BALTIMORE — Alarm bells went off and headlines blared around the world a year ago when Johns Hopkins University officials made a stunning announcement: scholars had learned the school’s beloved namesake, Johns Hopkins, was a slave owner.
Other investigators challenged the interpretation, pointing to what they call a lack of evidence. But even amid dispute, the findings of last December have inspired a broad reappraisal of the vaunted founder’s legacy.
Now a roster of historians is set to wade into the debate around Hopkins, slavery and, in a larger sense, how enslavement and racism have shaped institutions in Baltimore and beyond. Nearly a dozen scholars, a number of students and members of the public are to gather Friday for “Conversations on Slavery, Racism and the University,” a virtual symposium.
Organizers say the panelists aren’t expected to focus narrowly on the still-controversial question of whether Hopkins owned enslaved people, as university President Ron Daniels, Hopkins historian Martha S. Jones and others proclaimed last year. But the day is expected to feature full-blown discussions on important, related matters.
How, for example, do scholars unearth fresh information when old sources have proven incomplete? How do slavery and racism manifest themselves at universities? And to what extent have programs at Hopkins expanded awareness of these matters since last year?
“The overall goal is to bring our community together for dialogue about what it means to be engaged in scholarly research on slavery, racism and the university,” says Allison Seyler, an archivist and public historian with Hopkins Retrospective, a universitywide research project that helped plan the symposium. “Historians will discuss the complexities of archival research. They’ll discuss methodologies, challenges, and how one can trace the legacies of slavery through the historical record. And there will be moments to discuss the future of work in this area.”
All but one speaker are affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Jones, a professor and author who specializes in African American history, and her students will discuss research they’ve been conducting within the Hard Histories program. Jones started it last year to explore neglected areas of university and Maryland history, particularly slavery and racism.
Jessica Marie Johnson, a professor and historian of Atlantic slavery, and Jeremy Greene, director of the university’s History of Medicine department, will also be panelists.
So will Sydney Van Morgan, director of the school’s international studies program and the co-author of a paper that disputes whether Hopkins enslaved people, and Adam Rothman, a Georgetown University history professor who led that university’s investigation into its slaveholding past.
The scholars will discuss their latest research, exchange ideas, and invite viewers to submit written questions as part of the livestreamed event, Seyler said. The conference was planned by Hopkins Retrospective and the Krieger School of the Arts and Sciences and is free and open to anyone who registers.
It was Johns Hopkins, who was born on his family’s tobacco farm in Anne Arundel County in 1795, who founded the research institution that bears his name. The business tycoon did it by bequeathing $7 million to establish a university, a hospital open to patients of all races, and an orphanage for Black children.
That origin story was among the factors that previously inspired historians to portray Hopkins as a fearless progressive on matters of race. “Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette,” a sympathetic 1929 biography by his grandniece enhanced the legend, emphasizing that his father and grandfather freed their enslaved workers and portraying Hopkins as a staunch abolitionist.
Early in 2020, though, local researchers examined census records that showed Hopkins’ household in Baltimore included at least five enslaved men, one in 1840 and four in 1850. A Jones-led team demonstrated that scholars had never scrutinized the family’s account and that it contained unsupported assertions. The census listed Hopkins as the head of his household, which led the team to conclude that he owned the enslaved men, a finding the university’s leaders embraced and promoted.
Six months after that headline-making news, Van Morgan and retired State Archivist Ed Papenfuse published a study arguing that there are other possible explanations for the presence of enslaved people in a white man’s home.
That group recently added a finding to its study, available at the Hopkins Family History Blog at thehouseofhopkins.com, that Hopkins Brothers Wholesalers, the company Hopkins and his brothers ran, once briefly “boarded” an enslaved woman in the Baltimore City jail while a dispute between the firm and another that owned her was adjudicated. Van Morgan says it adds to a more nuanced understanding of the university’s founder and his times, one that falls short of showing he owned slaves.
Jones says she has seen nothing to undermine the findings her group made last year.
“I haven’t seen any evidence that counters the conclusion that Mr. Hopkins held enslaved people in his household in 1840 and 1850,” she says.
Whatever the truth on that matter, Daniels announced in an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun in June that the university would continue to pursue a fuller account of Hopkins’ life than the one that was accepted for so long. He promised the university would present this fall a symposium, which is Friday’s event.
The conference is scheduled to consist of three panel discussions. The first is to focus on the methodologies the panelists use in their work, the second to explore the “archival absences and biases” researchers must contend with. The third is to spotlight Jones and Hard Histories students discussing their work so far and where future inquiry might lead.
Hard Histories, a research initiative situated within the Stavros Nicholas Foundation Agora Institute, has hosted a range of activities aimed at deepening awareness of Hopkins, his life and times and their meaning over the past year.
They’ve included faculty members helping students explore everything from the relationships between Hopkins family members and local Quaker congregations to the role Black Americans may have played in the households of the Keyser and Wyman families, who donated much of the land that now constitutes the Homewood campus.
The Hard Histories program has also joined and taken part in events by Universities Studying Slavery, a collaboration of 71 colleges and universities investigating best practices in the field, and hosts “Hard Histories Conversations,” a series of virtual talks with historians on slavery and racism in Maryland.
University spokesman Andy Green said the panelists will likely address “the nature of Mr. Hopkins’ relationship to the individuals listed in the census slave schedules,” but the specific question of whether he was their owner “is just one part of the broad inquiry we have undertaken into the history of the university and hospital, and the symposium reflects that.
“As we said in December,” he added, “we will continue the research into Mr. Hopkins wherever it may lead, and with rigor and an unwavering commitment to academic inquiry, open dialogue and equity.”
