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Higher Education

INDEBTED

At the University of Pennsylvania, a “comforting story” about slavery and an ongoing search for the truth.

The more VanJessica Gladney learned about the preacher memorialized on her college campus, the more infuriated she became.

Gladney, who is Black, had occasionally passed the imposing statue of George Whitefield on her way to class. Whitefield’s followers owned the building in Old City that became the first campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Whitefield himself lived in Georgia, where he devoted himself to re-legalizing slavery in the colony.

“It is impossible for the inhabitants to subsist without the use of slaves,” Whitefield wrote in 1747. In 1751 he won his crusade, and by 1790, 29,000 enslaved people labored in Georgia.

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His tenuous connection to the University of Pennsylvania might have faded away entirely. But a century later in 1899, eyeing their Ivy League rivals, Penn’s trustees relied on Whitefield to claim that the university was in fact as old as its oldest part.

By adopting 1740 as its founding date, Penn could leapfrog Princeton and claim to be the “first university” (and fourth college) in the United States. In 1919, the university cemented Whitefield’s place in its mythology, unveiling a bronze statue of him in front of the freshman dorms.

The first campus of the University of Pennsylvania is depicted in this 1882 watercolor, before the trustees decided that the school’s founding date was in fact 1740.Library Company of Philadelphia

Gladney, a senior in 2018, was troubled by what the Whitefield connection revealed about her college. She knew that in the recent past, Penn had vigilantly denied any ties to slavery, even as colleges across the country unearthed their own shameful histories. But now it seemed to her that the statue of Whitefield typified what her university cared most about — and what it was willing to overlook.

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University leaders had chosen to chase prestige by binding the school to a vigorous advocate of slavery, while later using the university's Quaker roots to shield it from accountability.

The University of Pennsylvania cemented George Whitefield’s place in its mythology in 1919 by unveiling a bronze statue of him, depicted here in a 1925 photo. Philadelphia PA: Temple University Libraries

At the suggestion of her professor Kathleen Brown, a historian at Penn, Gladney and a few other students began excavating the university’s past, calling themselves the Penn & Slavery Project. Over time, they discovered a web of university entanglements with slave traders and slave owners that fundamentally disproved the story Penn told about itself.

It remains to be seen whether Penn will tell a new story. The university acknowledged the students’ work in 2018 and funded related projects and conferences. But Penn still has not taken the steps many of its peers across the country have, such as creating permanent monuments on campus, building a center for research about slavery, setting aside money for restitution, or even simply joining a large formal group called Universities Studying Slavery.

At a moment of profound conflict across the United States about curricula and the institutions at which they're taught, the implications of Gladney and her peers’ research go far beyond Penn and far beyond Philadelphia.

“We’re caught in a big battle,” says Tukufu Zuberi, a professor of race relations at Penn. Such history — whether it’s taught at all, and how, and what it might mean — is far from settled. Instead, Zuberi says, “It stands to divide this country fundamentally.”

‘Not known to have profited’

As a Northern school in a historically Quaker state, the University of Pennsylvania long considered itself on the “right side” when it came to slavery. Mark Frazier Lloyd, university archivist emeritus, said as much to the Penn student newspaper in 2006.

"Our 18th century trustees are not known to have profited from the slave trade," Lloyd said, adding that Pennsylvania differed from nearby colonies because of its Quaker traditions. "This is an important issue that fortunately Penn is on the right side of.”

At the time Lloyd made his comments, Brown University had just released a radical report documenting how the school benefited from slavery. In one harrowing example, the school’s founding family, the Browns, sent a slave ship called the Sally to West Africa, where the captain seized 196 people.

A More Perfect Union is a special project from The Inquirer examining the roots of systemic racism through institutions founded in Philadelphia. Read the series →

“By the time the Sally set sail for the West Indies, nineteen Africans had already died, including several children and one woman who ‘hanged her Self between Decks,’” the report said. In total, at least 109 of the 196 people captured in West Africa did not make it off the Sally alive.

Brown’s fellow universities greeted the account “with silence,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

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But in the years that followed, scholars and activists pushed their universities to commence painful reckonings of their own. Students and faculty at the University of Virginia documented how the school’s founders rented hundreds of enslaved people to haul timber, fire bricks, and set stones for the first campus buildings. Georgetown researchers chronicled a massive sale of 272 people facilitated by the school’s Jesuit leaders, during which children were wrenched from their parents and sold on their own.

Still, Penn claimed innocence.

“Penn has explored this issue several times over the past few decades and found no direct university involvement with slavery or the slave trade,” university spokesperson Ron Ozio told the Philadelphia Tribune in 2016, soon after Georgetown released its findings.

The phrase “direct university involvement” appeared to be central to Penn’s claim: that because the university itself did not own or trade people, it was more enlightened than its peer institutions.

“They were working with a different definition of what ‘counted,’” said Kathleen Brown, the Penn historian, in an interview. “And it was also kind of a comforting story for an institution and a community to tell about itself.”

A cascade of revelations

VanJessica Gladney initially found the university’s disavowals reassuring. After class one day in 2017 she mentioned to Professor Brown that she was glad Penn had nothing to account for, unlike Georgetown.

