UNC-Chapel Hill Opens Up Records About Ties to Slavery
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.
In the early decades of the nation’s oldest public university, students at the University of North Carolina had servants who kindled fires in their rooms and cut wood to fuel their stoves.
And at the school that’s so proud of its history, archivists have uncovered and collected — and are now displaying publicly — evidence of what’s been assumed for generations: that those servants were enslaved Blacks.
“I think it’s important for us to know our own history and to be honest about it,” says UNC chancellor Dr. James Moeser. “This university was built by enslaved and free Blacks. We need to be candid about that, acknowledge their contributions.”
The University of North Carolina, chartered in 1789, is one of a growing number of institutions of higher learning, banks and financial firms that have taken steps to research and recognize their historic ties to the slave trade.
North Carolina archivists, searching through records as part of a project on the university’s first 100 years, uncovered records confirming that slaves helped construct several buildings on campus. Other records showed that both faculty and university board members owned enslaved Blacks.
The research is now on display as part of an on-campus exhibit — “Slavery and the Making of the University: Celebrating Our Unsung Heroes, Bond and Free” — that includes photographs, letters, bills of sale for slaves and other documents. In one letter, the wife of the school’s first law professor wrote her husband that university President David Lowry Swain wanted to hire “Harry” for work. She pledged that she would “hire Harry out whenever I can.”
