The founder of Johns Hopkins owned enslaved people. Our university must face a reckoning.

December 9, 2020

Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, published an op-ed today in the Washington Post, regarding her recent research that has found that university founder Johns Hopkins had owned enslaved people.  “To some, it is an all-too-familiar story and perhaps not a significant one in a year of racial reckoning: Another elite college discovers ties to slavery,” she writes. “But for many of us who work at Johns Hopkins University, the shattered myth of our university founder, long admired as a Quaker and abolitionist, rattles our school community as well.”

She continues:

As leader of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project and part of a team that uncovered this story over the past six months, I remained nonplussed during most of this work. As a historian I have long investigated how enslavement was a tragically ordinary facet of early American life. Centuries ago, wealthy men such as Hopkins amassed their fortunes through endeavors only two or three degrees removed from the exploitation of people treated as property. Before the Civil War, Americans held more wealth in enslaved people than they did in railroads, banks and factories combined.

It turns out that Hopkins engaged in all of these endeavors. He enslaved people who likely tended to his comforts at home, without compensation or recourse. That was all too common in Maryland before the Civil War. It was also all too callous for a man whose vast riches financed the university for which I work today.

Read more at the Washington Post.