Colleges and Universities Studying Slavery: A Curated Bibliography

In the process of researching and teaching the history and complex legacy of slavery at colleges and universities, I am frequently asked for resources, including primary and secondary sources. As a result, I have developed a select bibliography of commonly used archival collections, digital resources, and scholarly publications for exploring the topic. This is not an exhaustive bibliography. I hope that it will serve as the starting place for students, scholars, non-academics and descendant communities seeking to learn more. 

Archival Collections and Primary Sources

W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
  • James Austin Anderson Papers, MSS-0078
  • The Corolla
  • Landon Cabell Garland Letters
  • Manly Family Papers
  • RG 001 University of Alabama Early Administrative Records
  • RG 154 Faculty Minutes, 1831-1854
  • “History of the University of Alabama, volume II, 1902-1952, James Benson Sellers, revised and edited by W. S. Hoole, unpublished manuscript.

Digital Collections, University of Alabama Libraries, https://digitalcollections.libraries.ua.edu
  • James Austin Anderson Papers
  • The Corolla
  • The Crimson White
  • Early University of Alabama administrative records (RG 1, slave receipts). 
  • Josiah and Amelia Gorgas family papers
  • Historical Maps
  • Manly Family Papers
  • McCorvey and Tutwiler families papers
  • James Thomas Murfee letters
  • A Register of the officers and students of The University of Alabama, 1831-1901 (1901)
  • Report of the committee of investigation who were instructed to enquire into the causes which have produced the late disturbances and decline of the University of Alabama. 
  • University of Alabama catalogue
  • University of Alabama Presidential portraits

Davidson College History Digital Collections, Archives and Special Collections, Davidson College, NC, https://davidsonarchivesandspecialcollections.org/archives/college. 
  • William Erskine Ardrey Papers
  • College Catalogs, 1842-2011
  • College Letters, 1837-1921
  • The Davidsonian, 1914-2016
  • Davidson, NC Newspaper Collection, 1883-1958
  • Inaugural Presidential Addresses of Rev. Robert Hall Morrison and Daniel Harvey Hill.
  • Nineteenth Century Davidson College Trustee Meeting Minutes
  • Nineteenth Century Davidson College Faculty Meeting Minutes
  • Nineteenth Century Family Papers and Plantation Records of Davidson College Trustees
  • Presbytery Minutes, 1835-1843
  • Quips and Cranks, 1895-2011
  • Semi-Centennial Catalogue of Davidson College, 1891

Transcription: Julian S. Carr, “Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University. June 2, 1913” (Carr's Dedication Speech of Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). 

