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Good afternoon and welcome to our Friday doc talks. Just give us a couple of minutes as we let people file in. It's Friday, but it looks, it looks different on this screen to people, I imagine, Dr. McDaniel.

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In a good way. In a good way. I think people are wondering, why did it take them this long to bring some other people into this conversation instead of listening to the two of us every week? So we're, we're very glad to have a special edition of our Friday doc talks today.

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We do this every Friday. If you're just joining us for the first time, my name is Caleb McDaniel, I'm the chair of the history department here at Rice, and I'm joined by my colleague, Dr. Alex Byrd, also in the history department and the Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity,

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and Inclusion here at Rice. And we are the co-chairs of Rice's Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice. And each Friday at noon central, at this same link, we take an opportunity to look at some of the documents that we're uncovering as a part of our historical

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research for the task force, working through the questions that they answer, what new questions they raise that require additional research, and so put it on your calendar. We'd love to have you back every Friday. Share it with members of the university community or your own university, and we

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really benefit, I think you would agree, Dr. Byrd, from the insights of our audience members, whenever they join us. You can participate in this conversation by putting your questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen or in the chat, and we're gonna do our best to make space at the

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end of the hour today to address questions that you may have. So this is a weekly event, we also have a podcast that you can subscribe to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The doc talks podcast includes recordings of past live webinars, and the best part of the

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podcast episodes are the debriefing conversations that follow with Kate Coley from the Rice Alumni Office, where we think, about a few weeks later or sometimes even a couple of months after the original webinar, how we're thinking about these documents in light of what we've learned since and what's going on on campus today.

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I'm pleased to say that today we just released episode eight of the doc talks podcast on race, space and belonging. So if you would like to subscribe, you can go to taskforce.rice.edu and listen to that podcast and also find two updates that we released this summer to the general public

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and the Rice community, giving a kind of progress report on our research to date, both about slavery, the first part of our title, but also more specifically about the Founder's Memorial here on campus, and we've asked some very special guests here today to discuss the first of those two updates in particular.

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And so I'm gonna turn it over to you, Dr. Byrd, to introduce our VIPs. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce today's guests, and it's always good to have guests, but I'm particularly excited because I've met and heard from all of our guests

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before, so it's good to have guests in your place, it's even better to have guests that you already know of, returning guests, and so I'm really excited for what will take place today. Our first guest is Dr.

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Hilary Green. Dr. Green is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of "Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in

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the Urban South, 1865 to 1890", and numerous essays and book chapters. Dr. Green is the founder of the Hallowed Grounds Project, focused on slavery and the University of Alabama. She is presently at work on several research projects, a book on African American memories

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and commemorations of the Civil War, and several pieces on the enslaved experience at the University of Alabama. With Jay Brent Morris, she co-edits the University of South Carolina Press book series, Reconstruction Reconsidered.

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I'm also happy to introduce and welcome Dr. Martha Jones, who is the Society of Black Alumni presidential professor, Professor of History, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author most recently of "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers,

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Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All." Her 2018 book, "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America", was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award for Best Book in Civil Rights History and many other prizes.

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She is also the author of "All Bound Up Together: The Women--The Woman Question in African American Public Culture." Dr. Jones is the director of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project, which examines the role that racism and discrimination have played at the Johns Hopkins University.

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Last, I'm happy to introduce and welcome Adam Rothman. Dr. Rothman is Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Atlantic history, 19th-century U.S. history, and the history of slavery.

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He is the author of "Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South", and most recently of "Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery", that tells the story of three slave children who were taken from New Orleans to Cuba by their owners during the U.S.

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Civil War, And their mother's efforts to recover them. Dr. Rothman served on Georgetown's Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, 2015 to 2016, and he is currently the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archives. Welcome to Rice, virtually, and welcome to doc talks.

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Thank you all so much for for joining us. We're really honored to have you here and maybe we could begin, Dr. Byrd mentioned that each of you is engaged in work similar to ours at your own institutions, and I'd be curious, and I'm sure our audience would love to know here at

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Rice, what the project of engaging in institutional histories and the connection of institutions to slavery, segregation, and racial injustice looks like on your own campuses, and are there differences or similarities that you perceive between the kinds of work that you're doing and the kinds of work we're doing here at Rice?

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So, Dr. Green, would you mind just starting? Yeah, so one of the things that I will say, at the University of Alabama, when I started the project, it was in January 2015, it was more individual faculty members. So the Hallowed Grounds project was my individual contribution to that.

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But in since doing the project, which consists of alternate campus walking tours and classes now, and a digital humanities project. We've had several monuments removed from our campus, including our UDC Boulder after the George Floyd reckoning.

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We've also had several building names renamed. And one of the things that I find interesting and exciting is now we have more institutional support. There is a working group, it's several years old.

