He was known as Lemon. For years he toiled in the cotton fields owned by the College of William and Mary. The school used proceeds from the fields as financial aid for young White male students from poor homes.
When the Virginia college sold the cotton fields in the early 1800s, Lemon was one of the few out of the 17 slaves who worked the fields redeployed to the college campus in Williamsburg. The others were sold. Lemon presumably worked there until his death in 1817.
Little else is known about him. Not his last name nor his survivors.
But a few years ago when William and Mary, the nation’s second-oldest university and, for centuries, the leading intellectual champion of Southern causes, including slavery and segregation, decided to atone for its past deeds, college officials picked Lemon as a symbol.
In 2009, seeking to address the wrongs against African-Americans, the college’s board of visitors passed a resolution acknowledging that William and Mary “owned and exploited slave labor from its founding to the Civil War and that it had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow Era.”
The board’s action followed resolutions by the student and faculty groups that asked the college to investigate its history in race relations and its role in slave labor.
And the Lemon Project was born.
