Ned Blake, the enslaved coachman of Samuel Keyser, was considered to “benefit from slavery,” according to Johns Hopkins University benefactor William Keyser. - Marvis Gutierrez
Before the work of Hard Histories Lab member Marvis Gutierrez introduced him, I knew little more than William Keyser’s name. Often, when I’m on the JHU Homewood campus, I pass through Keyser Quad, intended as a tribute to the man who brokered a consolidation of the land where the campus sits today.
I know Keyser better now because Marvis took us beyond the plaques and accolades, such as those shared during the 2006 rededication of the Keyser Quad. Keyser’s papers, she discovered, are held in our own Special Collections Library. Among them is a memoir of sorts, never published but filled with Keyser’s impressions of his family life and his years in nineteenth century Baltimore City. Personal memoirs, not unlike diaries, are challenging to work with. Marvis knew we might learn a lot about how Keyser saw things, but we’d also need to test his thinking against other sources.
As a university, JHU long focussed on Keyser’s later years and his role in establishing the Homewood campus. His memoir permitted Marvis to recover a longer and more difficult story, one in which Keyser expressed demeaning attitudes toward enslaved people. He subscribed to that facet of the Lost Cause myth which imagined slavery to have been benevolent, rather recognizing it for the unjust practice that it was.
Marvis permits us to see such attitudes not only as artifacts of a pre-Civil War past. They had consequences for the future. In the next generation William Keyser’s son and chair of the JHU Board of Trustees, R. Brent Keyser, himself played a role in establishing housing segregation in Baltimore City.
Racism, Marvis discovered, also shapes the archival record with which we work in the Lab. While the Keyser family papers have been carefully preserved by the JHU Libraries, the life of a man enslaved by the family — Ned Blake — earned only a slim trace in the public record. Read more about how Marvis discovered more about Mr. Blake. When it comes to marking the grounds upon which we walk, Marvis recommends, the labors of men like Ned Blake must also be acknowledged and accounted for.
Marvis Gutierrez is the Managing Editor and Chief Operating Officer of The Johns Hopkins Newsletter and an intern with the JHUnions Student Programming Board and Johns Hopkins Student Leadership and Involvement. Marvis will graduate from Johns Hopkins with a degree in International Relations and East Asian Studies in spring 2022.
— MSJ.
I read these articles to glean some semblance of " authentic" HOPE, for JHU as an institution and a stakeholder in the daily lives of black folks in east Baltimore who continue experiencing the shadow of racism, exclusion and silent inequalities. Would probably enhance this "Hard Stories Project," to invite black residents, particularly in east Baltimore to participate in this "lab." work. Let's make it happen, Nia Redmond, East Baltimore Historical Library. FB pg.
I’d be very happy for a chance to talk with you. Can we arrange that?