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They're still working on what is that foundational document, what is the charge, what is there, because while there's a working group, there's a disconnect between the working group led by the Diversity, Equity, and inclusion officer versus the institutional support, and then COVID hit.

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So that, so that being said, I know they're trying to get postdoc now through to help work through that group and to develop more resources there, so it is continually growing on that side, and it's nice to see that there's more people, not just me, doing this, even though my contributions are the scholar's side, looking at slavery and the

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enslaved specifically, now we have people from all over who are gonna tackle not only slavery, but segregation. And to have that work not only being done ongoing, but having it done with new building names, new markers, new everything at the same time.

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So last summer, the George Floyd really brought all this to a head. And then we also have the future debate of Critical Race Theory and whether or not Alabama law will affect this work too, so that's another question that we are dealing with. But we have removed markers, we have removed building names, and we also now have

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students who are doing the work. So one of the thing that strikes me is, compared to Rice in your foundational document, I wish we had something at our campus that had that, that had individual faculty. But you are definitely aligned with other schools there too, so I celebrate and

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applaud what you have been able to achieve, and think about the Deep South schools, where I think most of this work needs to be done. So having Rice, having the Gulf South, having those states, and Alabama I know will be looking towards Rice and seeing what we consider one of our peers and peer locations,

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in particular a Deep South public institution, private institution, but a Deep South school, are doing. Thank you so much for that, and I'm, I know that you joined us last summer when we were talking about movements and monuments on campus.

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It's great to have you back and to hear that you're getting a little bit more help and support with the working group underway. Although I don't want to undersell for our audience your foundational role in getting that work started and providing campus tours.

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Is that right, on campus? Can you tell us a little bit about about those and how those got started? Yes, so it got started because of a student in my second semester at the University of Alabama, black male, who now has graduated and is now in the law school.

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So I want to say he has progressed through you. He said, well, slavery doesn't exist, so why are we studying this? So I developed a walking tour and, when I was on leave last year, so it's right under 5000, but now, since I've come back to the University of Alabama, I have done the

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walking tour for now over 5000 individuals. So I walk the campus quite a lot. And right now it's been nice to see 'cause students didn't see the campus that way, they didn't know the history. But to make it real beyond the documents, but to actually use the

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landscape and bring that alive has helped a lot. And I think that's what, why we've had the changes there, because students were more aware, more able to press and demand of the administration that we needed a working group, not just faculty, but students, alumni, and the like, so we had a

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multipronged solution. And I think that's one of the reasons why we've had our boulder removed, renamed the buildings, they cite student activism because it ultimately, it was student petitions, and many of those students had taken the tours or taken subsequent classes.

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So it's an education project too. And I think those tours, if anything I can say, I'm like, I've walked the campus enough when it's 90 plus degrees and humid, that has helped push this conversation beyond the 2004 apology and the 2006 placement of apology marker to make it more pressing and

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urgent on our campus. Well, we are definitely peer institutions in terms of humidity and heat and dealing with all of that in the Deep South. You're right that, you know, these Deep South universities are really engaged and

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need to be engaged in this work, so thank you so much for for joining us. And we have two other guests here who are who are at institutions, and I guess we would call it the Upper South or somewhat different locations, depending on, on how we would use those terms.

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So Dr. Jones, would you mind telling us a little bit about Hard Histories and the work that Hopkins is doing? Oh, I think you're muted. I'd be happy to, and, and I won't permit us to digress into a debate about whether or not

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Maryland is the South. That's probably better for, for another occasion. But I take your point, because I think, as I hope we'll get to explore today, I think place really matters for the kind of questions that we ask and the kind of

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discoveries we arrive at, and there's very much in our work that we're doing through Hard Histories that is in part trying to surface and to bring to light for our campus community and the larger Baltimore community, the very particular story of enslavement, of emancipation, of segregation, and a great deal more, that is

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in many ways very specific to place, even as it thematically is connected to the work that you all are doing. So I also wanna say thank you to the task force at Rice, because I think you all were some of the very first folks to reach out to us at Johns Hopkins when news surfaced that

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we had some myths to grapple with and more with respect to our founder. But more importantly, that we were at the beginning of trying to stand up our own, what has become the Hard Histories project at Hopkins, engaging with student researchers. I wanna shout out to some of the students from our lab who are with us this afternoon.

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Thanks y'all for coming out. But in sum, one of the things I'll say about our work is that we stumble into it, right, we stumble into it. Maybe that's a bit true for everybody, but it's to say that the Hard Histories project is not born out of some sort of long-held concern or doesn't emanate

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out of some sustained research agenda. It really emerges out of real conditions, in our case, the, the surfacing of some evidence that runs contrary to the myths that we told about ourselves as an institution, and I know we'll talk more about that.

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And then we wrestle within how to respond to that. Not only, there are other folks at Hopkins who are charged with responding to those kinds of things in a public relations way. But how do we respond as researchers?

