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Chronicle of Higher Education, November 30, 2018
A ‘Long Overdue Conversation’: Do Universities That Benefited From
Slavery Owe a Debt to Black Colleges?
By Marc Parry
JACKSON, MISS.
Many universities have investigated their historical ties to slavery.
They published reports documenting how they benefited from slavery and
the slave trade — or even, in the case of Georgetown University, how
cash from that trade saved the institution from crippling debt. They put
up plaques honoring enslaved people who worked on their campuses. They
erased enslavers’ names from buildings. They apologized.
Scholars and administrators at some universities say they want to move
past symbolic steps, hoping, somehow, to begin trying to "repair" that
history. One question confronting them is this: Do universities that
profited from slavery, and later propped up segregation, now also owe a
debt to historically black colleges and universities?
Academics studying their campuses’ slave roots gathered at a symposium
here recently to confront that question (although, in public sessions at
least, none phrased it quite so baldly). The discussion, national in
scope, was sponsored and framed by two Mississippi institutions whose
stories highlight the stakes.
One, the University of Mississippi, opened in 1848. Slaves built the
first buildings on its Oxford campus. Its nickname, Ole Miss, is a term
that slaves used for the wife of a plantation owner. More than 95
percent of its first students either owned slaves or came from
slaveholding families, according to new research by Anne Twitty, a
historian at the university. That wealth, a collective total of some
4,647 slaves, underwrote the tuition and fees of those students. Slavery
had made Mississippi one of the richest states in the union by 1860. The
public flagship weaned on its profits now commands a $715-million
endowment and recently ascended to the elite upper tier of R-1 research
universities.
The other sponsor, Tougaloo College, is a private liberal-arts
institution that sits on a former slave plantation here in the state
capital, 150 miles south of Oxford. Missionaries set it up in 1869 to
educate a formerly enslaved population that had been starved of
education. African-Americans would continue to be shut out of the
University of Mississippi until 1962, when James Meredith’s attempt to
register spurred a deadly riot that was put down by the Army and the
National Guard. Tougaloo and institutions like it educated the doctors,
lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who created a black middle
class. But one legacy of desegregation is that Tougaloo — with an
endowment of $13 million — struggles to compete for students against
wealthier, predominantly white universities that are now keen to diversify.
A Tougaloo alumnus near Washington, D.C., John Rosenthall, is leading
the push to secure a voice for black colleges in the national movement
of universities reckoning with slavery. Rosenthall, 69, spent much of
his career working on issues of environmental justice, first at the
NAACP and later as a federal consultant focused on involving communities
in decisions about pollution-causing facilities. He believes
universities that benefited from slavery, a list that includes all of
the country’s oldest seats of higher learning, should not be the only
ones shaping how to make amends for that past.
And those universities should hear from a range of descendants of
slaves, he says, not only those connected to their campuses and host
communities.
"There is a debt to be paid, because these institutions received the
benefit that they not only didn’t pay for — they forced it out of
people," says Rosenthall, president of the Tougaloo College Research and
Development Foundation. "The debt is owed to the descendants of [the]
enslaved. And how do you pay that debt back? … You pay that debt back by
supporting the institutions that have been better to the descendants of
slaves than anybody else. And that’s the HBCUs."
The conversation is happening at a moment of excitement and angst for
the country’s 105 black colleges. A recent uptick in freshman enrollment
at about 40 HBCUs fuels talk of a "renaissance" in a sector of academe
that currently enrolls 9 percent of African-American undergraduates. But
these tuition-dependent institutions, which once attracted students from
across the economic spectrum, must also contend with a demographic shift
that has seen students from wealthier families choosing to attend
traditionally white institutions. Sixty-one percent of undergraduates at
HBCUs receive Pell Grants, meaning those students are among the poorest
in the nation, compared with a national average of 32 percent at all
types of institutions.
In the emerging dialogue between black colleges and predominantly white
colleges with roots in slavery, both sides tend to avoid what some among
them view as a divisive term: reparations. They talk instead about
partnering to confront challenges facing HBCUs, such as limited
infrastructure to get federal grants and limited scholarship money to
lure students.
Another challenge, and a potential avenue for partnership, is recovering
the narrative of slaves themselves. The story of Tougaloo College — how
a slave-labor camp became a center of black learning — packs drama
comparable to the well-publicized slave-history projects at places like
Georgetown and the University of Virginia. Similarly, other black
colleges, like Prairie View A&M University, near Houston, are also
situated on ex-slave plantations.
