Hard Histories in East Baltimore
Students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health call for a reckoning
We, the undersigned, implore the JHSPH leadership team to explicitly and expeditiously include an anti-racist lens in the school’s orientation, curriculum, practice, community engagement, policy, research practices, and course evaluation. - JHUSPH Student Organzing Group
“Is the university an Ivory Tower?” This is a question we ask ourselves at the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project. Our research has taught us how, since its earliest years, Johns Hopkins has pointedly asked a version of that question: What is our relationship to Baltimore City, the place that is home to our campuses and to many members of our university community? What should that relationship be?
In fall 2021, lab members Eirnin Mahoney and Jay Singh went searching for the roots of this question. Their efforts led us to one answer in the work of Professor Herbert Baxter Adams and his University Extension program of the 1890s. Adams assumed that few native Baltimoreans would enroll at Johns Hopkins. They would not attend seminars or earn degrees. Nor would they drive research or steer the university’s future. Instead, Adams kept Baltimoreans at bay by hosting off-campus lectures in which Hopkins faculty promoted the making of new citizens and good workers through adult education.
Today’s calls for SPH to commit to anti-racism and anti-colonialism break Adams’s mold. Yes, when students call for reform, of the curriculum and their school’s community engagement, they are wrestling with a version of the question Adams contemplated more than a century ago. Still, during his time at the end of the nineteenth century, Adams’s commitment to “Anglo-Saxonism” meant that he left unaddressed the racism and colonialism that shaped the early relationship of Johns Hopkins to Baltimore City. We have been wrestling with Adams’s legacy ever since
You can read the petition from students at Bloomberg SPH here: “Demand Anti-Racist Action from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.” And you can follow the story more in-depth through Shirlene John’s reporting for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter: “Bloomberg Students Advocate for Refroming of Curriculum and Reckoning with Historical Racism.”
Our campuses have never been Ivory Towers. Nor are they cloistered spaces set apart from the towns and cities in which they are located. As Bloomberg SPH student Loraine Arikat put it to the News-Letter: “This institution is more than just passively located - it’s taking an active role in changing the landscape of the neighborhoods around us.” This was true in the days of Herbert Baxter Adams, and perhaps it is even more true in our own.
There’s still time to register for our LIVE event, Monday March 14 at 12 noon ET. We’ll talk about the “hard histories” work of Marco Robinson at Prairie View A&M and W. Caleb McDaniel at Rice. Join us!
— MSJ