Nothing Has Troubled Our Work at Hard Histories More Than Family

What descendants know — when the archive of slavery and the university causes our tears to burn, our palms to sweat, our hearts to fill, our chests to tighten — what we know is that we are living with a sense of time that permits the past of our foremothers’ subjection to be a facet of our present liberation. Wherever we are going, we intend to take them with us. — Martha S. Jones

This fall at Hard Histories, we’ve had time to tackle some of the most challenging questions about our work. As those who follow us know, what was initially envisioned as a scholarly inquiry into an institutional past very quickly became complicated by questions about families, their histories, and their stakes in our work.

First, we heard concerns about descendants of those enslaved by Mr. Hopkins. When, for example, we explained that our research was accountable to them, it was an idea searching for substance. We did not know the identities of those enslaved by Mr. Hopkins. And still today, we have not discovered who their descendants among us today might be. Critics expressed doubt about our ability to responsibly guide a reckoning with the past when we had no capacity to involve families, those who live with the legacies of slavery’s subjections.

We also heard from members of the Hopkins family — people descended from a clan with slaveholding roots that date back to the early years of the 18th century. Among them were independent researchers who hoped to discover a palatable and even laudable explanation for why Mr. Hopkins held enslaved people. These theories have not held up. Still, these efforts revealed how the character of a man long gone can undergird the identity and esteem of an institution and even some people among us today.

At Hard Histories we spoke neither for the descendants of enslaved people nor the descendants of Mr. Hopkins. At least not until Harvard Law School invited Hard Histories director, Professor Martha Jones, to deliver its inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture in a talk titled “What’s So Hard About Hard Histories?”There, Professor Jones discovers her own stakes in the research into slavery and universities.1

That story took her from family places like Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, to the archives of Harvard University and Johns Hopkins. Jones concludes that the test of our work on slavery and universities, sometimes a difficult measure, is whether through our research the descendants of people enslaved by the university and its affiliates manage to get more free.

You can read about Professor Jones’s talk here in Harvard Law Today, or watch the talk (and the discussion that followed) here on YouTube.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/zKZKejSYAX4?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0