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Slavery helped build Emory, now it explores its history with “Slavery and the University”

by Felicia Feaster | Feb 1, 2011

In the Atlanta boosters’ mantra of “the City Too Busy to Hate,” the mania to move forward has often come at the expense of historical denial: old buildings razed to make way for the new or the unquiet history of slavery too often glossed over.

In an effort to sift through the past to illuminate the present, Emory University is hosting “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies” from February 3–6, billed as “the first-ever conference examining the history and legacy of slavery’s role in higher education.” For a complete conference schedule go to: http://transform.emory.edu/conference/

Emory Faculty, Oxford College, GA, 1860. (Emory University Archives Photograph Collection (EUPIX Series 5.1), Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University)

The conference features academics from 30 institutions including Brown (chartered in 1764, with much of the college’s early endowment coming from slave owners’ wealth), Harvard, Stanford and other colleges. They will deliver papers on, among other things, their colleges’ ties to slavery. The conference will launch February 3 with a keynote lecture at Emory’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium delivered by Brown University president Ruth Simmons and entitled, “From the Shadows to Plain Sight: Slavery and Justice at Brown University.” It is open to the public.

“Slavery and the University” is an outgrowth of the Ford Foundation-funded Transforming Community Project directed by Emory professor of history and African American studies Leslie Harris, the author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863″ (University of Chicago Press, 2003). “It is vital to recognize the foundational role of slavery and slave labor in the creation of institutions in the United States and around the world,” states Harris in Emory’s literature on the conference.

Miss Elmira Henderson, 1910, from the Henderson Family Collection

The underpinnings of “Slavery and the University” are Emory’s own historic ties to slavery established when the college was founded in Oxford, Georgia in 1836. One of the organizers of the conference and the community research fellow at TCP, Melissa Sexton, concedes that, “history has shown that a lot of the people in and around Oxford College were slave holders and it looks like some of the buildings were built by slave labor.”

Such unsettling revelations are partly based on the research of anthropology Mark Auslander, a former Oxford College professor now at Brandeis University. He has also investigated Emory’s ties to slavery in an essay published in “Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University.” Much of that history will be treated in Auslander’s forthcoming fall 2011 University of Georgia Press book “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family.” Auslander will also speak at the conference and lead a revistitation of Emory’s complex relationship with slavery at Oxford College (Emory’s original campus) on February 6.

Auslander has found concrete evidence of Emory’s economic ties to slave labor in the school’s minutes from 1840 which stated, “Resolved … That five of the man servants hired by the Trustees be employed in making rails and in hauling them to the place where they will be needed in the repairs of the fence around the plantation.”

“The institution’s founders were, without exception, slaveholders,” Auslander asserts in his “Where Courageous Inquiry Leads” essay “Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory.”

Such pieces of the history record, ferreted out over time, stand in opposition to the absence of visual proof of an sometimes unpleasant history at Emory. “The biggest revelation is the lack of images: this history has been erased, people have been erased. There are no pictures. And it’s not just at Emory,” says Sexton.

In an effort to in some way correct that lack of visuals, Georgia visual artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier has created an installation also to be unveiled on February 6 at Oxford called “Unraveling Miss Kitty’s Cloak.” The piece commemorates the experience of slave Catherine Andrew Boyd, also known as “Miss Kitty,” who was owned by Emory’s first Board of Trustees president James Osgood Andrew who, Auslander asserts, owned some 20 slaves. Residents of the local Newton County community, Emory academics and the descendants of both James Osgood Andrew and Catherine Boyd will meet at Old Church for a “talking circle” that same day.

History undergrad Patrick Jamieson, who will deliver a paper on February 4 at the “Slavery and the University” conference, found that although an 1851 publication of rules and regulations for Emory students stated that, “no Student shall keep, for his use or pleasure, any horse, carriage, dog or servant, except when his parent or guardian shall, with the approbation of the Faculty, allow him a horse for the purpose of healthful exercise,” the institution both profited from and championed slavery. Jamieson stated in Emory’s campus newspaper “The Emory Wheel,” that, “Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Emory’s second president, serving from 1840-1848, became one of the most prominent defenders of slavery by the mid 1840s.”

“Emory impressed upon its students a pro-slavery ideology which evolved with and paralleled pro-slavery thought across the South” notes Jamieson.

“A lot of this was undocumented and it’s been hard to dig down and tell the stories that need to be told,” says Sexton.

“Slavery and the University” comes on the heels of Emory’s recent statement of “regret” for its ties to slavery as the university celebrates its 175th year in 2011. Emory did not allow black students to attend the school until 1962.