Member schools are all committed to research, acknowledgment, and atonement regarding institutional ties to the slave trade, to enslavement on campus or abroad, and to enduring racism in school history and practice. - Universities Studying Slavery Consortium
When Johns Hopkins University joined the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium in fall 2020, it followed behind more than 70 institutions across the country already committed to reckoning with their pasts. At Hard Histories we knew that we were part of a movement that began in 2003 when Brown University President, Dr. Ruth Simmons, resolved to confront her school’s “historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.” What began with a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, led to a 2006 report, and today continues through the work of Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Returning to the story of Brown University reminds us that our own work has roots in pioneering efforts the were neither welcome nor easy to undertake. And no one affiliated with the Brown project and its beginnings two decades ago anticipated that scores of colleges and universities would follow by also converting to the view that histories that were once elided and even erased must now be reckoned with.
In the Hard Histories Lab, we begin each semester reading reflections from Dr. Simmons in which she explains, “I am immensely proud of the legacy of Brown, a legacy entangled with slavery but also defined by independence of thought and action, a respect for dissent, and a commitment to diversity. Perhaps most important, it is a legacy that affirms and confirms the human capacity to learn, change and grow.”1 And at Johns Hopkins we are not alone among Maryland colleges and universities in having embraced Dr. Simmons’s vision and the opportunity it opens up.
In 2019, Goucher College launched The Hallowed Ground Project. Work at JHU started the following year, in 2020. In 2022, the University of Maryland, College Park, launched its 1856 Project which “aims to investigate UMD's connections to slavery in order to provide a blueprint for a richer understanding of generations of racialized trauma rooted in the university.” There, in February 2023, Hard Histories at Hopkins joined colleagues from Community College of Baltimore County, Loyola University Maryland, and Towson University to explore how the work of Universities Studying Slavery is on-going across Maryland.
We are learning from each other all the time. This coming Monday, March 27th at 12 noon ET, over at the next Hard Histories webinar, we’ll talk live with members of the Loyola University Maryland team — faculty, student researchers, and archivists — that has been uncovering a story that begins with the school’s start in the same brokering of enslaved people associated with Georgetown University and runs through to Baltimore’s 20th century era of segregation by way of red-lining and restrictive covenants.
As always, registration is quick and free. Join us!
— MSJ
Ruth J. Simmons, “Slavery and Justice at Brown: A Personal Reflection,” chapter 11 in Slavery and Universities: Histories and Legacies, eds., Leslie Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).