History of Education in the News The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism on Campus
History of Education in the News
The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and
Contemporary Black Activism on Campus
James D. Anderson and Christopher M. Span
Members of Concerned Student 1950 protesting for racial equality at the Uni-
versity of Missouri in November 2015 (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson Photographer).
The History of Education Quarterly editorial team is planning to
integrate a new feature, “History of Education in the News,” into periodic
issues of the journal. Our idea is to highlight relevant historical scholarship on
a topic that has contemporary public resonance. Our first piece in this new vein
engages the current uptick of interest in the links between slavery and higher
education. Recent scholarship and popular press accounts have documented
how many eastern colleges and universities benefited from enslaved African-
American labor.
We asked Professors James D. Anderson and Christopher M. Span of
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to take up this issue and
reflect on how a deep knowledge of history informs recent activism on college
and university campuses, particularly activism focused on forcing institutions
to reckon with their histories and become antiracist spaces.
James D. Anderson is Head and Gutgsell Professor of Education Policy, Organization
and Leadership at the College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Christopher M. Span is associate dean for Academic Programs at Education Adminis-
tration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
History of Education Quarterly Vol. 56 No. 4 November 2016 Copyright C© 2016 History of Education Society
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The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism 647
As the late Maya Angelou stated so profoundly, “History, despite
its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need
not be lived again.”1 Put another way by the late historian Eugene
Genovese, it is never certain which lessons can be drawn from the past
to inform the future, “Except perhaps one: Until a people can and will
face its own past, it has no future.”2 This essay explores the historical
persistence of attitudes toward the sanctity of black life and its resulting
impact on contemporary activism as expressed in social movements such
as Black Lives Matter. While many Americans look for present-day
arguments for or against Black Lives Matter, answers to understanding
the origins of the primary motives for this movement are rooted in the
past. We illustrate how the demands of contemporary student activists
force their campuses to face their pasts, acknowledge the role of slavery
and racism in their creation and success, and rectify their wrongs. In
short, these activists aspire to have their universities become the first of
many communities to unconditionally value everyone equally and make
clear that white lives do not matter more than any other.
Americans have always had great difficulty facing their past
squarely, especially around issues of genocide, slavery, and racism. It
is common to view slavery as the distant past with no relevance to the
present, while at the same time viewing other events that developed
within the context of slavery (i.e., the Declaration of Independence, the
War for Independence, the formation of the United States, and the
ratification of the Constitution) as extremely relevant to the present
and the future. The perpetual ritual of sanitizing the “wrenching pain”
from our history renders us incapable of comprehending and under-
standing the political and cultural legacy of American slavery or the
social movements that aim to overcome its continuing effects. In an ar-
ticle on the political legacy of American slavery, authors Avidit Acharya,
Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen show that contemporary differences
in political attitudes in the American South, in part, trace their origins
to slavery’s presence more than 150 years ago. “Drawing on a sample
of more than 40,000 Southern whites and historical census records,”
Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen demonstrate “that whites who currently
live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in 1860 are to-
day, on average, more conservative and express colder feelings toward
African Americans than whites who live elsewhere in the South.”3 These
1Maya Angelou, Presidential Inaugural Poem, January 20, 1993, http://poetry.
eserver.org/Angelou.html.
2Eugene D. Genovese, “The Nat Turner Case,” New York Review of Books 11,
no. 4 (September 12, 1968): 37.
3Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, “The Political Legacy of
American Slavery,” Journal of Politics 78, no. 3 (July 2016), 621.
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648 History of Education Quarterly
authors make the simple, yet profound, point that racist norms and in-
stitutional arrangements to subordinate and control African Americans
have been passed down locally across generations. Their research and
findings illustrate a willingness to squarely face a past that most Amer-
icans prefer to disremember.
Nowhere is this historical amnesia more evident than in the con-
temporary reaction to black activism that is commonly known as the
Black Lives Matter movement. A common response to Black Lives
Matter is to assert that “all lives matter,” and thus the focus on black
lives, as some would have it, is inherently racist. This position assumes
that historically black lives have mattered in the same manner as all
other lives, including the lives of white Americans. In view of 250 years
of slavery followed by 100 years of Jim Crow in southern states and
patterns of pervasive racism in northern states, it would indeed be a
remarkable result if slavery and racism failed to have a profound impact
on the sanctity of black life. To the contrary, the historical record is
replete with evidence of how black lives have not mattered.
Black life ceased to matter with the onset of the North Atlantic slave
trade. This was poignantly portrayed in a 60 Minutes episode entitled
“The Slave Ship,” a story about the quest for the remains of a shipwreck
(the São José Paquete d’Africa) that sank off the coast of Cape Town,
South Africa, in 1794.4 It is the first time that the wreckage of a slaving
ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered, along with
a document detailing the rescue of the crew and half of the enslaved
Africans. The document, which is in Portuguese and paraphrases the
inquest testimony of the ship’s captain, Manuel João, reminds us of the
way in which regard for black lives had been reduced to livestock being
transported as cargo. Captain João reported that he was able to save the
men (meaning white men) but could save only half of the cargo (meaning
black people). The distinction between people and cargo underscores
the point that black lives did not matter except as valuable cargo to be
sold. This attitude toward black bodies developed within a slave trade
that lasted nearly 500 years and that made it virtually impossible to
trade and sell people while maintaining a sense of dignity toward the
sanctity of their lives.
The devaluation of black lives continued with each passing year
of slavery, and, following the end of slavery in America, the disregard
for black lives was passed on from one generation to the next. This
fact is replete in every aspect of American life and culture and has been
in plain sight even as we turned a blind eye to its significance. For
generations, Americans read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while
460 Minutes, “The Slave Ship,” November 1, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/
news/the-slave-ship-60-minutes.
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The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism 649
ignoring Mark Twain’s illustrations of how black lives didn’t matter.
When Huck, pretending to be Tom, tries to explain why he had been
delayed, he explains that the steamboat engine was damaged when a
cylinder head blew up. Huck says to Aunt Sally:
Huck: It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We
blowed out a cylinder-head.
Aunt Sally: Good gracious! Anybody hurt?
Huck: No’m. Killed a nigger.
Aunt Sally: Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.5
Clearly, the fact that a black man was killed did not factor into Aunt
Sally’s conception of “people.” In 1884, Mark Twain used the fictional
Aunt Sally, and the society in which she lived, to underscore the reality
that the death of a black man was widely regarded among whites as
unimportant. Indeed, Aunt Sally captures the attitude that Black Lives
Matter seeks to change: the deep-seated habit of regarding the sanctity
of black lives differently than that of white lives.
Both the disregard for the sanctity of black lives as well as the
struggle to make black lives matter are products of slavery’s past and
have a detectable effect on present-day black activism. Hence, the an-
swer to the question as to where we should begin in accounting for
the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement lies in our past. It does
not begin with the tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown,
Tamir Rice, or Sandra Bland, even as their deaths are part and parcel
of the long-standing disregard for the sanctity of black lives. We must
begin the accounting for the Black Lives Matter movement at the onset
of the massive North Atlantic slave trade that made it impossible to
treat black lives as people when their primary value to the New World
was as cargo to be captured, bought, and sold like livestock. We should
not be surprised at the emergence of a Joseph generation that knows
not Pharaoh’s generation and does not share historically conditioned
sensibilities regarding the sanctity of black lives. What they feel and
believe has been in the making for centuries and they will not stand for
its continuance.
The recent black protest movements and activism, particularly on
college campuses, illustrate this growing discontent. Within the past
two years, black students at over eighty colleges and universities, from
Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Occidental, to the University of Michigan and
the University of Missouri, have submitted formal demands that their
universities acknowledge their histories and change their practices, poli-
cies, and treatment of all people from underrepresented backgrounds,
5Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1912), 306–7.
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650 History of Education Quarterly
but particularly African-American students.6 The persistent overt acts
of racism on their campuses, and the silence, resistance, and failure of
university administrators, faculty, students, and alums to acknowledge
and address these harms, reinforce the refrain that black lives are not
valued as much as white lives. The devaluing, disregard, indifference,
and mistreatment of black lives compared to white lives, and the lack of
any meaningful response to remedy these problems, is what theologian
and scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. has come to define as the “value gap.”
“No matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we’ve
made,” Glaude states, “white people are valued more than others in this
country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of
Americans.” He concludes, “The value gap is in our national DNA.”7
It continues to justify slavery, segregation, racism, and discrimination.
It affords and denies opportunities. It determines who is protected and
harmed. It determines who receives the benefit of the doubt or the
“deficit of the doubt.”8 It defines who is qualified, worthy, and deserv-
ing. The only way the value gap can be closed and dismantled is when
whites show and express an appreciation and value for the lives of others
as much as they do their own. It is arguably the last lingering vestige of
slavery’s past—a vestige that continues to haunt us to the present day.
Two of the more recent and notable Black Lives Matter protests
to challenge this value gap occurred at Yale and at the University of
Missouri at Columbia. The administrative responses to this activism
are telling and mirror the title of the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of
Two Cities. The timeline for black activism at the University of Mis-
souri tentatively began in November 2014 after the nonindictment of a
Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who shot and killed unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown three months earlier. It took center stage at
the start of the fall 2015 semester when the student government pres-
ident, Payton Head, posted on Facebook “his frustration with bigotry,
anti-homosexual and anti-transgender attitudes at the school after peo-
ple riding in the back of a pickup truck screamed racial slurs at him.”9
Missouri chancellor R. Bowen Loftin investigated the incident and
immediately issued a statement deploring any act of discrimination,
but student protesters felt the university’s response was halfhearted and
6For the listing of universities and student demands, see http://www.thedemands.
org.
7Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2016), 31.
8Jeff Cook, “Why I Am a Racist,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2016, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-im-a-racist_us_57893b9ee4b0e7c873500382.
9Michael Pearson, “A Timeline of the University of Missouri Protests,” CNN,
November 10, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/09/us/missouri-protest-timeline/.
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The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism 651
more was needed to ensure the well-being and safety of everyone on
campus.
Then, in early October, “a drunken white student disrupts an
African American student group preparing for homecoming activi-
ties and uses a racial slur when asked to leave.”10 The next day,
Chancellor Loftin issued another statement, again denounced the in-
cident, and said “racism is clearly alive at Mizzou” and that “every
member of our community must help us change our culture.”11 He in-
stituted a policy—to begin at the start of the next academic year—that
required all students and faculty to complete diversity and inclusion
training. Two days later, black student protesters blocked the univer-
sity president’s car at the homecoming parade to voice their concerns.
In an effort to get around the protesters, the car “taps a protester,”
further inflaming the situation. Ten days later, on October 20, “the
student group Concerned Student 1950—named for the year African
Americans were first admitted to the university—issue[d] a list of de-
mands.”12 The administration did not respond immediately. Four days
later, someone on campus used “feces to draw a swastika on the wall of
a residence hall. A similar incident occurred in April, but with ashes.”13
Two days later, after a private meeting with Concerned Student 1950,
President Tim Wolfe refused to agree to all of their demands, one of
which asked him and the chancellor to resign. In early November, one
black student protester launched a hunger strike until all demands were
met. A week later, more than sixty black football players “announce they
won’t practice or play until Wolfe is removed.”14 The athletics depart-
ment, head football coach, and many white teammates announced their
support of the players who stood in protest. One day later, November
9, approximately one year after the nonindictment of the Ferguson po-
lice officer, the University of Missouri system’s administration said that
President Wolfe and Chancellor Loftin had “undeniably failed us,” and
both immediately resigned thereafter.
Four days after the University of Missouri president was forced to
resign, protest arose at Yale. Empowered by the mobilization, activism,
and success at Missouri, protesters submitted a list of demands to Yale
president Peter Salovey. The demands read:
Next Yale, an alliance of Yale students of color and our allies, have
come together to demand that Peter Salovey and the Yale administration
implement immediate and lasting policies that will reduce the intolerable
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
12Ibid.
13Ibid.
14Ibid.
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652 History of Education Quarterly
racism that students of color experience on campus every day . . . Because
the administration has been unwilling to promptly address institutional and
interpersonal racism at Yale, Next Yale has spent hours organizing, at great
expense to our health and grades, to fight for a university at which we feel
safe—a university that we would feel happy sending our younger siblings and
eventual children to attend . . . In the spirit of the nationwide student mobi-
lization demanding racial equality on campus—particularly at University of
Missouri, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Ithaca College—Next
Yale intends to hold Yale accountable to its students of color in the public
eye.15
The response to the activism at Yale differed significantly from
Missouri. University president Salovey immediately responded to their
concerns, announcing that over the next five years Yale would invest
more than $50 million in initiatives to promote cultural awareness and
inclusion, increase faculty diversity, and construct an academic center
to “build a more inclusive Yale” and “reaffirm and reinforce [their]
commitment to a campus where hatred and discrimination have no
place.”16
Amid this activism for access, inclusion, recognition, and equal
consideration, one thing was certain: lessons from the past were being
drawn upon to question the current and future considerations of these
institutions of higher learning. On both sides of the discord, history
mattered. Black student activists drew upon the past to explain their
current conditions and demands, and administrators were forced to
confront institutional and societal wrongs that many hoped would be
disremembered, ignored, or simply forgiven. Sharp images stood out
during these exchanges. At Missouri, black activists named their student
group after the year the university admitted nine black students and be-
came fully integrated. They wore T-shirts that read “1839 was built on
my B(l)ack,” in reference to the role free and unfree blacks played in the
construction and daily maintenance of the university since its found-
ing in 1839. Yale activists insisted campus officials change the name of
Calhoun College—a residential hall named in honor of alumnus and
unapologetic defender of slavery John C. Calhoun. This was not a new
demand. For decades, residents of the college and protesters demanded
the building be renamed and that the stained glass windowpanes and
iconography depicting the life of Calhoun as a prominent slaveholder
15“Next Yale Demands for Administration,” November 18, 2015, https://www.
thefire.org/next-yale-demands-for-the-administration/.
16Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Yale’s president responds to protesters’ demands,
announces new initiatives to ease racial tension,” Washington Post, November 18, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/18/yales-president-
responds-to-protesters-demands-announces-new-initiatives-to-ease-racial-tension.
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The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism 653
and enslaved blacks as cotton pickers be removed or replaced.17 Ac-
tivists at Missouri and Yale illuminated the troubled history of slavery
and racism at their universities, and the disremembering and unre-
sponsiveness of generations of university leaders, faculty, students, and
alum who dismissed or disregarded the intergenerational concerns of
the black men and women who enhanced the profile and experiences of
these campuses.
The timing of historian Craig Steven Wilder’s account of the
central role slavery and racism played in the building and shaping of
America’s first colleges and universities coincided with the protests
roiling college campuses. As Wilder records in Ebony and Ivy, “Human
slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the
Americas.”18 Virtually every institution of higher education founded
prior to the abolition of slavery was built and maintained, in some
form, by the labor of free and enslaved blacks. Blacks were on col-
lege campuses, not as students, but as cheap sources of labor that both
directly and vicariously taught whites enrolled and working in these
spaces that blacks were inferior and subordinate and they were superior
and leaders. Wilder demonstrates that for nearly two centuries univer-
sities valued black lives only to the extent that they could benefit from
their presence. He details how curricula was developed and taught that
“scientifically” race was immutable and biologically determined, that
whites were superior, and that the expansion of Western civilization
to every corner of the world was necessary, just, and beneficial. With
each passing generation, graduates from these institutions of higher
learning became the next assembly of elected officials, judiciaries, pro-
fessors, theologians, educators, and businessmen to nurture morals and
practices and to sanction ideologies, policies, laws, and institutions that
justified slavery and racism, and exacerbated the human value gap be-
tween blacks and whites.
Wilder was not alone, however. The New York Times reported
that “since 2003, when Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown
University, announced a headline-grabbing initiative to investigate that
university’s ties to slavery, scholars at William and Mary, Harvard,
Emory, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and elsewhere have completed their own studies.”19 These
17Ed Stannard, “Renaming Calhoun College still possible as Yale forms committee
after outcry,” New Haven Register, August 1, 2016, http://www.nhregister.com/general-
news/20160801/renaming-calhoun-college-still-possible-as-yale-forms-committee-
after-outcry.
18Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of
America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 114.
19Jennifer Schuessler, “Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers: ‘Ebony and
Ivy,’ About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow,” New York Times, October 18,
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654 History of Education Quarterly
investigations substantiate the centrality slavery and racism had in the
development and growth of their universities. The recent discovery
that Georgetown University sold 272 enslaved blacks in 1838 to keep
the institution afloat raises an important question as to whether these
institutions of higher learning have any obligation and accountability to
the descendants of those who were held in bondage or sold away from
their families to save or advance the mission of universities that blacks,
in mass, could not attend until well into the twentieth century.20
In the wake of these findings, Georgetown took the initiative to
begin the healing process. It established a working group to identify
ways the university could acknowledge and make amends for this trou-
bled history. Genealogists were hired to work alongside Georgetown
alums, faculty, and students to trace and find the descendants of the
272 enslaved blacks sold to keep the university solvent. It is “weigh-
ing whether the university should apologize for profiting from slave
labor, create a memorial to those enslaved and provide scholarships
for their descendants.” As Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown
and member of this working group, correctly states, “It’s hard to know
what could possibly reconcile a history like this . . . the university itself
owes its existence to this history.”21 Important questions need answers
in light of these explorations and findings. What can be done to make
amends? What must society, communities, institutions, and individuals
do to move beyond this troubled past to ensure it does not continue to
fester and fracture into a troubled future? To come to the point, where
do we go from here?
The collective knowledge and histories produced and recorded
on the impact slavery and racism have had, not merely on the rise of
American colleges and universities, but on the dehumanization of blacks
for the benefit of whites, is essential to understanding and addressing
the value gap that still plagues our society. These histories expand our
understanding of how ingrained the impacts of slavery and race are.
As historian Eric Foner reasons, “It is hardly a secret that slavery is
deeply embedded in our nation’s history. But many Americans still see
it as essentially a footnote, an exception to the dominant narrative of
the expansion of liberty on this continent.”22 In order for our nation to
2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/books/ebony-and-ivy-about-how-slavery-
helped-universities-grow.html.
20Rachel L. Swarns, “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does
It Owe Their Descendants?” New York Times, April 16, 2016, http://www.nytimes.
com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html.
21Ibid.
22Eric Foner, “A Brutal Process: ‘The Half Has Never Been Told,’ by Edward
E. Baptist,” New York Times, October 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/
books/review/the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html.
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The Legacy of Slavery, Racism, and Contemporary Black Activism 655
truly begin the healing process, we must reflect upon and acknowledge
our past and better understand the society we have inherited. Then, and
only then, will we be able to take the necessary steps to make amends and
hopefully get to a point of meaningful and momentous reconciliation.
That is what this current generation of activists demands, and they
seem prepared to accept nothing less. Black activists protesting across
America’s colleges and universities have relied on these recently un-
covered histories and this process of self-reflection to further articulate
their concerns and demands. They connect these histories to their own
experiences in an effort to impact meaningful change for themselves
and future students on their campuses. They demand their campuses
proactively speak out against racism and discrimination, adapt their cul-
ture and practices to challenge these vices, and implement plans and
policies to protect, include, develop, and value them. Their activism
underscores a collective and long-standing demand made by every gen-
eration of blacks before them who sought to be recognized as persons
of equal value and consideration, and to be regarded as something
more than a commodity for another person’s profit, consumption, ben-
efit, fear, or imagination. “These activists force us, whether we agree
with them or not,” as Glaude thoughtfully penned, “to think about
how we currently live our lives. In short, they shed light on our racial
habits and create the conditions, however fleeting, for us to change
them.”23
These contemporary activists call us to action; they ask us to strive
alongside them in the hopes of upending the enduring ill effects of
slavery and racism and to help them establish a social order where black
lives not only matter, but are unequivocally valued. On our campuses,
they expect us to develop guidelines and action plans that define and
confront racial harassment and protect them from its harms. Truth be
told, we should have already laid this foundation; they should never have
had to ask. Fundamentally, they expect us to live up to the aspiration
we’ve championed for generations (and they have come of age believing
as truth) that America, in general, and our universities, more specifically,
are one of the few places in the world where everyone is valued and given
equal consideration. Their lived experiences conflict in important ways
with this aspiration and encapsulate the growing frustrations and angst
these activists feel. Just as universities expect students to learn, succeed,
develop, and become excellent ambassadors of their institutions and
creed, students protesting for change expect their campuses to close the
gap between their professed values and the ones they live. They want
their campuses to acknowledge and face their past with courage, even
23Glaude, Democracy in Black, 184.
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656 History of Education Quarterly
if it is a wrenching pain, as Maya Angelou expressed, so that it need not
be lived again.
We cannot undo our past, but we can learn from it; examples
abound prove this truth. History provides a lens and medium for us to
revisit who we were, what we did, and how our thoughts and actions
make us who we are today. History affords opportunities to address fail-
ings and start anew. If the ideals of society and our profession impress
upon us to teach the general public to appreciate diversity and inclusion,
to be self-reflective and mindful of others, and to enhance our strengths
and remedy our limitations, then it is imperative we have the moral com-
pass and courage to learn from our pasts, amend their shortcomings,
and develop and implement the practices, policies, and innovations nec-
essary to produce the outcomes, opportunities, and reconciliation that
this current generation and future generations of Americans rightfully
deserve.
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