The VCU team performs DNA analysis on the bones and reburies them, hoping to restore their dignity.
Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school was “closely linked” to slavery in the mid-1800s, according to a new report commissioned by the university.
Each year, the college owned or rented slaves to cook the food, clean the classrooms, wash the clothes, light the furnaces, and maintain the buildings.
A report released last month called the use of slave labor a “sad and troubling chapter” in the history of VCU’s medical school. This, in response to state legislation passed in 2021, calls on VCU and her four other colleges to explore the extent of slavery’s impact on schools and commemorate the lives of enslaved people. and to formulate countermeasures. The law directs the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, and the Virginia Military Institute to do the same.
Now that the report is complete, VCU will form a committee to determine next steps, school principal Michael Rao told a visitors’ committee last month. This is the latest step taken in consideration of The school removed the names and symbols of people associated with the Commonwealth and re-examined the human remains strewn in the wells under the campus buildings.
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“Universities must recognize and carefully consider the role that slavery has played, has played, and continues to play in humans,” Rao said.
A worker removes a plaque from the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel at West Hospital.
Thomas Kojcsich, VCU
In 2021, the governor at the time. Ralph Northam signed a law requiring his five public colleges built before the Civil War to investigate their ties to slavery. The law directs them to implement scholarships or economic programs for students associated with slavery in hopes of lifting low-income students out of poverty and correcting the wrongs that have happened on college campuses. said a member of parliament at the time.
VCU responded by commissioning a 74-page report written by Professor Peter J. Wash of New York University for $30,000.
Some of his findings, VCU already knew. A medical college founded in 1838, he resided for nearly 30 years in what became the federal capital, a city where slavery permeated many aspects of government, business and life. And those slave laborers, known as “revivalists,” dug up the dead black bodies and took them to the university for medical autopsies.
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But Wash’s work added detail and gathered historical information in a way never before seen. called.
4 to 8 slave laborers per year
The medical school opened in 1838 as a division of Hampden Sydney College. In 1854, it became a public institution, the Virginia Medical College.
According to tax and census data, from 1848 to 1864, it regularly owned or rented four to eight slave laborers each year.
A young woman holds the program of the ceremony as she takes pictures of four wall panels dedicated as the East Marshall Street Well Project during the ceremony at VCU Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, Friday, September 24, 2021. The panel tells the story of a 19th-century human remains found in an abandoned well on the MCV campus in 1944 during the construction of the Medical Science Building. The remains, believed to be of African descent, are now held at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
Bob Brown/The Times Dispatch
Since most of the local labor force at the time was slaves, Wash said it was likely that slave laborers built the Egyptian building in 1844. When the MCV built a new infirmary in 1860, Contracted with RB Woodward for slavery. It is unknown if he used slave labor in construction, but the subcontractors he hired also enslaved people.
The university had to hire an “anatomical demonstrator” and pay half the cost of the slave servants, with the other half paid by the school.
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And the dean of the school and the doctor became wealthy thanks to slave labor. Of her 23 doctors at the school, 15 had owned at least his 101 African Americans during his MCV career.
It is unknown whether the students brought slave “servants” to school. However, most students lived in boarding houses and depended on slaves for food, laundry, and maintenance of housing. Most of the students came from slave-owning families.
Employees may have used their own slaves for work at the university. Caleb R. Newman, the caretaker, oversaw the purchase of supplies, cooking, laundry, maintenance, and the procurement of servants. He owned five.
“MCV profited from slavery in tangible and indirect ways,” Wash wrote. Culture “infiltrated both the institution and the individuals associated with it”.
The university advertised itself to “black owners and employers” and Northern students were friendly to slavery, so they sought MCV.
Caucasian patients received better care. They were able to choose a faculty member to treat them and purchase a private room. Black patients were not afforded such luxuries.
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Rumors circulated that the clinic had killed a black patient and used it for an autopsy. Even The Times-Dispatch’s predecessor, Richmond Dispatch, took note of the argument that sick blacks brought to the infirmary did not appear to come back to life.
To curb the speculation, MCV Dean Levin Smith-Jones ran an ad saying that dying patients in the clinic, whether white or black, would not be sent to the autopsy room. bottom. Other records support his claims.
And all this happened while MCV was preaching a message of philanthropy.
“MCV never considered the contradiction between its often lofty, humanitarian rhetoric and its pre-Civil War commitment to slavery,” Wash wrote.
By the end of the Civil War in 1865, Richmond was devastated, the infirmary closed, and slavery no longer played a role in the MCV.
Wosh’s report does not answer all questions, he said. It’s unclear how MCV’s behavior compares to other medical schools in the South. And the identities of the slaves remain mostly unknown. The 1860 tax record has no name, only age, race and sex. A 45-year-old mixed-race woman, a 25-year-old black woman, and a 40-year-old black man.
Responses from other universities
Five universities directed to study their relationship to slavery have completed varying levels of work.
Longwood University has launched a project called the Bicentennial Initiative to better understand the role of African Americans on campus, a school spokesperson said. Longwood She was founded in 1839 as Farmville Women’s Seminary.
When Union troops arrived in April 1865, they burned school records, a spokesperson said. As a result, Longwood has little historical information on the use of slave labor. There is very little evidence.
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William & Mary began researching the links to slavery in 2009 when they commissioned the Lemon Project, named after the university-owning man. Last year, William & Mary unveiled a 45-foot-long memorial dedicated to the slaves.
The school determined that it owned or employed more than 100 African Americans from its founding in 1693 to the end of the Civil War. Many are known only by name.
William & Mary has launched two foundations that provide need-based scholarships for students with documented historical links to slavery. They are called the Lemon Scholarship and the Ann R. Willis Scholarship, named after the wife of a longtime faculty member.
UVa has identified more than 4,000 slave laborers on its campus. A school spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the university’s response.
VMI had close ties to the Confederate Army, and its cadets fought at the Battle of Newmarket, where Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall Jackson” was a professor. A VMI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The VCU report is just the beginning of an effort to come to terms with the university’s past.
In 2020, we began removing names, plaques and busts along campus honoring members of the Coalition. Last year, we began a careful study of human remains found in a well on Marshall Street. It hopes to determine some biographical information about people, perhaps even by their place of birth.
The next step from VCU’s board is expected by the end of the school year.
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Jones grew up in Richmond and played football for UVa in 2018, but did not appear in any matches.
At VCU, “much more people smoke weed than drink,” said one student.
“It’s such a blessing to be 24 years old and still alive, doing what I love and doing what I dreamed of.”