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How do we respond as community members? It was something that we had to grapple with and I think are still grappling with in real time. So for me, it felt very important to build on the things we do best at Hopkins, and I think we do best at all our institutions.

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One is teaching and the other is research. And to let other folks take care of the many other dimensions of this. And so for me, that meant building a lab and inviting our students, both undergraduate and graduate students, to come in to help us discover more about the provocative evidence

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that had surfaced, but also to help us define the kind of questions we wanted to answer going forward. So we begin with a thorny question about Mr. Hopkins himself, our benefactor and namesake, and his relationship to slaveholding, someone

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who had for a very long time been held out to us as an abolitionist Quaker, and by strong implication, someone who was actively anti-slavery rather than intimately connected with the institution during his lifetime. So, yes, we have to think about that, but I think, like you all, we have a great deal

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more accounting to do when it comes to the history of racism, and so our lab is working on the advent of separation, what becomes segregation, in Baltimore city, the exclusion of African American students from our campus, which goes on for a very long time at Johns Hopkins.

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And, you know, with some good fortune and some elbow grease, as my mother would say, we will come all the way to the 21st century to think about the ways in which those histories are hardly passed, and we are still grappling in the 21st century with the legacies, but also the realities of inequality in our own time.

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So we are definitely the newcomers to this community, and we are just very grateful for the opportunity to learn with you all both about the research that I know we're going to talk about, but also I think, I was very moved by the, what I take to be the deep ethical considerations that you all have brought and all of you have brought to the

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work. So, so again, thank you so much for including us today. Thank you, thank you for being here. And and, you know, I think we've heard about Hard Histories, and at Rice, where we are both, I think, newcomers to this project of investigating the history of slavery with

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regard to institutions of higher education, and we're fortunate to have with us today Dr. Rothman, who's been involved in, I think, one of the leading early model projects on this score, the one at Georgetown University, and so, Dr. Rothman, could you tell us a little bit about Georgetown and its history with these

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issues? Sure. And thanks for the invitation to join this conversation. It's really great to learn more about the project at Rice and certainly an honor to be here with Martha and Hilary, whose work has really been an inspiration to a lot of us.

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My own, my own experience with, with Georgetown's campus history of slavery really goes back to 2015, 2016. I was a member of Georgetown's Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, a working group charged by the president of the university, President DeGioia, with

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studying our university's history of slavery and making a series of recommendations to the university community about how we could confront that past. There were other faculty on that committee, students and staff and alumni, and it was a really intense, collaborative effort by a lot of people to try to wrestle with that

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history. And it was a, it's a, it's a deep and long history. Georgetown's history is closely connected, deeply entangled with the whole history of American slavery, and in some ways, it's a microcosm of the history of American slavery. One of the reasons why it's, I think, important and interesting and captured the

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attention and imagination of a lot of people. To put it simply, Georgetown was founded in 1789 by a slaveholding Catholic elite, including the Catholic clergy of Maryland, that operated plantations across the state of Maryland. The campus was itself a site of slave labor, a place where enslaved people

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lived, worked, and died. They're even buried underneath campus. The college was connected to the Jesuit plantations in Maryland, and the original idea behind the university was that the profits from those plantations would help to

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subsidize education for free white boys and men at the college. And then, quite infamously, the Jesuits decided to get out of the business of slaving, mostly, in the 1830s, and sold almost all the people they owned, nearly, approximately 300 people, to two plantations in Louisiana in 1838, and part of the profits

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from that sale was used to pay off the debts of the college. So I don't know if I would even be sitting here today as a historian of slavery at Georgetown University if it were not for that history of slavery. So the working group tackled all of that history.

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It did it with the benefit of generations of scholarship into that history. The story was known in many dimensions, but it was not well known to the university community or the broader public. And I think that, that's really one of the big lessons that I took away from my

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experience, that historians and other academics can generate all sorts of esoteric knowledge about the past or whatever it is we study, but if we don't communicate that to our own communities or the broader public, then that knowledge can just wither and die. And so part of our task since 2015 has to make, has been to make sure that the

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university community and members of the public who are really interested in this history can learn it, have access to the original archival material that teaches us about it, and is able to engage in the process of historical exploration, discovery, and learning. I should add that one of the dimensions that makes the Georgetown project,

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the Georgetown effort, distinctive, is that we now have a very large community of people who are descended from the enslaved people the Jesuits sold in 1838. And so they've been extremely important collaborators and partners in this project of historical exploration, challenging those of us at the university to think broadly, to

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think ethically about our relationship to the past. So that's, that's been really important, and important for me personally in really changing the way that I relate to the history that I study. I've, since for the last five years I've personally been engaged in two projects that

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I think are relevant to this conversation. One is the Georgetown Slavery Archive, a website that's dedicated to publishing historical and contemporary material about slavery, memory, and reconciliation at Georgetown. So a lot of the original historical materials are on that website,

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slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu, for people to read, to learn from, to study to research, and in some cases, for people to research their own family's histories. So that's an ongoing project that has, I've been the curator of it, but a lot of people have been involved, including undergraduates and graduate students at Georgetown.

