Facing Up to a Role in Slavery

Inside Higher Ed, 4/25/07, by Andy Guess

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/25/uvaslavery


Two months after the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution
apologizing with "profound regret" for the state's slave-holding past,
one of its most revered institutions has followed suit. The University
of Virginia announced Tuesday that its board had passed a unanimous
resolution expressing "particular regret" for the university's use of
slave labor from its founding in 1819 through the end of the Civil War.



The institution believes this is the first such resolution passed by a
university governing board. In 2004, the University of Alabama's faculty
apologized for its historical role during slavery, and last year Brown
University released a report summarizing several years of research into
its ties to the slave trade. In recent months, other state legislatures
have passed or begun debate on resolutions similar to Virginia's,
leading to what Alfred L. Brophy, a professor of law at the University
of Alabama who led the apology effort in the faculty senate there,
called a "domino effect."



Unlike the efforts at Brown, the Virginia resolution offers an admission
of guilt on behalf of a public institution, and unlike Alabama, it
carries the weight of the entire governing board. (It doesn't, however,
contain the word "apology.") "Our effort here was aimed at recognizing
the artisanship and blood, sweat and tears put into what is considered
to be the leading architectural accomplishment in the United States,"
said Thomas F. Farrell II, the rector (or chairman) of the board.



The university has stepped up its diversity and recruitment efforts in
the past five years - a marked change from its reluctance to embrace the
civil rights movement four decades ago. Warren M. Thompson, a member of
the board and chair of its special committee on diversity, said the
resolution had added value for him personally as the
great-great-grandson of a slave who lived in the area. "I'm very proud
of this and proud of my fellow board members," Thompson said. "My father
grew up about 20 miles from the university and was not allowed to go to
the university because of his race, and he made sure all three of his
children got degrees from the university. But he told me this story time
and time again ... I said to him, if you stop telling the story, I'll
try to do something about it."



Thompson characterized the resolution both as an acknowledgment of the
forced labor that helped bring the university into being as well as an
"affirmative statement about what we'd like to do in the future, and
continue to do in the future, in making the university one that is open
to people based strictly on people's ability and their desire to work
hard."



The effort comes after not only the state's resolution but the board's
authorization of a memorial stone at the Rotunda for the slaves who
worked at the university. But even as the university does what it deems
necessary to atone for its own past, Farrell said, the history of
"slavery is a part of what this country is all about, and what this
state is all about, and what this institution is all about."



That, Brophy hopes, will now spur other institutions to follow a similar
path. "I think what's important is that the great University of Virginia
has done this," he said. "It makes it both more acceptable and important
for other institutions to undertake similar investigations."



What Brophy, the author of Reparations: Pro and Con (Oxford University
Press), finds important, beyond the apology itself, is that such
investigations help illuminate "the connection between the past and the
present, getting further knowledge in which the institution of slavery
is connected to the present." Otherwise, "people wouldn't have any
reason to know that UVa owned any slaves."



Peter S. Carmichael, a history professor at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro who has studied the Civil War and Southern
identity, said that the apology is something that people across the
political divide should embrace. But he added that it might discourage
focusing on the complexities of the antebellum South and those who lived
in slave societies.



"The resolution has its value in bringing attention to the fact that the
University of Virginia was created, was sustained, was energized by the
institution of slavery - in its physical construction and also in its
intellectual climate," he said, "committed intellectually, economically
and politically to the institution of slavery." But he added that it
would do nothing to add to existing discussions of slavery in the
classroom, and that it could "give some people a sense of moral
superiority over the past."



One figure who will surely be invoked in the discussions surrounding the
resolution is the university's founder, Thomas Jefferson. While he
publicly opposed slavery and expressed deep personal qualms about that
feature of American society, he owned slaves himself.



"We realize and recognize that Thomas Jefferson is viewed as the founder
of the university, the architect of the university, but we also realize
that someone got the footings, laid the bricks, put the roof on, and
much of that work was done by enslaved men and women, and now it's time
that we recognize those people as well," Thompson said.



- Andy Guess