But Brown was skeptical. She told Gladney that she was putting together a group of students to interrogate that claim. Gladney joined four other undergraduate students and began digging.

And then the cascade of revelations began.

At first, the students focused solely on ownership; Lloyd, the former archivist, pointed them toward the tax records of the trustees, where enslaved people were tallied. At least 75 of the early trustees, including the first provost of the university, owned people.

VanJessica Gladney is pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Here she poses for a portrait where the statue of George Whitefield once stood.TYGER WILLIAMS / Staff Photographer

The students found handwritten notes about an enslaved man named Caesar who labored at Penn’s early campus, ringing the school bell and building fires for students. For his forced work, the university reimbursed his enslaver, a professor named Ebenezer Kinnersley, in 1757.

Then, in the fall of 1771, desperate for an infusion of cash, the founders of the university organized a fund-raising trip to South Carolina. They sent provost William Smith, the modern equivalent of the university’s president, to drum up donations, according to minutes reviewed by Caitlin Doolittle, another student researcher.

Smith called on nearly 100 of the wealthiest people in Charleston, collecting about $200,000 in today’s dollars for the new school in Philadelphia.

The largest donor during the trip was a man named Gabriel Manigault, a slave trader who owned 300 people and who had participated in transactions that were so large they likely included entire ships of enslaved Africans, Doolittle found. Having seen the success of fund-raising among slaveholders, Penn trustees planned another trip in 1772 — this time to Jamaica.

“This exists in a way that, truthfully, was not that challenging to find,” Doolittle says. “And the university had still denied it.”

The students found evidence that, far from being an outlier, Penn contributed to racist scholarship just as much as, and in some cases more than, scores of other schools. Early students at Penn’s medical school dissected some cadavers that were stolen from Black burial grounds and were taught that Black people were naturally inferior because of features like the size of their skulls. The students helped show that Penn Medical School was a primary champion of racist science in the early 19th century.

The students found handwritten notes about an enslaved man named Caesar who labored on Penn’s early campus.

“The institution of slavery is a profoundly shameful and deeply tragic part of American history,” Ozio, the Penn spokesperson, said in a statement for this story. “Previously, Penn had known and acknowledged that at least two trustees, including our founder Benjamin Franklin, who became an abolitionist later in life, had owned slaves. The work of our students helped illuminate additional individuals with connections to Penn who directly benefited from slavery.”

Gladney often heard a variation of “Well, at least it’s no Georgetown” in private conversations and presentations. It was an echo of what she had once felt: a desire to keep Penn morally untainted, even if that required looking away. She no longer found that soothing.

“You get to a point where, deep down, you're trying to find pros and cons in the institution of slavery,” says Gladney, who graduated from Penn in 2018 and is now pursuing a history Ph.D. there. She saw that it wasn’t a competition — and there weren’t any winners.

The widening web of connections

Breanna Moore began piecing together her own lineage just before graduating from Penn in 2015.

At home in Sumter, S.C., Moore found two of her relatives' names, Binah and Adam, scrawled on a 150-year-old will. Both had been enslaved by Dr. William Wallace Anderson, “a physician of great culture and ability,” as one South Carolina newspaper put it in 1927.

Breanna Moore discovered this 1864 inventory of Dr. William Wallace Anderson’s estate. At the top are Moore’s relatives: Binah, aged 62 and valued at $100, and Adam, aged 22, and valued at $1,500.
In this 1850 federal census, Breanna Moore’s relatives were identified by their enslaver, Dr. William Wallace Anderson, and whether they were “deaf & dumb, blind, insane or idiotic” or “Fugitive from the State.”

Moore discovered that Anderson had graduated from Penn, just like her. So had his two brothers, his cousin, and his son, also named Dr. William Wallace Anderson, who eventually signed a sharecropping contract with her relatives. Some of the Andersons had been able to fund their education in part because of the uncompensated labor of Moore’s family.

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Both Dr. Andersons had likely also learned how to practice “plantation medicine” at Penn Medical School, what Brown, the Penn historian, describes as “‘patching up’ enslaved people so they could keep working.” The younger Dr. Anderson went on to become one of the top doctors in the Confederate Army.

To Moore, the research helped to illuminate the staggering transfer of wealth away from enslaved people — as well as the ways that institutions like her alma mater benefited from, and helped to sustain, slavery. She joined the Penn & Slavery Project in 2018.

In probate records and newspaper stories, Moore’s relatives often appeared like shadows in glowing accounts of the Andersons.

The elder Dr. Anderson, for example, was lauded for building parts of the Borough House Plantation and the nearby Holy Cross Church in the “rammed earth” style, an impressive, labor-intensive form of construction. But, of course, he hadn’t really done the building.

“Since he was able to use slave labor, this expense was kept at a minimum,” explained a 1948 Columbia Record article about the Borough House.

Moore’s family members often went entirely unnamed in official documents, as they did in an 1850 federal slave census, where they were identified by whether they were “deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic” and whether they were “fugitive from the state.”