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It's been really a collaborative process. And the second thing I'll say is that for the last five years, I've been teaching a class called Faith in Georgetown's History. It started out as a small seminar, now it's a fairly large class.

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I taught it last year with about 90 students. And that, that for me has been a transformative experience, just teaching the history of our own school to, to our students, seeing them, seeing the impact it has on them to learn the truth, the full history of our university, and not the

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whitewashed version that's often peddled around. It's, it's been a very meaningful experience, and I think taking the research and the work of the working group and the archive and translating into the classroom is a pivotal part of what we're all doing.

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We can't just let, we just, we can't just think that we're gonna produce a report like this and it's magically gonna change the world. You've gotta teach it. So that, that's how, that's how I'll end my rant. Thanks very much for that rant, and thanks for all of you for the introductions, the

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powerful and inspiring introductions to the projects that are ongoing at, at your institutions. This is the part of doc talk where we generally turn to a document, and the document in this case is the task force update on research on slavery, and I'd like to get that part of the conversation started by just asking the kind of question we always

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ask on on Fridays, and that is, considering the document, what, what questions does it raise for you? Sometimes we go further than questions and and look at problems. What problems does the document raise?

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And we started in an order, but I'd like now to to dispense with that order and just go with more of a free-ranging talk. So that's the, that's the open. I can jump in, because I think, and maybe get us started by just pointing to some really, I

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think, important questions that you all explore here in this document, but I think are pertinent to perhaps all our work. And my first question is, why a document? In other words, there are many ways to convey knowledge,

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to condense it, to express it, and I am interested in the relative merits of documents versus, in our case, we've been thinking a lot and talking a lot and preparing ourselves actually to do kind of video iterations, video shorts that would, like you all, try and summarize the work and share pertinent parts of it, but thinking

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about the relative possibilities of different ways of sharing this, thinking about Dr. Green walking the campus at the University of Alabama and realizing there's no experience like accompanying her and having her narrate the history. That opportunity for Q&A, so different than a report, different than a filmic, you know,

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different than an archive. And so I'm interested in that piece of it and how you all have, and you've deeply committed to this, this powerful report, and I wonder how you arrived at that as a form. Couple of other things.

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One is, you say at a couple of points, this is preliminary research findings and work that's still in progress. Now, here at Johns Hopkins, we have been very deliberate in saying this because we, if you will, shared our first revelations very quickly, believing that it was important to

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share the little that we knew early rather than to appear that somehow we were working in some star chamber and weren't being transparent. But for some folks, that's frustrating. That as historians, we can't sort of arrive at the answer and then offer that ironclad

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interpretation that will stand the test of time. And I think as historians, we know that's the nature of the work always, and that in fact, history is always iterative in this respect. But I think for many folks, that lesson about the nature of historical knowledge is

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not only new, it's unsettling, and I think it's still a challenge for us to sit with that sort of truth, even as folks want us to be sure. I guess the last thing I'll put on the table, there's so much here, is this confrontation with myth and with origin stories.

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And I think in some ways this is, in my view, one of the most perhaps influential or enduring lessons that can come out of the work, is attuning ourselves or attuning one another, such that when we encounter myths, we, we know the signs, and we, and we know to kind of step back just enough to think critically, and at the same time, it's not

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enough to tear down or destroy myths, that then we face the question, what do we put in their place? And on this, my thinking is really evolving, in the sense that as much as I have been a critic and someone responsible for deconstructing myths about Johns Hopkins, its origins, Mr.

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Hopkins himself, I'm also someone who is sympathetic to and understands why we need myths. And one question for us might be what, if anything, replaces myths? Is it only hard history, or is there something else? What else do we offer up that, that help folks who are not going to do the deep dive

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that students associated in our classes or in our labs take? What do we offer? What can we offer up to a more casual visitor? What do we want?

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I'd love to hear Dr. Green on this, what do we want those students who lead campus tours to say when they've got a lot to say and they're only going to get to say a little on this subject that doesn't take us back into myth making, but also appreciates that folks need broad

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strokes sometimes, and not everyone is going to do that deep dive that it's such a pleasure to do in our everyday work? So I hope those are helpful at least for getting us started, but thanks again for the chance to read this and to to think with you about it.

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I will add, because I think, Martha, you hit on a point and I'm glad you mentioned it, too. I teach this too, so I'm gonna be teaching two courses in the spring, undergrad level and a grad level, 'cause to make that history alive and to get them into, 'cause we're teaching institutions, like, we need to, also 'cause a report only does one thing.

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And one of the things I see on my campus and its history is they like to create things, but not to extend that conversation to the new communities that constantly, our campuses are constantly changing every single fall. New communities need to introduce themselves to this.

