When it Comes to Hard Histories, Can Silence be a Virtue?

The Girls of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. - Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light, and Other Essays

Sometimes, the work of Hard Histories requires that we attend to the silences. And when it comes to our founder and namesake, Johns Hopkins, no aspect of his founding 1873 bequest has gone less examined that that of the so-called Colored Orphan Asylum. Our followers likely know some about the evolution of the hospital and university that were provided for in Mr. Hopkins’ will. These are stories the university and hospital have more readily and fully told. But the workings of the orphan asylum is a subject about which the university and hospital have remained largely silent.

When the Hard Histories Lab was presented by the Chesney Medical Archives with an opportunity to discover what there was to know about the orphan asylum, we dedicated our spring 2023 research to just that. We learned that just recently, Dr. Heather Cooper, Project Archivist for the Reexamining Hopkins History initiative, had completed a new and impressively detailed finding aid for the Orphan Asylum collection. These materials were now ready for a team of researchers to come in and ask new questions about this facet of Mr. Hopkins’s legacy. We hope you’ll stay tuned and learn more about our findings as the semester concludes.¹

Image courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Archives.

Already this work has expanded our thinking and presented new, hard questions. What if, in contemplating the history of an orphan asylum, silence is a virtue rather than a shortcoming? What if there are weighty reasons for valuing privacy alongside transparency? These are questions we in the lab are wrestling with while recovering the names of more than 300 girls who — during the years of the asylum, 1875 to 1914 — were at one time or another in residence. What ethic of care do we owe to these children and their descendants, including those living today, as we unearth their identities and their stories?²

We’ve learned how historians have adopted varied approaches to these questions. For example, in some studies the names of children once resident in an orphan asylum are concealed. Scholars instead use pseudonyms or construct composite portraits that preserve the privacy of individual children. In other instances, historians have deliberately published the names of asylum residents especially hoping that living descendants might reconnect with their ancestors.³ Dr. Amy Rosenkrans, whose study examines Saint Frances Orphan Asylum and Saint Elizabeth’s Home (both Baltimore asylums for Black children,) explained to us how her work has permitted families to recover the lives of family members that had been largely lost to time.⁴

To help us think through these ethical questions, we’ve organized a special webinar session. Join us on Wednesday, April 5 at 12 noon ET for a discussion with Dr. Heather Cooper of the Chesney Archives, Dr. Ayah Nurridin, an historian of medicine and Costen Postdoctoral Fellow with the Princeton University Society of Fellows, and Kamal Kaur, a double major in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Public Health Studies at Johns Hopkins University and member of the spring 2023 Hard Histories Lab research team.

What ethics of care must we bring to researching the girls who once resided at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum? Archivists, curators, and librarians are always our valued collaborators in the work of Hard Histories and already Dr. Cooper has enriched our thinking about the tensions between the values of privacy and transparency by recommending Dr. Susan C. Lawrence’s Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). We look forward to continuing this essential conversation and letting it inform how we present our findings.

Our webinars are always free and registration is easy. Please join us.

— MSJ

1. Our research this semester has focused on three questions. First, we are discovering how JHU and JHH forgot the story of the orphan asylum, especially how its last site was on what is today the JHU Homewood campus. Second, we are documenting lives of the girls in residence at the asylum and exploring their persepctives on life in Baltimore City. And finally, third, we are exploring the role that women, in particular, the Board of Lady Managers, played in the organization and operation of the asylum. We hope you’ll tune in for our end-of-semester presentations later in April.

2. Our approach to the ethics of care is rooted the Black feminist thought of Audre Lorde and has been deeply enriched by discussions in the JHU History Department Black World Seminar as led by Dr Jessica Marie Johnson. See, Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light, and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 2017.) On the ethics of care, see Dr. Johnson quoted in Jamelle Bouie, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” New York Times, January 28, 2022, and in her highly acclaimed book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020).

3. The published studies we’ve reviewed include Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Jessie B. Ramey, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Also important for our understanding have been these studies of orphan asylums for African American children. Christy Clark-pujara, “In Need of Care: African American Families Transform the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans During the Final Collapse of Slavery, 1839-1846,” Journal of Family History 45, no. 3 (2019) 295-314; Hilary N. Green, “At Freedom’s Margins: Race, Disability, Violence and the Brewer Orphan Asylum in Southeastern North Carolina, 1866-1872, Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians 24, no. 1 (October 2016); Thomas W. Cowger, “Custodians of Social Justice: The Indianapolis Asylum for Friendless Colored Children, 1870-1922,” Indiana Magazine of History 88, no. 2 (June 1992): 93-110; and, Lauretta F. Byars, “Lexington’s Colored Orphan Industrial Home, 1892-1913,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 89, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 147-178.

4. We thank Dr. Rosenkrans for sharing her expertise with the Hard Histories Lab this semester. Her study is “‘The Good Work’: Saint Frances Orphan Asylum and Saint Elizabeth’s Home, Two Baltimore Orphanages for African Americans” (Ph.D. Diss., Notre Dame of Maryland University, 2016). Among the important insights we have gained from Dr. Rosenkrans’ work is more context for the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum. It was neither the first nor the only the asylum for Black children in Baltimore city.