But, unlike some predominantly white universities studying their ties to
slavery, Tougaloo does not have a team of historians and other experts
tasked with that work. What it has, primarily, is one professor: a
computer scientist with no time, no money, and no end of enthusiasm for
a mystery that has tugged at her imagination for nearly four decades.
What Happened to the Slaves?
On a Friday afternoon last month, the second day of the slavery
symposium that took place in Tougaloo’s modern civil-rights research
center, Sharron T. Streeter accompanied a reporter through an older
campus structure that embodies the history those scholars had traveled
here to confront. Streeter, 57, has lived much of her life in the orbit
of this 1,000-student college. She went to high school nearby, earned
her bachelor’s degree here, sent her children here, and now chairs
Tougaloo’s department of math and computer science.
Her curiosity about the slaves who once lived here dates to the early
1980s, when, as a student walking to class, she would pass by an
administrative building known as "the mansion." It’s a wood house whose
gray exterior and rust-red trim are meant to mimic a stone building in
the Italian countryside. John W. Boddie had it built for his betrothed
around 1860 at a time when this land was a 2,000-acre cotton plantation.
According to Tougaloo lore, when the woman heard how Boddie mistreated
his slaves, she decided to marry somebody else.
The master bedroom of his house became the Tougaloo president’s office.
As a student, Streeter would visit the financial-aid office, then also
housed here, and wonder: What happened to the slaves?
She points out one of the arched windows on the top floor. From this
height, you can take in a panorama of what Boddie’s plantation has
become: cars, chapel, students, library, geese grazing beside trees
thick with hanging moss.
"Could they have imagined this?" Streeter says of the slaves.
For people visiting Tougaloo these days, it can be difficult to imagine
them. Much of the history that greets you in public spaces centers on
the college’s role in the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s.
Black colleges educated "nearly everyone involved" in that movement,
says Marybeth Gasman, a historian of education at the University of
Pennsylvania, from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to student foot
soldiers who participated in uprisings in places like Nashville and
Greensboro.
Tougaloo was no exception. It functioned as a safe haven where black and
white activists could come together. Its students and professors staged
sit-ins and protests to integrate Jackson’s churches, restaurants, and
public library. The harassment, violence, and imprisonment they endured
are honored across campus in historical markers and wall-length
black-and-white photos.
Streeter believes the slaves who preceded those activists here should be
honored, too. In her mother’s generation, she says, people preferred to
forget the hardships of slavery. But Streeter feels that
African-Americans can derive strength and self-identity by reflecting on
the slaves’ perseverance and achievements.
"People look at these buildings, and they only see the white oppressor,"
she says of Tougaloo’s mansion, which was built with slave labor. "But I
see African-Americans who had skill, who took pride in what they did
even though they were being oppressed."
By sleuthing through court documents and other government records,
Streeter has begun to sketch some answers to the questions that nagged
her as an undergraduate. She knows, for example, that the Boddie
plantation’s slave population grew larger, younger, and more female over
time, reaching a total of at least 64 slaves by 1860. From Boddie’s
will, she knows the names of three slaves: Jonas and Corry (identified
as "man servants") and Cesi ("the master’s woman").
She wants to know more. The slaves’ remains, their quarters, their
artifacts: She hopes to identify all of that, and eventually to tell
their story in a book and a museum. Tougaloo, however, does not have the
archaeological expertise needed for such work. Streeter is talking with
scholars at the University of Mississippi about a collaboration.
Given that institution’s racial baggage — some in the Tougaloo community
attend church with the elderly James Meredith — Streeter feels compelled
to explain herself.
"Some of us don’t want to have anything to do with Ole Miss," she says.
"When they hear ‘Ole Miss,’ their blood boils. But, you know, we have to
get past that, too, in order for there to be a meeting of the minds and
some collaborations and cooperation. People say, ‘Well, you gotta get
over it.’ No, not get over it, OK. But you gotta let go of the anger."
Roadblocks to Repair
A limited collaboration is the easy part. Tougaloo already has a
half-century-plus partnership with Brown University, now focused largely
on student exchanges. When, in 2006, that Ivy League university blazed a
trail with an investigation of its own ties to slavery, it responded in
part by pledging to strengthen the Tougaloo link.
