Why did Penn keep saying it had no ties to slavery?

The University of Pennsylvania long considered itself on the “right side” when it came to slavery. Even as other colleges unearthed their own shameful histories over the past two decades, Penn claimed innocence.

Then, in 2017, at the behest of Penn historian Kathleen Brown, a group of undergraduate students began digging.

In the latest installment of A More Perfect Union, we explore what the students found, and what happens when an elite American institution is forced to see the history it has chosen to ignore.

Here are four takeaways from the story.

Penn’s trustees relied on George Whitefield, an evangelical preacher and vigorous advocate of slavery, to claim that the university was in fact as old as its oldest part. Whitefield’s followers owned the building in Old City that became the first campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

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. The school unveiled a statue of Whitefield on campus in 1919, cementing his place in its mythology.

Penn long said that it had little to account for when it came to slavery.

“Our 18th century trustees are not known to have profited from the slave trade,” Mark Frazier Lloyd, university archivist emeritus, told the Penn student newspaper in 2006, 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.”

Lloyd, who retired from the university after 35 years in 2019, spoke about his comments for the first time in an interview for the 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.

“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 in 2006.

» READ MORE: Penn denied ties to slavery. Students sought the truth.

The Penn & Slavery Project, made up of undergraduate students, found that at least 75 of Penn’s early trustees, including the first provost, owned people. The students also learned 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.

They also discovered that the founders of the university organized fundraising trips to South Carolina and Jamaica in 1771 and 1772 to raise money from slaveholders. And they helped show that Penn Medical School was a primary champion of racist science in the early 19th century.

Issues of racial justice have been at the forefront of campus and community organizing in recent years, with activists especially focused on the repatriation of skulls included in the Morton Collection at the Penn Museum, and Penn’s role helping to gut affordable housing for residents of West Philadelphia.

The university acknowledged the Penn and Slavery Project 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.

Multiple freshmen told The Inquirer they had never heard about the Penn & Slavery Project.