The 150th anniversary of the University of Maryland, College Park's founding should have been a cause for celebration. But some members of Maryland's community were dissatisfied with how little mention was made of the university's connection to slavery in the commemoration events in 2006, said Herbert Brewer, a doctoral candidate at UMD.
In response, Brewer and Professor of History Ira Berlin have designed and will teach a two-semester course called "Knowing Our History: African-American Slavery in the University of Maryland." UMD's investigation follows Brown's study of the role slavery played in its own past.
Admission into the course will be competitive, said Brewer, and about 30 lucky students who are chosen to participate will research the university's historical ties to slavery.
"The university has decided to systematically go about understanding what happened," Brewer said.
UMD is not the only institution undertaking research into its past ties to slavery. Several other colleges and universities across the nation have found their racial histories difficult to ignore.
Alfred Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, said he began looking into the university's historical ties to slavery in 2003. He has researched faculty members' ownership of slaves and their role in propagating pro-slavery thought.
In March 2004, Brophy and several colleagues approached the university's faculty senate and asked for an apology for the university's connection to slavery, Brophy said. The faculty senate issued the apology in April 2004.
That spring, discussions about whether the faculty should issue an apology took place all around campus, and it was "controversial to say the least," Brophy said.
Though Brophy said Brown "set the standard" with the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's report released in Oct. 2006, he said investigating ties to slavery is even more important at a school like Alabama.
Discussion in Rhode Island, he said, "may not resonate with the same power as in a place like Alabama or Mississippi or Virginia."
Brophy estimated that 30 percent of Alabama's population is African-American.
"A vast majority of them are descended from (slaves)," he said. "It is a very live issue for the people of Alabama."
Terry Meyers, professor of English at the College of William and Mary, also took a glance into his institution's past.
Meyers first wrote a short history of the college's involvement in slavery a year ago. An extended version that he worked on this summer is slated to appear in William and Mary's law school journal this spring.
"My hope is to pass a resolution to hire a professional historian to do this," Meyers said. While plans to hire an outside scholar are still tentative, Meyers said William and Mary's faculty and Board of Visitors have shown support for his idea.
In 2003, Emory University founded the Transforming Community Project to examine its own ties to slavery and race. Though the project was initially launched as a five-year endeavor, the steering committee is considering extending the initiative. Director Leslie Harris, associate professor of history, said it has two purposes - to investigate Emory's racial history and to provide a forum for discussion about race at Emory.
The project has involved students, faculty, staff members, administrators and alums, said Harris.
"Often on campuses you have people who are the usual suspects in a conversation about race and other people sit back," Harris said. But in this project, she said a "wider range of people have gotten involved."
The project has not limited its focus to slavery - students have examined Hispanics, Jews and desegregation at Emory. "We go all the way to the present," Harris said.
The projects have taken the forms of artwork, exhibits and plays, Harris said. She added that she hopes to incorporate these different types of presentation in a book that will represent the culmination of TCP.
Harris said she does not have a "traditional history book" in mind and wants it to be accessible to a wider range of people. She said she would like to include images, multimedia and maybe even a CD-ROM in the back.
The book should be "more alive and reflective of the process that we went through to come up with this history," she said.
Harris has found that the Transforming Community Project is living up to its name. She said participants have discovered in themselves "a greater sense of connection to the university."
"Open, honest conversations have made people feel better," she said. "The process of talking about it openly rather than hiding it has created a new sense of trust in the institution in many ways."
Not all schools are so willing to speak openly. The University of Virginia apologized for its use of slaves between 1819 and 1865, in an April 24, 2007, press release. But UVA has done little to examine what its role in propagating and advocating slavery might have been, Brophy said.
"The problem with apologies is they can be a sort of on/off deal," Brophy said. "Everyone's expected to go away."
But even when universities aren't willing to speak out, sometimes students are. In 2001, three Yale grad students took matters into their own hands and released an unofficial report titled "Yale, Slavery and Abolition" about Yale's ties to slavery.
David Blight, director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, said that since then, Yale has sponsored lectures, talks and conferences about the history of slavery, including a 2002 conference about slavery in New England.
"The Center does a great deal to investigate, research and reveal to the broadest possible public the history of slavery in general," Blight said.
But he added that Yale has not launched an investigation into the university's own historical ties to slavery.
In the meantime, some schools that have looked into their own pasts are doing what they can to repair them.
In the 1940s, Paul Jones applied to the University of Alabama and was denied admission, Brophy said. Jones received a letter saying that black people were not admitted.
Jones kept the letter and came forward in 2004 after Alabama made its apology, Brophy said. In August 2006 he received an honorary degree from the university.
For others, it is too late. At least two slaves lie in unmarked graves in a 19th-century cemetery on Alabama's campus, Brophy said.
One was a young child named Boysey, and the other was a slave named Jack who had been born in Africa and brought to the United States. Brophy said both had been owned by the president of Alabama at the time. All that the university could do was raise a brick pedestal - on it, a brass tablet commemorates Boysey and Jack and bears the university's apology.