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And one of the things that I find with the, talking about the fuller, inclusive histories, is I think you have it in the report, the names of those enslaved people. The name humanizes their experiences, what they have, so you're not just having, okay, great white man founder type of thing, but bringing them in.

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And so I know when I do these tours with my classes, they start to follow people, not the dehumanizing documents. And so if you look at slave receipts over time and you keep on seeing the same person over and over and over again, like, so why is this man like Arthur or William, who

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worked at the university as a hired out enslaved person for 30 years? That's a long relationship and connection, but my students picked that up. They were like, okay, why is Arthur always here? And they put him in a timeline, and they did that within a class setting.

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So there's ways to take those names, humanizing their experiences. But for my, what I see is, those are what we get beyond the narrative and erasure of myth. We expand it and grow, and to use those documents more actively, and instead of saying, "some enslaved people," you say, "Tom." You say the names of those people in

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there and bring that in. And I think that's one of the reasons, I think, to get us away from this question and guilt over what do we do with this or does attachment, we only know Rice, we can't do anything else.

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But if we're gonna tear down those narratives that we often stumbled into because we are embedded in those institutions, we're gonna have to replace it with something. And how do we replace it? How do we tell that, insert that instrument and moving beyond just a document that

00:35:14.330 - 00:35:30.980

satisfies a certain way, and make this a living document to frame classes and the like ? And I think that's something that came away, but one of the questions that came up, because I really, I was invested with the enslaved people's names and the state of the documents that you had.

00:35:30.980 - 00:35:45.050

And I like that, because they were scraps and they were not perfect and ideal. But I kept on asking, did I open it up, one person who ran away like, so where are they on the slave rolls for Rice? Because you have the Civil War years.

00:35:45.050 - 00:36:00.020

I'm thinking about the Confederate slave rolls that they built, what, did they get money for the hiring out of them, and are they documented that way? And more importantly, with someone who does reconstruction and the like, I want to know what happened to them afterwards.

00:36:00.140 - 00:36:19.280

Are they voting, 1867, are they taking on Marsh's last name, or Rice's last name, are they taking those names, and we can trace them forward in time? Because one of the things that happened, and I'm grateful for Georgetown, and I always turn to that as my model for a future, but it's also a burden, because now everyone

00:36:19.280 - 00:36:31.670

wants descendants. I'm like, well, we don't know the names of the people, so how can we then get the descendants of these people? So it raises some questions about what happened after slavery for those men and

00:36:31.670 - 00:36:48.600

women and children you identify, and those are ways that help to build these other stories. And we decenter, right, so we decenter the other ones. But I love that you built connections. So you have those connections here, can we make those threads and go out further?

00:36:49.200 - 00:36:59.550

And that's something that came out of the document that I really enjoyed in this early talk. Thank you so much. And you kind of preempted the question that I, that I was going to ask, was are there

00:36:59.550 - 00:37:17.430

particular parts of the report that you think have the most promise for this kind of more humanized narrative that both you and Dr. Jones were talking about? Because you're right, you know, a lot of times we just have a document that's a scrap

00:37:17.430 - 00:37:38.910

and it has, it has a first name, but it's difficult to to trace that out beyond emancipation or even before emancipation with with other sources. And so you called attention at the beginning of the report to Captain's story, but I'm wondering maybe for for all three of you, whether you have advice for us about

00:37:39.300 - 00:37:59.660

particular stories or sources that you think might hold the most promise for going beyond this, this update. Well, I just wanna start by saying that the report is a tremendous piece of scholarship, and I think it's, it's admirable.

00:37:59.680 - 00:38:25.570

I learned a great deal about slavery and the Civil War in Houston, and in Texas more broadly, from the report, through this lens of William Marsh Rice. And it's, it's so rich. There are so many different threads to pull on, as Hilary was indicating, that you've

00:38:25.570 - 00:38:52.320

just, you've just given anybody who wants to think about this subject a great deal to think about and to think with. So you learn, for instance, that, you correct the record about Marsh's[ own slaveholding, but also go into great detail about the connections between his business practices as

00:38:52.320 - 00:39:16.110

a merchant and the slave economy, that he bought and sold people. But even more deeply, that when he's buying and selling cotton, for instance, he's just one step removed from, from direct human enslavement. And so the whole social structure of slavery shapes, shapes what he does.

00:39:16.290 - 00:39:38.310

And you learn all of that in very vivid detail from the report. And any, any piece of that could could be a teaching opportunity in the classroom. I think it just depends what students, what catches their eye, you know. One of the documents that really stood out to me that I think you might be able to do

00:39:38.310 - 00:40:00.190

more with is the Freedmen's Bureau labor contract for Edgehill in 1867. Because you say in the report that that labor contract includes the full names of the people who lived and worked on that site, but you don't actually tell us what their, what those names were.

00:40:01.310 - 00:40:24.860

We have something similar in the Georgetown Slavery Archive. There are Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts for two of their plantations where the community we call the GU272 lived and worked at the moment of emancipation and just after. And the last names that are included in those labor contracts are really important

00:40:25.670 - 00:40:45.350

pieces of, among other things, genealogical information that can help you track those families over time if you want to. Besides the fact that they're so revealing about the conditions of labor and what it means to be, quote unquote, "free," coming out of the Civil War and emancipation.

00:40:45.680 - 00:41:04.940

So I think if there's one document, there's one document I think you could do a lot more with, I think it's that, it's that labor contract. And just generally, and this also builds off something Hilary was saying, obviously the figure of Rice is at the center of the report and that makes a lot of sense.

00:41:05.360 - 00:41:30.190

But what if you rewrote the report in a way with the subject of it being black Houston? Things would, things would take a little bit of a different shape, and different things might be emphasized over others, but it might take you, it's just a, a way of, of thinking in a, from a different angle, about this history.

00:41:30.760 - 00:41:58.450

But I think I'm really just echoing what Hilary was saying. If I could jump in on Professor Rothman's point, one of the things we're doing in the lab this semester is constructing a history of Johns Hopkins from the pages of the Baltimore Afro, which is our city's African American newspaper.

00:41:58.460 - 00:42:21.530

And here, even in the preliminary look at the Afro and its coverage, if you will, of the university and the hospital, it is clear that there is a very different vantage point to take on the institution, and there are very different takes on the institution when we shift our lens.

00:42:21.530 - 00:42:39.140

And so I think one of the challenges embedded in this work is how much of this is institutional history, which is always sort of centered in and is taking the point of view of the institution. How do we break with that?

00:42:39.740 - 00:43:06.100

And and and we're fortunate to have, still, this long African American chronicle of many things, including Johns Hopkins, to draw upon. Thank you for that. To me, that kind of takes us back to your opening question about what makes this work preliminary, you know, and partly it's preliminary or a work in progress

00:43:06.100 - 00:43:23.110

because you're still sifting through the archives and and leaving open the possibility that sources will come to light that are not there yet. But I think that's another sense in which it's preliminary, is when you start a project like this, your questions are initially going to be framed around the institution's

00:43:23.110 - 00:43:37.990

history. That's our charge, right, and so, where should you start a project on the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice? With respect to Rice University, it makes sense to start with the founder, William Marshall Rice. That's where you would begin.

00:43:37.990 - 00:43:54.490

But I also think you're both raising a great point that that's a sense in which this update is, is preliminary, because it could be rewritten, as you're suggesting, from a different perspective or a different vantage point, and perhaps in the end, it should be flipped in that way.

00:43:54.490 - 00:44:13.000

And so that's another reason why we we release this as an update rather than as a final report. And I thank you as well, Professor Rothman, for the suggestion about that 1867 document. I'd be curious, I know we have at least one student researcher in the audience who would

00:44:13.000 - 00:44:37.520

be very interested to know some specific tips that you might offer about how you work out from a document like that, a Freedmen's Bureau contract, to try to build a larger story. I'll say, well, the first thing is that you can link or connect the names in the contract

00:44:37.520 - 00:44:57.880

to the 1870 census. This is important because the 1870 census is really the first census where you'll find the full names of people who are enslaved before 1865, I think it would be, for Texas.

00:44:57.880 - 00:45:18.570

Before that, in the other kinds of records that that include the names of enslaved people, you're not as likely to find last names, which makes it much more difficult to, to trace people and to link them to later census records. In the Georgetown case, it's quite striking because most of the Jesuit recordkeeping

00:45:19.650 - 00:45:35.340

identifies the people they own only by their first names. There are a few families in which the judges recognize last names. Usually these are people who have, some members of their family are able to get free one way or another.

00:45:35.460 - 00:45:55.950

But by and large, last names are absent from the Jesuit records. For the Georgetown case, the first document that actually indicates the last names of the people the Jesuits owned, was the manifest of one of the vessels that transported them from the D.C.

00:45:55.950 - 00:46:11.700

area to Louisiana. That was like the big break in the case, genealogically speaking. And I have to give a lot of credit to an organization called the Georgetown Memory Project, independent of Georgetown University, founded by an alumnus named

00:46:11.700 - 00:46:28.260

Richard Cellini, who actually did a great deal of the genealogical work to trace the descendants of the Maryland Jesuit enslaved community. He did that in collaboration with members of the descendant community, using some of the material that we had put, put online.

00:46:28.260 - 00:46:46.140

So it really takes a village to do this kind of work. But the first step is to connect the documents that you have with last names, like the labor contracts to the 1870 or 1880 census. And I would add another step further.

00:46:46.590 - 00:47:00.450

The voter registration of 1867, because Texas is occupied, so they can vote and make those constitutions. So you also connect that document to, if it's a, it's actually men, sorry, the women are kind of excluded there.

