The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson and opened in 1825, owes a debt to people who were forced to build the university, then maintain it and feed and care for the professors and students, people who were treated as property belonging to their “owners.” UVA has made a first step in acknowledging the slaves whose labor built and maintained the university, but it has done little to repay the debt it owes them.
Here’s my suggestion to UVA: Pay back by paying forward.
• Extend the meaning of “legacy student” from the children of UVA alumni to include the descendants of slaves who were forced to build and maintain the school.
• Create a UVA fund dedicated to the educations of their descendants based on the monetary value of their ancestors’ contribution to the university.
The first anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of UVA, comes in a few days. Coinciding with the anniversary is the publication of the final report of the UVA’s Slavery and the University Commission, which began its work in 2013. Together, the two events put the issues of pre-Civil War slavery and present-day racism into stark perspective.
The racism of the Unite the Right participants is well known. The history of slavery at UVA, however, like the history of slavery in the U.S., is clouded by our national determination to paint our country’s original sin in broad strokes and ignore its disturbing details. The UVA report is one of the recent attempts to bring the full, accurate history of slavery to light.
Based on the commission report, it’s fair to call UVA the university that slavery built. According to the report, “Slavery, in every way imaginable, was central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.”
The dollar value of the slave labor which directly contributed to the building and maintenance of the university is only one part of the story. The people who funded the building of the school were Virginians who owed their wealth to the state’s slave-based economy, including the country’s third, fourth and fifth presidents, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe.
The mission of the university was to become Virginia’s answer to Harvard University. That didn’t simply mean creating a prestigious intellectual center in the state. It also meant protecting and preserving Virginia’s system of slavery.
Thomas Jefferson made that mission explicit in a letter to a friend.
Even in Jefferson’s own imagining of what the University of Virginia could be, he understood it to be an institution with slavery at its core. He believed that a southern institution was necessary to protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North. Jefferson wrote his friend James Breckenridge in 1821, expressing his concern with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a place “against us in position and principle.” He worried that in northern institutions, young Virginians might imbibe “opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country. This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.”
The university was “an incubator for pro-slavery thought,” according to the report, which says its racist mission extended beyond the Civil War.
[UVA] had become the intellectual protector of white supremacy and of the idea that slavery should be perpetual. Those messages were spread across the country by alumni who became lawyers, judges, university professors, doctors, and legislators elsewhere. This heritage would not disappear after Confederate defeat in 1865. It would not end in March 1865 when Union General Sheridan’s forces occupied Charlottesville and effectively freed 14,000 Albemarle residents. It would not disappear with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolishing slavery. It would not disappear with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments seeking to create and protect African American citizenship. It was still with us in the early twentieth century when UVA became a eugenics center, it was still with us in the 1920s when the University had its own Ku Klux Klan chapter, and it appeared as recently as 2001 when the University objected to a state historical marker on University property that recounted Charlottesville’s surrender to Union forces in 1865.
In 1950, 125 years after its opening, UVA admitted its first black student. He was a Howard College graduate who was already practicing law. The school didn’t begin accepting black students in earnest until 1955, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
UVA was built on the backs of slaves and it continued to do harm to the descendants of slaves throughout its history. Today, African Americans make up 20 percent of Virginia’s population but only 6.1 percent of UVA’s undergraduates. While the Slavery and the University Commission report is an important document, it doesn’t suggest that UVA is making a major effort to right its historic wrongs. The university has begun to recognize its slave history with placards, recreations of old buildings and walking tours. It offers modest scholarship opportunities to African Americans. That isn’t enough.
I believe a more active program should be enacted at UVA. The university already has a Legacy program to help children of alumni with the admissions process. While it doesn’t guarantee acceptance, it offers information sessions and personal meetings with the families which begin as early as the potential students’ freshman year in high school. The same opportunities, and more, should be extended to Virginia’s African American students, or any students around the country who can trace their ancestry to Virginia’s slave population. UVA should offer a full range of counseling, tutoring and mentoring programs to those students who express interest in attending the university, beginning in high school or earlier. Those who are accepted to the university should be given full ride scholarships as well as a continuation of counseling, tutoring and mentoring services they received as K-12 students.
All that takes money, but UVA should think of it more as a late repayment of an outstanding debt than an added expense. Historians, economists and mathematicians can work together to figure out how many slaves worked at the university and the monetary value of their labor in today’s dollars, with the understanding that some of them were skilled artisans and craftspeople whose work was highly valued. If they want to take a more cautious approach and consider only the value added by slave labor, they can compare the cost of slave labor to the cost of hiring free people to do the same work. The difference would set a base amount for an endowment of the program.
