Many of the racial reckoning efforts at major institutions have seen their funding and support cut. But one that’s still going strong is the Hard Histories Project at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. — Dr. Jason Johnson, host of Slate’s “A Word with Jason Johnson”
In 2020, as our work at Hard Histories began, that summer’s cries for racial reckoning echoed in our thinking. Ignited by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, demonstrations occupied streets in the United States and across the globe that season. Not long afterward, as we began to examine the ties of Johns Hopkins to the past of racial injustice, we recognized that the work of Hard Histories would endure only if we became part of something bigger than ourselves.
Today, we are still here. Recently, Jason Johnson, host of Slate’s podcast “A Word,” observed that many institutions which in 2020 committed to racial reckoning had since “abandoned those efforts [and] have seen their funding and support cut.” Dr. Johnson, who is also a professor of politics and journalism at Morgan State University, asked what has kept us doing our work at Hard Histories even today? How is it that we are “still going strong?”
We very much appreciate Dr. Johnson’s recognition of our work. We also think that he asked a good question. What does it take to sustain the work of projects like ours across time? How have we stayed the course and continued the work of self-examination even after the summer 2020 heat has cooled?
First, we must credit how fresh questions at Hard Histories are generated in real-time by faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, along with our librarian, archivist and curator collaborators. Our mission is broad — investigating the past of slavery and racism at Johns Hopkins — while our specific investigations spring from cutting-edge historiography, new archival access, and keen attention to how the understanding the past can inform the present.
Efforts by colleagues and collaborators buoy our work. Close to home, leadership at Johns Hopkins has affirmed our work and the academic freedom that ensures that it is innovative and relevant. Among researchers at JHU, we are one among many voices asking critical historical questions in gatherings such as the December 2021 “Conversations on Slavery, Racism, and the University,1” the May 2022 conference “Reckoning with Race and Racism in Academic Medicine,” and through public programming with Hopkins Retrospective including this May 2021 Fireside Chat. Across the country, we’ve been part of new thinking with programs at the University of Southern California, Rice University, Harvard University, and Boston University.
At Hard Histories, our commitments to timeliness and transparency enliven our research. If you’re following this Substack, you already know that here we openly wrestle with research puzzles, ethical dilemmas, and interpretive debates — all while our investigations are underway. Over on our YouTube channel, you can discover webinar conversations with experts, collaborators, and researchers which place our work in the context of history, theory, and practice —while frankly testing our questions and the answers we propose. This approach — which invites you to discover what’s under-the-hood — permits our followers to actively think with and influence us.
Finally, our work on hard histories emanates from both professional and personal commitments. Many of us have ties to the same pasts that are the subject of our research. We are Baltimoreans or the descendants of families that once called Baltimore home. We are veterans of struggles for racial justice for whom history informs our political commitments. We are the children of people once enslaved and others once the targets of Jim Crow violence and inequality. Many of us know first hand the scourge of racism, including police violence, in our own time. All of us are 21st century stewards of Johns Hopkins University and Medicine and as such are accountable for the institution’s future in Baltimore and the world. While following us, we encourage you to know your own connections to the work of hard histories at Johns Hopkins or wherever you find yourself confronting the difficult past.
One question Dr. Johnson did not ask is perhaps the most difficult: When will the work of Hard Histories be complete? We take seriously those who suggest that the work might be infinite. At Johns Hopkins, there are still many more novel, challenging, and timely questions to ask about our past. At Hard Histories, we will not get to answer them all. But we hope that our work is a model for how reckoning can be sustained through confronting that which was unjust and paving the way for will be a new, more equitable future.
At Hard Histories at Hopkins, we continue to heed the 2020 calls for justice. This summer, three years after the reckoning that Mr. Floyd’s murder inspired, here on the Substack we’ll turn things over to our lab’s student researchers who will share more about their first-time look into life at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum. Thanks for joining us on this journey.
— MSJ
Including colleagues from the JHU History Department, Center for Africana Studies, Institute for the History of Medicine, and Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship.