Inheriting Contradictions
Johns Hopkins, John McDonogh, and Our Part in the Baltimore Institutions They Left Behind
Hard Histories, as a project and a practice, forces us to contend with the reality that often what we view as the past is very much present. I experienced just this during the April 17th, 2023 Hard Histories webinar which featured two historians: Dr. Andrew Jewett, who is writing a history of Johns Hopkins, the institution and the man, and Dr. Ken Lipartito, who is at work on the history of McDonogh School founder John McDonogh. Listening to their stories was particularly meaningful for me, as my own life has been in frequent contact with these two institutions.
These two projects have many parallels. Both are exploring the lives of controversial men in Baltimore’s history and the institutions founded by their bequests. Both historians are bringing their scholarly expertise to bear on this research. Dr. Jewett was appointed by JHU President Ron Daniels in the wake of the 2020 discovery that Mr. Hopkins had held enslaved people in his household. Dr. Lipartito, an alumnus of the McDonogh School and in collaboration with Dr. Susan Watson, first wrote a commemorative history of the school and is now researching a biography of the man. These two institutions–with origins in the 19th century and coming up on their 150th anniversaries in 2023 and 2026, respectively–will begin their next chapters equipped with new insights about their pasts.
Not only do these two projects run in parallel, the men and institutions to whom they are dedicated share a very similar DNA, so to speak. Aside from the obvious shared presence in Baltimore, both men and both institutions have benefitted from a century of misleading and incomplete historical narratives. The family lore that animated Helen Thom’s 1929 panegyric Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette was for a long time regarded as fact. One of the early headmasters of the McDonogh School, William Allan, published in 1886 the Life and Work of John McDonogh, a similarly hagiographic account that has been left relatively unscrutinized for decades.
Only recently did JHU learn that Mr. Johns Hopkins held enslaved people, while the McDonogh School has always been aware that John McDonogh was a slaveholder and involved in the New Orleans slave trade. Both he and Mr. Hopkins lent support to the colonization movement which manumitted enslaved people in an effort to remove them from the US and preserve it as a white man’s country. McDonogh refused to free the people he held in bondage unless they agreed to go to Liberia and sent over one hundred of them across the waters on American Colonization Society ships.1 Dr. Lipartito explained that the school nonetheless continued to celebrate Founder’s Day each year in honor of John McDonogh until very recently. At Clifton Mansion in Baltimore, Mr. Hopkins’ summer estate, celebrations of his birthday continue until today.
William Allan, LL.D., Life and Work John McDonogh (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1886)
One parallel especially struck me: Both Johns Hopkins and John McDonogh included institutions for orphans among their legacies. In the Hard Histories lab, my research has focused on the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphans Asylum, established by a bequest in Johns Hopkins’ will. (More on that in a forthcoming post.) To learn that the McDonogh School was initially established as a “semi-military” academy for orphaned boys, who provided farm labor in exchange for tuition, room, and board, was especially fascinating given my research this past semester.
Hard Histories are meant to challenge us, to strike at the heart of our preconceived notions and biases and to leave us questioning these assumptions. This webinar certainly succeeded. How can we square these men’s seemingly benevolent bequests with the evils they participated in while alive? What puzzles me more are the contradictions between what we might regard as altruistic acts, such as providing for orphans, and participation in slavery, a crime against humanity. It is my sincere hope that the work of Dr. Jewett and Dr. Lipartito will help me and many others gain clarity about these questions. Institutional histories and biographies will allow us to understand the men themselves and the impact on Baltimore (and beyond) of the institutions they left behind. We will see whether these histories can also explain the contradictions.
I arrived at this webinar with a more personal connection than most: I am a student at Johns Hopkins, and my mother, aunt, and uncle all attended the McDonogh School. My mom’s best friend from high school, Rob Young III, now serves as the President of the Board of Trustees at McDonogh. Mr. Young has been deeply involved with the school’s institutional reckoning, in his unique position as the President of the Board and a Black man. Both my mother and Mr. Young remember celebrating Founder’s Day as students, but only Mr. Young recalls that at those ceremonies, when Mr. McDonogh’s accomplishments were explained, he was said to have been a “kind” slaveowner.
Already things have changed. Dr. Lipartito noted that a franker history of the school’s founder is now included in every McDonogh student’s U.S. history course. I hope that similarly Dr. Jewett’s work will be given the space and attention it deserves so that students at Johns Hopkins can meaningfully grapple with the whole of our origin story.
Emma Petite, KSAS BA ‘24
Emma Katherine Bilski, Editor
Ane Lintvedt, “The Relationship Between John McDonogh’s Financial Legacy and Slavery,” McDonogh School, August 2021. Martha S. Jones, “Thomas Gross and the Road to “Maryland in Liberia’: The Monies of Men Like Johns Hopkins Removed Black Marylanders to West Africa,” July 19, 2022. Lintvedt adds that a rare exception to McDonogh’s manumission policy was a young man named David McDonogh, who defied his former enslaver’s orders, faced his wrath, and eventually became the first professionally-trained Black ophthalmologist in the US.
Whew! Past is present. History rhymes. History repeats itself. How many times have I used those words? The parallelism is important. This is why I'm such a history geek, learning and re-learning all the time. Keep up the good work, Dr. Jones!