The university should also add other considerations to their figurings, like interest accrued over the years, the value of the freedom which was denied to the slaves and the percentage of the money donated to the college which is directly attributable to the slave-based economy. However the final amount is determined, the endowment would allow UVA to cover the cost of tuition and expenses for descendants of Virginia slaves who decide to attend the university, people whose ancestors were forced to build and maintain an institution which benefitted white Virginians but brought them only hardship and oppression.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2018.
The public universities in this country exist to educate the next generation of this countrys citizens, not to research and create recompense programs for some exploited labor cohorts but not others. Sadly, there have been MANY exploited labor groups in America, and, though it may not be politically correct to mention this fact, some of them have been white. Look up the history of Irish immigrants in the factories of the Northeast some time. Are we going to insist that every consumer who benefited from products whose price was lower because immigrant labor costs were suppressed pay into a fund to educate the descendants of those factory workers? This type of policy tokenism may continue to be an A-list, go-to strategy for a Democratic Party that thinks publicizing programs like this will drive voter turnout for targeted cohorts in the next election cycle, but it does not solve problems in a broad-based, systemic way. And the resentment-byproducts it produces are politically toxic.
Why were the Asian Americans marching against policies of the DeBlasio administration recently in NYC, David? Because he proposed to augment low proportions of African Americans and Hispanics in the citys competitive admissions high schools by changing admissions criteria in a way that would mean fewer Asians would be able to gain seats. Heres a quote from the Chairman of the NYC Asian-American Democratic Club: Our mayor is pitting minority against minority, which is really, really messed up, to put it nicely.
While tokenism and divide-to-conquer politics prevail, here are a few questions that, not coincidentally, dont get asked and answered: Why are some portions of the public K-12 system struggling to produce fully qualified college applicants? Why arent there enough high quality publicly funded schools in NYC and elsewhere? Why are families being asked to take on huge amounts of debt to meet higher ed costs that have inflated by 300% in the last 30 years? Why did Congress change the interest rates on student loans and made them undismissable in bankruptcy? Why is the birth rate in our country now at its lowest recorded rate? Why has the rate of retired people filing for bankruptcy increased so steeply (the answer would include that many of these retirees were encouraged to take on too much debt trying to fund their childrens educations). More dysfunctions related to access to and cost of higher ed could be listed, and they hit ALL ethnic cohorts, across the board.
Why not fix them, lifting the burden for ALL, rather than tinkering with the University of Virginia and only those African-Americans who can prove descent from a specific cohort of slaves?
To “Try broader policy solutions for higher ed.” I don’t think it’s reasonable to create an equivalence between Africans being taken to this country against their will and being kept as slaves and the injustices and prejudice visited on other minority groups. I agree with the idea of lifting the burden on all people who are mistreated in this country, but this is an especially egregious situation, where a university would not exist without the labor of slaves whose descendants weren’t allowed to attend until 1950.
We cant go back in time and correct all the injustices that have been done to each cohort in the past. If were going to do that, perhaps we should start thinking about structural recompense for all the unpaid and underpaid essential labor of infant and child care and primary education that has been, for thousands of years and in many different countries, performed disproportionately by women. And no, contra much of the rhetoric we hear these days, allowing a statistically small sample of privileged and largely white women in the first world access to professional opportunities that were in the past reserved for men while expecting less privileged and less educated women (and often women of color) to accept low wages and low status jobs taking care of other womens children does not achieve anything resembling EQUALITY.
We cannot pay back the descendants of slaves for the evils of slavery, nor can we pay back the children of women (every person now living) for the structural disadvantages women have suffered since the beginning of time. What we can do, looking at the present and trying to achieve greater justice and better policies in the present, is to try to make sure there are no positions in our paid and unpaid labor systems, going forward, that require some to toil in poor conditions and with low status and insufficient entitlements to do unpleasant work some portion of which properly belongs to other people who, through unjust privileges, are systematically evading the necessity of doing it.
Thus the focus needs to be on broad based labor-supportive policy, not identity-group recompense programs. The Democratic Party continues to try to earn its social justice bona fides by applying an identity group bandaid here and another identity group bandaid there, missing the fact that the patient needs surgery. What is being done with labor entitlements like employees right to file class action suits and what is being done with the financing of higher education in this country will permanently destroy many of the values the Democratic Party says it upholds.
By all means, lets take an honest look at all the evils in the past like how slavery was part of the University of Virginia, and Georgetown, and many other academic institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere. But in the current political moment, would it be possible to ask the so-called Party of labor to keep its collective eye on main game and the broadest economic and educational problems in the present? If not, the majority of those who work for a living in this country people of EVERY ethnicity and citizenship status are in trouble.
That was yesterday and yesterday’s gone. It seems that for some people it is all they have to hang on to. We will never satisfy both sides. It is a folly to attempt to. Law after law was passed, affirmative action put in place, and yet some feel no progress has been made.
Listen to Diamond and Silk discussing Kanye West being shunned.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5820450320001/?#sp=show-clips