The question is whether historically black and traditionally white
colleges can realize their ambition of a more systemic program of repair.
It may help that the leader of one of the main institutions involved,
the University of Mississippi, has approached his institution’s slave
history with a candor not always found among Deep South academic chiefs.
Speaking to scholars at Tougaloo, Jeffrey S. Vitter, Mississippi’s
departing chancellor, said slavery was "a system underpinned by
exploitation and violence." He said slaves "suffered beatings and other
abuses documented in the university’s records." He said his university
"acknowledges the injustices" under which slaves lived.
Those statements come from a campus plaque that the university installed
this spring. But slavery can’t be boxed off as a solely historical
issue, says Twitty, the Mississippi historian. It can’t be disentangled
from the role universities played in maintaining post-slavery
segregation and discrimination. Or from the generations-long
underfunding of black colleges, which spawned a landmark lawsuit against
the state of Mississippi. Or from the way the University of Mississippi
piled up advantages that helped it achieve R-1 status, giving it an edge
in the competition for federal grants.
"This has naturally raised these questions about what these
predominantly white institutions owe HBCUs," Twitty says. "They probably
perceive it, rightly, to be a long, long, long overdue conversation, and
an opportunity to ensure, potentially, that some of the tremendous
resources of some of these predominantly white institutions are not
hoarded solely for the benefit of predominantly white student bodies."
But the Tougaloo discussion also captured some of the dilemmas impeding
any move in that direction. Slavery implicated institutions across
American society — banks, churches, media, government. Yet efforts to
examine reparations at a national level have gone nowhere.
"In part, there’s a lot of attention on universities precisely because
universities have tried to engage this history," Joseph A. Ferrara, vice
president and chief of staff at Georgetown, said during one session at
the Tougaloo event. "I can think of lots of other sectors of our economy
and our country that have just as deep, if not a deeper, connection to
slavery, and haven’t stepped up … in any meaningful way. So there’s a
burden you carry if you step up."
Slave descendants’ sometimes-conflicting views on reparations complicate
that situation, as do a variety of other factors particular to
individual universities. For example, Georgetown’s response to the issue
is entangled with its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. Public
institutions grapple with the politics of state legislatures.
Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean who helps lead the University of
Virginia’s slavery commission, argues that a collective repair effort
could best overcome any roadblocks.
"If one institution has to bear all the weight of the work, I think it’s
hard to get those things pushed through administrations," he says. "But
if it’s, hey, we’re joining 10 other schools in attempting this thing, I
think that makes it a lot easier."
So far, one of the most-developed ideas to emerge from these repair
discussions calls for steering more federal research grants and
contracts to HBCUs through partnerships with predominantly white
universities.
Tougaloo’s Rosenthall, who has proposed a national center dedicated to
that work, points to data indicating that HBCUs get less than 1 percent
of federal research dollars. They often lack the personnel necessary to
obtain and manage such grants. The proposed center would help address
that, while also connecting HBCU students to research opportunities —
and, ultimately, graduate programs — beyond their own campuses.
Gasman, director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions,
welcomes Rosenthall’s plan but cautions that black colleges’
partnerships with majority-white institutions often end up giving those
majority universities most of the benefits.
Gasman prefers a bolder approach. Universities that benefited from
slavery, she says, should pay reparations by investing directly in black
colleges’ endowments.
These funds tend to be small. Some HBCUs, like Howard University,
Spelman College, and Hampton University, do have substantial endowments,
although not in comparison with those of the Ivy League universities
that have dominated much of the recent slavery discussion. The biggest
private gift to a black college was the $20 million that Bill Cosby gave
to Spelman — in 1988. In a recent op-ed, Walter M. Kimbrough Jr.,
president of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, said that
record "should be a shame on this nation because we have not erased it
from history."
Gasman argues that support for HBCUs’ endowments would have a better
long-term payoff, making these institutions less tuition-dependent and
helping to solidify their place in society. It would also show "some
giving and sacrifice" on the part of those universities that profited
from slavery, she says.
"What a way to say, ‘We apologize, we’re sorry, and we’re going to
actually do something about it,’ " she says. "Because, you know, words
only mean so much. Actions mean so much more."
Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work they do. Follow him on
Twitter @marcparry or email him at marc.pa...@chronicle.com.
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