On 12/9/2020 11:15 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/arts/johns-hopkins-slavery-abolitionist.html
... it was important that Black Baltimoreans be seen as a central
audience for the research. “This is the community writ large that
lives with the legacies of slavery, racism and inequality,” she said.
The revelations of Johns Hopkins’s slaveholding may be a reputational
blow to the university. But the real “hard history,” she said, was
born by the enslaved, who were listed on the census forms without even
the dignity of a name.
And even more at /The Guardian/
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/09/john-hopkins-university-founder-slave-owner-baltimore>
about how /"the university and hospital have had a complicated
relationship with residents of Baltimore, a majority-Black city.
//Residents were displaced from the neighborhoods around the Johns
Hopkins facilities during expansion and redevelopment projects. And some
in the community point to the 1951 case of Henrietta Lacks as a reason
they distrust the institution. Lacks unwittingly spurred a scientific
bonanza when a surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital collected a piece of
tissue from a tumor while she was under anesthesia for treatment of
cervical cancer. Nobody asked for her consent, but her cells are widely
used in biomedical research."/
Ah, memories flood back, writing from Johannesburg, about a place on the
Homewood Campus' main square that we populated with shanties and called
JoHopkinsburg about 35 years ago.
The most obvious legacy of the university's racism today is probably the
ubiquitous east Baltimore gentrification push (quite successful it
seemed, when I last visited in 2016). But there are many other ways the
ruling class of Baltimore saw JHU as the primary local site for not only
social-class reproduction, but also maintenance of reputational
prestige. And some serious brand damage was done to that high
self-regard by pointing out how the university's enormous wealth grew
thanks to apartheid-derived profits.
At the time, while the university was engaged in service to Reagan's
soft-imperial and military expansions (through its new campus in China
and the advanced weapons contracting at the Applied Physics Lab), the
local ruling class was simultaneously shedding its own
metropolitan-rooted institutions - especially manufacturers and banks -
as they were either deindustrialized or swallowed in mergers by national
financial behemoths by the mid/late 1980s. (This role in U.S.
imperialism was not new, as my first mentor, Neil Smith, documented in
excruciating detail in /American Empire
<https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520243385/american-empire>, /regarding
Isaiah Bowman's use of his base at Hopkins - as a geographer and
university president - to promote that era's Washington Consensus.)
So when students regularly confronted the 75-member Board of Trustees
during the late 1980s (when I was doing my PhD in geography there), we
still found scores of overlapping directorship conflicts of interest and
a profound sense of white capitalist power, and more image conscious
than ever.
We found it vital to work with Baltimore community and labor activists
who understood the general hatred that city residents felt for Hopkins.
So from 1986-88, we put up a couple of dozen apartheid-era shanties on
the main campus square and then at various targets across the city
(including Hopkins Hospital - with our gentri-shanty with its faux-brick
linoleum siding provided free by sympatico workers in one of the local
hardware stores). Trustees proved useful as personifications of their
Baltimore companies - often just branch plants of major international
corporations profiting from South African investments - when we showed
up with the shanties. Ordinary passers-by would take part in the
construction, delighted to be part of the symbolic attacks on these firms.
We especially went after Maryland National Bank, which had 23
overlapping board members with the university's board. In addition to
boycott calls, we sent money through that bank to the "Afrikaner Arms
and Ammunition" company in Pretoria - which didn't actually exist, so we
got our $1000 wire transfer right back into our accounts - and from that
stunt acquired a bank receipt of the transaction. Joined with maps that
explained racist mortgage loan distribution - that our advisor David
Harvey pioneered in his /Social Justice and the City/ - our leaflets
illustrated the greenlining of the Pretoria regime and redlining of
South Africa.
But the point of the /NYTimes /article - and the lessons from our failed
struggles to divest and halt gentrification - was the importance of
local-legacy prestige on the one hand, and the deep hatred of JHU in
Baltimore's African-American communities on the other. As student
activists began connecting the dots between the university, Maryland
National Bank and uneven urban development, we had quite a successful
period of learning from radical community leaders, like Mary Benns
Gresh, Max Obuszewski and Cliff DuRand - and some major concessions were
finally made by the bank after a fierce campaign (described in
/Dollars&Sense /here
<https://projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/210-808-4090/BonddivestmentDollarsSense1987opt.pdf>).
Ultimately, our use of the name /JoHopkinsburg University /and the Gil
Scott-Heron theme song "Johannesburg" meant the university president -
who had ascended from German refugee to the national/imperial ruling
class, Steven Muller - became infuriated and used over-the-top tactics
such as banning the construction of shanties, backed by judicial
injunctions. That was useful for us, illustrating the limits of
corporate liberalism, and led to cat-and-mouse shanty-building including
surprise drops from the tops of building, and wheeling them onto campus
to annoy trustees at their meetings. (I had a contempt of court charge
hanging over me for a couple of years as a result, but it was worth it.)
I see there are some ancient reports that are still online - in this
twitter thread
<https://twitter.com/ar_holter/status/1114972482266697735?lang=en> last
year and an old /Baltimore Sun
<https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/378073078/> /story - about this
struggle and how JoHopkinsburg must have felt like a very smeary name
indeed, to university managers who were internationally sensitized to
South Africa's rogue status under PW Botha's rule (like Muller - who
always said he opposed apartheid but forever refused to divest)... as
well as to some of the rightwing kids. Three frat boys, one of whom was
the son of the state attorney general, decided in May 1986 to firebomb
one of our shanties, nearly killing a fellow geography student, Kevin
Archer - and their Young Americans for Freedom mates built a mock gulag
next to our shantytown/./
Later reverberations include memories of this struggle to advance
student advocacy of Palestine-solidarity BDS
<https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/johns-hopkins-alumni-professor-patrick-bond-charges-israel-like-south-africa/2014/04/08>
and the need, more generally, for greater student militancy
<https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2016/10/the-board-of-trustees-and-the-anti-apartheid-protests-of-the-1980s>
when facing off against university trustees who were and are as
committed as these ones, to maintaining the role of the U.S.' first
full-fledged university within imperial capitalism.
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