Month: December 2021

In my final research project, I set out to explore institutions in the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium and to start to develop ideas around a case for Bates to join this consortium. The USS “represents a multi-institutional collaboration focused in sharing best practices and guiding principles about truth-telling projects addressing human bondage and racism in institutional histories. Member schools are all committed to research, acknowledgment, and atonement regarding institutional ties to the slave trade, to enslavement on campus or abroad, and to enduring racism in school history and practice.” As a college that has an urgent need to address our with profits from enslaved labor as well as contemporary race relations, I believe that joining this consortium will foster collaboration that helps us reckon with our past and orient towards a more just environment for all members of our community. 

My research question is: How does the timeline of emancipation in the United States (as dictated by policy) compare with the founding dates of higher education institutions in the United States?

I sought out to collect data on each American higher education institution within the consortium, the state where the school is located and when slavery was abolished in each state. This data collection is a small and incomplete piece of understanding the non-linear and complex process of emancipation in the United States. 

“Visualizing Emancipation” is a project launched to map the end of slavery during the American Civil War. It was directed by Scott Nesbit, assistant professor of the digital humanities at the University of Georgia, and Edward L. Ayers, president emeritus, University of Richmond. The project states, “The end of slavery in the United States was a complex process that occurred simultaneously in courtrooms and plantations, on battlefields and city streets. It involved a wide variety of human interactions, many of which we represent in this map as emancipation events.”

In her American Cultural Studies thesis “Founded by Abolitionists, Funded by Slavery: Past and Present Manifestations of Bates College’s Founding Paradox,” Emma Soler writes about a conversation with Bates grad Ursula Rall ‘20 and how “a rosy-eyed institutional origin story… discredits the complaints of students of color when they voice concerns” (56). I think this gets at the root of why this glorified image of Bates actively harms students (white students AND students of color): Actively grappling with our institution’s harmful history informs our approach to current injustices and inequalities. By not only glossing over this past but intentionally twisting it to depict Bates as heroic and upstanding, we enable and maintain violence against BIPOC students, faculty and staff and the community of Lewiston. Soler says, “Without addressing our institutional historical narrative, our college will not be able to actualize goals regarding racial equity” (62). Creating ways to address and confront past injustices is crucial to contextualizing the lived experiences of students of color at Bates today. 

Soler continues, “To date, there has been no organized group effort overseen by Administration to shift our historical discourse” (58). My final project attempts to contextualize such an effort in the context of how other universities are grappling with how their histories and contemporary conditions are tied to enslaved labor and ways to catalyze action around justice-oriented practices. Slowly, as a community, we are finding ways to interrogate our institution’s origin story and the ways Bates is framed often throughout the admissions process as a “social justice utopia.” However, we are not doing such work in a vacuum. We have an opportunity to collaborate with other universities facing the same complex histories and navigating how to move forward.

Below is the commented code for my project.

#Reading in the data

read.csv(“data.csv”)

data <- read.csv(“data.csv”)

#Creating a new column which reads TRUE when the college was founded before enslavement was made illegal

#and FALSE when the college was founded after enslavement was made illegal

#Creating a column for years schools were founded

a <- data$Year.of.founding

#Creating a column for slavery being outlawed in each state

b <- data$Year.slavery.was.outlawed.in.the.state

founded_while_slavery_was_legal <- a < b

#creating a new column in the dataframe

data$founded_while_slavery_was_legal <- founded_while_slavery_was_legal

#viewing the dataframe with the new column

data

#finding min and max in dataset in order to create x axis for visual

max(data$Year.of.founding)

min(data$Year.of.founding)

# Make ggplot code available to us

library(ggplot2)

#SYNTAX REMINDER

# create graph object

#g <- ggplot(name_of_dataframe, aes(name_of_one_column, name_of_the_other_column))

#create 

g <- ggplot(data, aes(Year.of.founding, fill = founded_while_slavery_was_legal))

g + geom_histogram(binwidth = 5) + xlab(“number of schools”) + ylab(“year of institution founding”)

The data I compiled for my project consisted of a list of all the institutions in “The Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium.” Then, I created a column for the years in which all the institutions were founded. I gathered this information conducting google searches where I pasted the name of the institution and then searched “year of founding,” which was the quickest way of assembling each date. I used the top google hit, which most of the time, was the website of the institution itself. However, I did not double check the founding dates with an additional source, so there was definitely room for human error in this process. In my final data set, I decided to omit the outliers of international universities as well as high schools in order to focus on schools most similar to Bates. So, my final set just included American universities. 

Next, I made a column for the state (or country) where each institution is located and lastly, a column for the year slavery was outlawed in that state. For location, I also used the top google hit and then entered that place into the spreadsheet. Although this data collection didn’t employ much of the archival research skills we developed in this source, such as interpreting cursive handwriting from centuries ago, it did make me reflect on how google as a tool has influenced data collection. It also makes me want to further consider the drawbacks of this type of data collection. During the course, we discussed how to avoid distancing ourselves from the data we’re working with. For instance, it is important to acknowledge that the vast majority of higher education institutions in this data set are predominantly white institutions, which means that historically and currently, they mostly serve white students. Further, higher education is often lauded for its role in social and economic mobility in the United States, yet it also engenders the very conditions of inequity that a four-year degree claims to remedy. In Where Did They Go: Retention Rates for Students of Color at Predominantly White Institutions, Kevin McClain and April Perry write about how the higher education system prides itself on its progressiveness, however, “despite appearing diverse on the surface, many institutions exhibit covert microaggressions and controlling images that provoke attrition among students of color at predominantly White institutions” (McClain 1). It is also crucial to note that the founding of PWIs often uprooted Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land, forced removals by white settlers that dispossessed them from their communities, resources and traditional territories. As a student and researcher, as I grapple with the topics introduced in this topic, it is critical that I consider how my own intersecting social positionalities impact the ways in which I conduct my research. My identity heavily influences a question I struggled with throughout the process of my project: How can we conceptualize the process of emancipation in the United States? How do we quantify it? Whose narratives are most often centered when we tell stories about emancipation?

Abraham Lincoln, often falsely heralded as the “father of emancipation,” issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but the process of ending slavery and reaching black freedom is continuous and contested. In Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom, edited by William A. Link and James J. Broomall, Yael A. Sternhell writes, “Emancipation figures in our imagination as an event of mythic proportions, a sea change splitting American history into two. Yet for enslaved Southerners, emancipation was first and foremost a complex lived experience, a daily reality that took multiple, shifting, and often contradictory forms. Slavery, a system encompassing millions of people, fell apart in thousands of different ways” (15). I have been wrestling with this data collection process and how to quantify and qualify emancipation. The state and national ordinances outlawing slavery, which are largely attributed to white, male politicians, are a small piece of a larger and much more layered story of emancipation. I know that merely weighing these political degrees produces a flawed, incomplete and potentially harmful understanding of both our country’s and Bates’ histories. That said, delving into this research process has allowed me to explore how nuanced and intricate emancipation was, and is. It has left me with urgent questions, such as, how can we examine our institutional history with a critical lens in the context of a social, economic and political context deeply intertwined with the labor of enslaved peoples?