Four years ago, at George Mason University, Black students in the honors college started asking questions: Who were the slaves of George Mason IV, the 18th-century Virginia lawmaker whose name marks the school, and what were their lives like?
Those discussions turned into a research program, which culminated in the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial Project, a plan to add monuments commemorating George Mason IV’s slaves in the center of campus next year.
“The lives and experiences of these individuals have just been, in some ways, erased or forgotten about,” said Julian Williams, George Mason University’s vice president of inclusion and diversity. “These were people. They were human beings, and they just happened to have been born at a time when they were enslaved. But they still have stories, and what we wanted to do is to help bring their stories to the forefront.”
In 2016, when students started to interrogate the legacy of the school’s namesake, history professors Dr. Benedict Carton and Dr. Wendi Manuel-Scott were eager to foster students’ curiosity. They applied for an undergraduate research grant through the university to run a 2017 summer program aimed at uncovering the lost histories of the more than 100 slaves that George Mason IV owned.
Five undergraduates from different majors came together to tackle the project. They read 15 books over the course of two weeks to get a grasp on the history of slavery in Virginia before each student took on their own research focus.
Then, “we let them loose,” said Manuel-Scott. After trips to courthouses and archives, the group rejoined to present their findings and created a website to share them with the public.
“The types of questions that students were bringing to the archives created new discoveries because they were centering questions that centered Black lives and Black experiences,” she said.