00:47:00.450 - 00:47:23.370

But then also, too, I'm finding obituaries, and people in their obituaries will say, even published in the white newspapers who owned them before they died, and they will say, "ex-slave of this." But some of these become a point of reference to community members, and then the information wanted ads of families trying to reconnect, and giving

00:47:23.370 - 00:47:44.010

those little biographies, but once you have a last name, you can have an opening before and make those ties back and forth. But yeah, that labor contract from there with last names you can really much expand. But the 1870, 1867 voter registrations, but also the Freedmen's Bureau courts records,

00:47:44.010 - 00:48:00.120

'cause they might have sued or be sued, especially over labor disputes. And then education, you might get some of the children and their parents writing into the Freedman's Bureau, superintendent of education in Texas's schools are pretty good with those records.

00:48:00.660 - 00:48:14.220

I will say go to microfilm first and just search Houston. Don't do online. I love the Ancestry version, but it's harder to find people if you don't know last name. But if you know what the district is, starting there and then add those names and

00:48:14.220 - 00:48:43.990

going back. I wonder if I can circle back to an issue that Dr. Jones raised at the, at the start that I found difficult and inspiring, speaking about how we stumble into these projects, and in her remarks about stumbling into these

00:48:43.990 - 00:49:14.080

projects I think was the potential to consider, what would a university or a department or an approach to scholarship look like that, that had, at its core, some of the missions of these smaller projects that, that, that we've, we've talked about? What, what would a "recharter," right, if we were, if we were rechartering our

00:49:14.080 - 00:49:45.580

institutions and taking to heart some of the lessons that we've learned from these projects, what, what might be some of the things that we would want for our institutions, or could imagine for them? I would stress, because I stumbled into my project, you're gonna have some naysayers.

00:49:45.580 - 00:50:04.730

Like, every time I have to deal with someone from engineering. So I would say you want an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary that people from the school, so, one of the things I have, projects I've done, is people in music, because we've got a program led by a former enslaved person and they had all these slave

00:50:04.730 - 00:50:21.560

spirituals, and being able to get them invested into the project, and also to rebuild the trust of the, of the descendant communities, including the communities surrounding the school, who have no reason to trust us on this project because of our long history with race, slavery and segregation.

00:50:22.520 - 00:50:38.960

So it's a rebuild the trust and build, bringing people in, but more importantly, paying the people who are doing this work and not continue a level of extraction through volunteer labor. But really at the core, like, this is not an extractive, exploitive model, this is an

00:50:38.960 - 00:50:58.390

inclusive, building, uplifting one. If we're gonna rebuild, tear down, rebuild, we're gonna do it the right way. Thank you. You know, one of the ways I think that we wound up where we found ourselves in 2020 at

00:50:58.390 - 00:51:26.410

Johns Hopkins is attributable to the way in which universities, like all sorts of institutions, convene at landmark moments: centennials, bicentennials, and the like. Or they convene every year at Founder's Day and the like to tell a story.

00:51:26.410 - 00:51:55.850

And we, for all we pride ourselves on being an excellent history department, Dr. McDaniel being Exhibit A in that regard, there was a, almost a total disconnect between the history department, historians on campus, and the folks who were writing the histories of the institution.

00:51:56.960 - 00:52:18.380

There was no relationship between the two. And I really am still not settled on what I think that relationship should be. Dr. McDaniel, you used the phrase, "That's our charge." And I should say, I don't have a charge from the university in my work.

00:52:18.380 - 00:52:45.350

And that's very deliberate, because for me, academic freedom was the principle that I would not compromise on, and that meant that I work for myself, with my students. We set the agenda and we, we don't answer, right, in, in that kind of institutional sense, right, to, to other facets of the university, not because we don't talk to

00:52:45.350 - 00:53:05.570

them, but because we need to stay autonomous, and critically so. So how do researchers sort of maintain that kind of integrity and that kind of distance from other kinds of institutional imperatives, on the one hand, but get close enough that we actually can shape the kinds of stories that, at Johns Hopkins we're gonna

00:53:05.660 - 00:53:27.230

mark 150 years in 2026. I want to be close enough, right, to inform the kinds of histories that get promoted, but not so close that I am beholden to our wonderful folks in development and institutional advancement and alumni relations.

00:53:28.730 - 00:53:49.490

Because the integrity of the work for me is in part rooted in a kind of autonomy that a researcher enjoys by virtue of academic freedom. I think that's a tension that probably we're all wrestling with differently, but it's a tension that's, I think, present in a lot of, a lot of this work.

00:53:51.320 - 00:54:04.250

So I don't think I've really answered your question, Dr. Byrd. I think I've just at least added a layer to it, sorry. I wrote down an answer. Well, speaking of...

