Campus Meets World: Introduction to Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable

These essays contributed by Chana Kai Lee, Hilary Green, Rhondda Robinson Thomas, and Leslie Harris take us on vivid virtual tours of four southern campuses with deep roots in slavery and/or histories of racialized labor exploitation. The authors’ rich descriptions of campus mobilization as well as of the emotional work required to interpret the difficult past highlight the dramatic ways in which our current political moment has collided with historical realities on campuses and beyond. The thoughtful words of these women scholars of African American history and cultural life point us to a recognition of the possibilities and risks we face as practitioners of history, especially in this current moment of instability. Harris, Lee, Thomas, and Green drafted these illuminating pieces during a tumultuous summer like none other in our lifetimes. I write my response as the academic year haltingly begins and as my own university’s recently inaugurated Presidential Committee on the Legacy of Slavery at Harvard, chaired by Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, emerges from a summer of intensive meetings amid external turmoil.

Two days into September, mass protests and counter-protests continue over the unjust and graphic killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Aubrey, and the manifold African American victims of police and vigilante brutality. A deadly virus still rages across the national population, taking the lives of African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx Americans in disproportionately higher numbers than whites. We have watched military machinery roar down avenues, unmarked government vans troll the streets, SWAT team-outfitted officers sweep through downtowns, active military personnel tear gassing peaceable protestors in the nation’s capital, and police officers knocking protestors old and young to the ground. Buildings are burning in the cities due to assaults on property by what appear to be fringe actors even as public schools overturn plans to physically reopen due to the virus. These are scenes of dystopian horror. It feels like chaos has descended upon us, and we are reeling internally and institutionally as a result. As utter disorientation prevails, we wonder where our guidelines, and for those of us who may be religious, perhaps even where our gods, have gone. These distressing events together with President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to condemn the vigilante killing of protestors who were calling attention to the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, bring saliently to mind for many of us the palpability of the legacy of slavery and the continuation of politically and economically motivated racial animosity in this country.

In this moment of extremity, we should recognize and respect the productive value of frontline work in educating the public about slavery and its afterlives, a value that reverberates from the local to the national level and back again. Several key themes immediately rise from the pages of this roundtable. Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Chana Kai Lee, Leslie Harris, and Hilary Green demonstrate that the campus is wholly a part of society, entrenched in its challenges and collared by its constraints, rather than being a separate tower of lofty thought and moral virtue. They lay bare the invisibility of labor performed on behalf of the university by unfree people in the past, as well as by Black women in the present. They are generous enough to share with readers the psychological and emotional toll this labor exacts, at times using the laden language of “burden.” And they reveal just how long they have been at work in these fraught fields of endeavor—four years, thirteen years, and in the case of Leslie Harris’s foundational work in the Slavery and the University movement at Emory—two decades.

The imbrication of campus and society is startlingly clear in the contemporary interpretive efforts these authors chronicle as well as in the historical interactions their research has uncovered. In Hilary Green’s essay on slavery at the University of Alabama, for example, we see the university functioning as a virtual brothel allowing sexual access to enslaved women’s bodies, and we also see the excruciating picture of enslaved babies being born on campus. The authors describe in detail incidents of...