A Fraught Reckoning: Exploring the History of Slavery at the University of Georgia

“The voices of those enslaved therefore do not always exist where we would like.”¹

“And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.”²

History completes me—at least that is one aspiration for my work. Archival research is mostly a solitary experience, but, as I work, my mind hardly ever strays from the public and personal meanings of my labor for the African American past and present. I have never thought about my intellectual work apart from its political relevance. So much of my graduate training focused on “silences” and “invisibilities”—now commonly invoked conceptual metaphors used to characterize what is not said and who is not represented in the historical record.³ To be sure, these scholarly challenges have not been unique to African American history but they seem to loom especially large for our thematic field because of parallel in-equities in education and other institutions. It is the enduring legacy of racial and gender exclusion that created the silences in the first place.

The condition of relative absence has been a critical point of professional entry for generations of scholars, and in multiple ways for historians who are Black women. Those of us who finished our degrees in the early 1990s were just as curious as any other intellectuals to know for the sake of knowing, but we also knew that discovery and reclamation involved a process that was as much about hierarchies of power as it was the life of the mind. Who is authorized to speak? Is the eternal project of historical revision any different or more urgent for us? And how is our work complicated when public memory becomes the primary terrain for defining who and what gets to matter?

It takes a certain kind of reluctance or illusionary thinking to relegate scholarship to imaginary spheres of meaning and influence unrelated to the political context of our labor. Certain times will not allow such subjective denial. Currently we are living in one of those times as protesters fill the streets with demands for an end to police violence and for an unqualified reckoning with centuries of anti-Black racism. One historian has described this season as the “summer of pandemic and protest,” a pointed acknowledgment of the disproportionate, unjust impact of COVID-19 on people of color.⁴

The spring and summer protests of 2020 have an analog in higher education, where numerous colleges and universities have been doing this existential work already. Although the pace has been fitful and scattered across numerous institutions, the effort stretches back more than fifteen years, beginning when the University of Alabama issued an apology for its use of enslaved labor and campus communities at Brown University, Emory University, and the University of North Carolina called attention to histories of Black subjugation at their respective schools.⁵ Since then scholars, students, and community members have completed research projects and held public forums on the legacies of racism at other institutions around the US and across the globe, all places where the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism created generations of wealth and human devastation, the impact of which is still present. Most of these schools are now part of a movement called Universities Studying Slavery (USS).⁶

For four and a half years, I have been part of this movement at the University of Georgia (UGA), where I coordinate an interdisciplinary team of twenty-two faculty, staff, and students researching the history of slavery at our institution. Organizing faculty collaboration for such a broad research endeavor is strenuous under any circumstance, but it is especially so in our case. Initially administrators refused to support a genuine effort to research our campus history, relenting only after a generous anonymous donor came forward to underwrite our efforts. The labor demands have tested me in ways that I could not have anticipated at the start. They have moved me to reflect on what it means to be an African American woman desperately searching for small fragments of information to revise an official account of the...