00:54:04.250 - 00:54:16.670

Thank you. Questions and answers. I know we're nearing the end of our hour, and I wanna make sure, if anyone in our audience has questions they'd like to pose, that you can use the chat or the Q&A box at

00:54:16.670 - 00:54:41.960

the bottom. We've already had in the chat a couple of comments, one about the importance of seeing our project through the lens of the Houston community, so we thank you for that insight, and also a question going back to the question about origin stories and myths. And, you know, is our goal to create a myth for people, or is it

00:54:41.960 - 00:54:57.410

rather to help students learn what's fascinating about the actual people, the actual stories involved? So maybe we could return to that, that question as well at the end. I also see a question about research and advocacy.

00:54:58.850 - 00:55:21.680

And I think this gets to your, your point, Dr. Jones, a little bit about how you and your institutional locations balance studying and scholarship and rigorous research that's independent and autonomous, and making recommendations or even farther pressuring the institution to follow through on findings

00:55:21.680 - 00:55:37.680

and research that's done. So any responses to those questions from our audience? Well, I'll come back on the, on the question of myth, if I could, 'cause I'm seeing the question, and it invokes Dr.

00:55:37.860 - 00:56:02.510

Nell Painter's magnificent biography of Sojourner Truth that was developed precisely to kind of separate the woman from, from the mythologies that had come and continue to surround her life. And it's a book I go back to again and again and I admire deeply.

00:56:03.590 - 00:56:34.570

But I think that for me, in that book, Dr. Painter remains very respectful of Truth's own need to construct myth. So I think Painter is aimed at us, right, and, in our mythologizing of Truth. But I don't think she's, in the same way, a critic of Truth herself, who is creating a

00:56:34.570 - 00:56:51.640

persona, promoting a persona in the furtherance of many things, right, including her livelihood. So I guess I wanna say that I don't think it's sort of as simple, I don't mean the questioner was suggesting it was, but it's never as simple as sort of history versus

00:56:51.640 - 00:57:20.900

myth, that myths function on many levels, and I think that there is a utility, right, in, in those kinds of stories, even as they don't always comport with the way we would narrate them in a 300-page book. I wanna just reiterate something Dr.

00:57:20.900 - 00:57:38.570

Jones said, which is that academic freedom is a foundation of all of the work that we do around these campus histories. We can't, we can't tell truthful stories unless we, we know we're, we're free to tell them as we, as we, as, as the evidence takes us.

00:57:39.050 - 00:58:00.590

I think that's really important, and a principle that has to be articulated and defended as much as possible. In terms of advocacy, principally, I'm an advocate for history. I want people to think through the, for themselves, the ethical relationship between

00:58:00.590 - 00:58:20.250

the present--the past, the present, and the future. But I want them to do so on the basis of the most accurate, informed, and thoughtful understanding of the history that we can possibly have. And that's, I think, what, what my role as a historian is, to provide.

00:58:20.250 - 00:58:35.640

To provide the information that people need to make the judgments that they have to make. So I'm an advocate for history, and as an advocate for history, it's not my business to construct myths for people. They can do that for themselves.

00:58:36.740 - 00:58:48.770

It's not my job. I'm gonna stick to history. And I would advocate, also why I still have the Hallowed Grounds project separate from the institutional history.

00:58:48.770 - 00:59:08.060

Because what our communications department wants to do with that history, that is not me. They're gonna construct their own narratives around the research, so that academic freedom, the ability to write and to advocate for more history, not less, not mythmaking, because our institutions survive on PR.

00:59:08.060 - 00:59:21.620

And so how do you construct that in there, and for me, I tell the history of the documents there, I just make those lives. So instead of "an enslaved man," I'm like, no, it's William. And William at this time worked on this building, at this space.

00:59:22.040 - 00:59:36.830

So that's a type of history there, but the institution and the enslaved person, but also active voice, not the passive voice that we have on markers. So advocacy for those names and those other histories, because some of our myths were intentional. Those erasures were intentional.

00:59:37.700 - 00:59:52.910

It wasn't haphazard that we got to this place. So how do we talk about that these stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and our institutions are also there and being what we do best as historians? I'm an advocate as a historian in the classroom.

00:59:59.410 - 01:00:18.610

To me, that seems like a wonderful note to end on. We're so grateful to all of you for joining us for this very rich conversation. We hope that we'll have many opportunities to continue to follow the work that you're doing and learn from the research and advocacy at your institutions and invite you

01:00:18.610 - 01:00:35.590

back any time to doc talks. Thank you to the audience for being here and spending your lunch with us. Again, we do this every Friday at noon Central, usually with not such an august group, but if you'd like to return next Friday to join Dr.

01:00:35.590 - 01:00:54.250

Byrd and myself, we'll be looking at another set of documents from Rice's past, from the history of Houston, perhaps I should also say, and thinking about these entangled issues of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone, and thanks again for joining us.

01:00:56.870 - 01:01:03.020

Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.