A team of scholars is pushing back on a widely-reported claim that Johns Hopkins – the namesake for the 150-year-old private research university in Baltimore – owned slaves.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the scholars offer an alternative explanation for why census workers found an enslaved 15-year-old boy named George in Hopkins’ Baltimore home in 1840 and four enslaved men at his mansion – known as Clifton – in 1850. They say George belonged to Hopkins’ brother, Samuel Hopkins Jr., who was “visiting” at the time and whom the article describes as “the only one of 11 siblings with a documented history of slave ownership.” They also say tax records show Samuel Hopkins paid taxes on an enslaved person, but not Johns Hopkins. 
A portrait of Johns Hopkins Source: hopkinsmedicine.org
This is not the first time that the scholars, Sydney van Morgan, director of the university’s international studies program, and Ed Papenfuse, a historian and former Maryland state archives director, have pushed back against claims that Hopkins was a slaveholder. Only now they do so in a peer-reviewed article, titled “A Maryland Mystery: Johns Hopkins, Slavery and the Census of 1850,” which appears in Maryland Historical Magazine, according to the Baltimore Sun. A current edition of the magazine is not online.
The pushback against Hopkins’ alleged slaveholding comes at a time when several institutions of higher learning, such as the University of Maryland, Georgetown University and Brown University, to name a few, have taken steps to document, acknowledge and make amends for their ties to slavery.
Their pushback also comes at a time when the United States – about a month shy of its 250th anniversary – remains locked in a largely partisan-driven culture war over how to reckon with the nation’s slaveholding past.
For instance, in a 2025 executive order – titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” – President Donald Trump lamented a “widespread effort” by a “revisionist movement” to cast the United States as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed” instead of focusing on the principles on which the nation was founded.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of “whitewashing history” by taking steps such as removing an exhibit on slavery at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park and seeking to censor how institutions such as the Smithsonian present problematic subjects such as slavery.
