I'm very pleased to see from this Tuscaloosa News article that the University of Alabama's Gorgas Library has an exhibit about the University's connections to slavery. The exhibit presents the research of Benjamin Flax, a senior at the University who's researched this extensively. Benajmin worked with my friend and former colleagues (and author of several terrific books on antebellum America) Josh Rothman. It sounds like the human connections to slavery are central to this exhibit. I should expect there's probably a lot on the life and work of the enslaved people on the campus and on the University and faculty's ownership of enslaved people. There are also really significant intellectual connections between the University and the support of slavery. This is a common story for colleges and universties in the old South. (And here's a story on Flax' work from last fall.)
The illustration is the President's Mansion at the University of Alabama, from the Library of Congress' Historic Buildings Survey.
Comments