The senior Dr. Anderson had once owned 131 enslaved people, valued at $100,026, according to Moore’s research. (The average slaveholding family in South Carolina owned 15 people.) That wealth, some $3.8 million in today’s dollars, helped pay tuition bills at Penn.

Moore discovered that her family’s enslaver had graduated from Penn, just like her.
Breanna Moore graduated from Penn in 2015 and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in history there. She discovered that her family members had been enslaved by Penn alumni in the 1800s.TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

Moore was jarred by the Penn connection, but she also found meaning in learning each small detail about her relatives.

“A lot of times you say, ‘My ancestors were enslaved people,’ but you don’t know anything about them other than that,” says Moore, now 29. In the archives she discovered what kind of crops they were forced to grow, where they worshiped.

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Then she decided to return to Penn, where she is now pursuing her Ph.D. Like Gladney, she aims to change the institution from within. She studies indemnities, funds paid by Britain to other nations to compensate them for the abolition of the slave trade.

‘I was hedging’

Former archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd’s remarks in 2006 were virtually the only comment Penn made about its ties to slavery for a decade. The Penn & Slavery students had it front of mind when they began their research.

“My personal belief about history is that ... it is not wise to use it to advance a current political cause of any sort.”
Mark Frazier Lloyd, University Archivist Emeritus

Lloyd, who retired from the university after 35 years in 2019, spoke about his comments for the first time in an interview for this story. It was apparent that he had leaned on the act of not investigating too deeply in order to tell reporters truthfully that he did not know what ties existed between Penn and the institution of slavery.

As a historian, he had been convinced that any relevant information would be in the personal records of the trustees, not in the university archives. Restricting his research to those university archives, he didn’t turn up anything that he deemed notable, as he had expected.

Beyond that, he was not keen to go exploring, for both political and professional reasons.

“My personal belief about history is that, generally speaking, it is not wise to use it to advance a current political cause of any sort,” Lloyd says. Similar research at other universities was, in Lloyd’s view, being used to push for reparations at the time.

The university had not put together a formal commission or fact-finding team; administrators had not asked someone to scour every record, to find any trace of human bondage, to get to the real bottom of things, no matter the cost. Speaking as the de facto university historian, Lloyd did not want to say something that could reflect adversely on the school.

Instead he made a distinction that served to protect the university and required no further research. No 18th-century trustees were known to have profited from the slave trade.

“I was hedging,” Lloyd says. “I was saying, ‘We don’t know.’”

What does repair look like?

Surveying the state of universities reckoning with slavery today, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco recently noted that some have blurred the line between performance and meaningful repair as they compete with their rivals.

“In this contest it is sometimes hard to distinguish self-abasement from self-congratulation,” Delbanco wrote in the New York Review of Books.

Gladney wonders about that too — whether her university is trying to rack up PR points by now sharing information it had long worked to ignore. Though maybe it’s irrelevant, she thinks, if the university truly takes concrete, reparative action.

“Sure, slap a Penn P on it and let’s go,” she jokes.

But Penn has been slow to do even that. Despite promising in 2018 to join the UVA consortium “to collaborate with and learn from peer institutions,” the school still has not joined four years later. Penn also has not developed a “University website to serve as a portal for and repository of research findings,” another 2018 promise, though it did fund an augmented reality app.

Ozio, the Penn spokesperson, told The Inquirer that Penn has provided support for conferences and research related to Penn & Slavery, including the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project, which focuses on the medical school. The school also recently filed a request to rebury 13 skulls that were unethically obtained from Black Philadelphians to be part of the Morton Collection, more than 1,300 skulls amassed by white supremacist and physician Samuel Morton.

Ozio declined to say how much money Penn has put toward its efforts. In general, scholars and activists say, Penn has been happy to remain in the middle of the pack.

And at this point, there’s no nationwide consensus on what, exactly, repair should look like.

Is it money for research? In the spring, Harvard announced it would channel $100 million into redressing slavery, in part by endowing a fund to continue studying its own history.

Is it restitution? Georgetown promised to raise $400,000 a year for community-based projects that benefit descendants of people sold by the school, but it has yet to actually distribute the funds.

Is it raising awareness? In 2021 the Penn & Slavery Project released an augmented reality app, highlighting six stops on Penn’s campus related to slavery, including the campus bell Caesar once rung.

A new group of students enrolled in Kathleen Brown’s Penn & Slavery research seminar this fall, but it’s not clear how broad of an audience their findings will have.

Multiple freshmen told The Inquirer they had not heard about the Penn & Slavery Project during orientation and had no idea the Penn & Slavery app existed. There are no permanent markers on campus alerting people to the research. Perhaps most significant, there is no student organization or movement dedicated to pushing the university forward on this work.

In the summer of 2020, Penn did remove the statue of George Whitefield from the Quad courtyard, citing Gladney’s research.

Given the years of institutionally accepted ignorance, the breadth of what the students carefully brought to light, and the model of what other universities have undertaken across the country, perhaps the University of Pennsylvania’s response is best illustrated by that vacant patch of stone where the statue of Whitefield once stood.

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Acknowledgement

A More Perfect Union is produced with support from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Peter and Judy Leone, and Surdna Foundation. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.

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