Abstract:
Within the last twenty years, research analyzing the connections between American universities and slavery has exploded into the news, and within academia itself. Now more than ever, universities and the historians they employ are willing to critically engage with the uncomfortable truths of their institutions’ historical entanglements with slavery. The recent wave of scholarship on this subject has been classified as the ‘Universities and Slavery’ movement. Spreading across a number of prestigious institutions, this movement has led to localized change on an institutional level – through the renaming of university spaces honoring pro-slavery advocates, or the creation of plaques and monuments dedicated to the enslaved who lived and worked on these college campuses – and a national conversation centering on retrospective justice and slavery reparations. This project asks: Why did this movement emerge now? It is no secret that the rise of American universities coincided with the Atlantic slave trade. Furthermore, the maintenance of readily available institutional archives reveals that the proof of connections between the institution of slavery and American universities has been lying around all this time. So, what sparked this call for the redress of past injustice? And how do those motivations affect the substance of university-led inquiries into their past connections with slavery?
