Our New Webinar Season Begins,
and Finding Marylanders in a Study of Congressional Slaveholders.
There is a way in which people want to disconnect and say, “I didn’t own slaves. My family didn’t own slaves. So let’s keep it moving.” We have to tell them why it’s important and why it matters and what it tells about where we are at this present moment. What’s happening politically has deep roots in our political leaders’ investment in slavery and they wielded that power for their own personal benefit. People who don’t know that longer history can’t draw those connections. — Dr. Crystal Feimster, Yale University.
In March, our Hard Histories at Hopkins webinar returns. During live conversations with academics, activists, and institution builders, we discover the approaches that Baltimore City is taking to the “hard” in Hard Histories by featuring our allies, collaborators, and fellow travelers, all doing their own hard histories work. We’ll begin by a conversation with Theresa Sotto of the Walters Art Museum, where discovery of the museum’s historical ties to slaveholding, the Confederacy and the Lost Cause myth have generated important new thinking about the museum, its past and its future.
Registration is easy, tuning in just a click away, and we always welcome your questions for our guests. Usually, our webinars are recorded and you can view them on our YouTube channel.
Monday, March 6, 2023, 12 noon to 1 pm ET. Register here.
Theresa Sotto, Director of Learning & Community Engagement at the Walters Art Museum. Theresa Sotto has worked at the crossroads of education, equity, and the arts for over 25 years. She is currently the Ruth R. Marder Director of Learning & Community Engagement at the Walters Art Museum. She previously worked at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Getty Museum, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Central to Sotto’s career has been a commitment to creating inclusive spaces for diverse communities, both internally and externally. She frequently presents and publishes on topics related to inclusive teaching, implicit bias, and equity initiatives, and she is the co-editor of the book, From Small Wins to Sweeping Change: Working Together to Foster Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism in Museums, published in 2022 by the American Alliance of Museums and Rowman and Littlefield.
In the Hard Histories Lab, we’ve been reading the Washington Post report “More than 1,800 Congressmen Once Enslaved Black People. This is Who They Were, and How They Shaped the Nation” from Julie Zaumer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez. The report includes details about 148 Maryland lawmakers who were themselves the holders of enslaved people.
For us at Hard Histories, a few things about the Post report stand out. First, this research relies heavily on U.S. census returns from the period 1790 to 1860. You’ll recall that our work here on Johns Hopkins, our founder, also began with an examination of U.S. census schedules for 1840 and 1850, both of which reported Mr. Hopkins as holding enslaved people in his household.
We also noted that there is a list of an additional 25 Maryland lawmakers not yet examined by the Post’s research. Readers are invited to contribute what they know about members not already in the paper’s database. Here is an opportunity for those of in the field to contribute to a fuller picture of national leadership and slaveholding, and Maryland’s part in that story.
For those who’d like to take a deeper dive into the subject we recommend Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slave Holders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard, 2016); William L. Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (Knopf, 1996); and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago, 2010.) As you’ve come to expect, these historians do not always agree. Still, each makes the case for how the slaveholding documented by the Post had consequences for law and policy being made in Washington.
— MSJ