Commission Reports and Digital Humanities Projects 

Universities, Slavery, Afterlives and Reconciliation

  • Baldwin, Davarian. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021. 
  • Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
  • Boyd, Kendra, Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, eds. Scarlet and Black, Volume 2: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 
  • Bradley, Stephan M. Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
  • Brophy, Alfred. "The University and the Slaves: Apology and Its Meaning." In The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
  • _____.  University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Clarke, Max and Gary Alan Fine. “‘A’ for Apology: Slavery and the Collegiate Discourses of Remembrance – Cases of Brown University and the University of Alabama.” History and Memory 22, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 81-112.
  • Cronin, Paul, ed. A Time To Stir: Columbia '68. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
  • Doss, Selena Sanderfer, Susan Farmer, and Alexander Olson. "Jonesville and the Legacy of Slavery at Western Kentucky University." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 72-91.
  • Flint, Maureen A. “Ruptures and Reproductions: A Walking Encounter With a Campus Tour and a Confederate Monument.” ​Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies​ 19, no. 2 (2019): 91-104.
  • Freeman, Margaret L. Women of Discriminating Taste: White Sororities and the Making of American Ladyhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020.
  • ​Fuentes, Marisa J. and Deborah Gray White, eds. Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History. Volume 1. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
  • Fuller, A. James. "The Legacy of the Founders: Wrestling with Slavery at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 37-53.
  • Green, Hilary N. "'What, then is the Church?': A Path Forward for Columbia Seminary and Its Slave Past," Repair, a roundtable forum, @This Point: Theological Investigations in Church and Culture 14, no. 1 (Spring 2020).
  • Green, Hilary.  "The Burden of the University of Alabama's Hallowed Grounds," Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable, The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 28-40.
  • Green, Hilary. “2. Shifting Landscapes and the Monument Removal Craze, 2015-2020,” in Remembering Wrongs in Public Space: Forum in Reaction to the Toppling of Edward Colston in Bristol, June 2020, Patterns of Prejudice 54, no. 5 (August 2021): 485-491.
  • Green, Hilary. “University of Alabama Civil War Monument - UDC Boulder,” entry with interpretative essay, Commemorative Cultures: A University of St. Andrews Project, The American Civil War Monuments Database, edited by Jill Caddell, Kristin Treen and Alan Miller, (2022), https://www.civilwarmonuments.org/.
  • Green, Hilary. “The Hallowed Grounds Tour: Revising and Reimagining Landscapes of Race and Slavery at the University of Alabama,” in Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas, eds. Thaisa Way and Eric Avila (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Press, Trustees for Harvard University, 2023), 297-323.
  • Greene, Robert and Tyler Parry, Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021.
  • Harris, Leslie M., James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy. Slavery and the University: History and Legacies. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019.
  • Harris, Leslie M. “Higher Education’s Reckoning with Slavery,” Academe (Winter 2020).
  • ______. “Working To Transform Community at Emory University. The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 56-62.
  • Hutton, T.R.C. Bearing the Torch: The University of Tennessee, 1794-2010. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2022. 
  • Inniss, Lolita Buckner. The Princeton Fugitive: The Trials of James Collins Johnson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
  • Jones, Brian. The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 
  • Kapur, Geeta N. To Drink From the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University. Durham: Blair, 2021.
  • Kendi, Ibram X. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
  • Lee, Chana Kai. “A Fraught Reckoning: Exploring the History of Slavery at the University of Georgia,” Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable, The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 12-27.
  • Lincoln, Angelina. "Remembering William Moulden: Villanova University's Black Founder and Early Benefactor." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 22-36.
  • Mealy, Todd M. This Is the Rat Speaking: Black Power and the Promise of Racial Consciousness at Franklin and Marshall College in the Age of the Takeover, 1967-69. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2017.
  • Miles, Tiya. “Campus Meets World: Introduction to Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable.” The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 9-11.
  • Monroe, Stephen M. Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021.
  • Murray, Robert. "The Half That Is Never Told: Creating a Useful Past at Centre College." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 6-21.
  • Nelson, Louis P. and Claudrena N. Harold. Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018.
  • Oast, Jennifer. Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680-1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Platt, R. Eric. Educating the Sons of Sugar: Jefferson College and the Creole Planter Class of South Louisiana. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017.
  • Rothman, Adam and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, ed. Facing Georgetown's History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. Foreword by Lauret Savoy. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021.
  • Segal, Theodore D. Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
  • Shahid, Kyra T., and Holly Y. McGee. "The Academy's Original Sin: Reflections on Universities, Slavery, and History's Role in Institutional Reform." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 92-110. 
  • Stein, Sharon. Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2022. 
  • Steinert, Anne Delano. "Forgetting Charles McMicken." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 54-71.
  • Stradling, David. "Universities, Slavery, and History's Role in Institutional Reform." Ohio Valley History 21, no. 2 (2021): 3-5.
  • Thomas, Rhondda Robinson. Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community (Humanities and Public Life). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020.
  • ______. “Meeting the Challenge of Honoring Clemson University’s Invisible Black Founders,” Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable, The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 41-55.
  • Whichard, Willis P. A Consequential Life: David Lowry Swain, Nineteenth-Century North Carolina, and Their University. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, 2022.
  • White, Jonathan W. and David Glenn. Untouched by the Conflict: The Civil War Letters of Singleton Ashenfelter, Dickinson College. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2019.
  • Whites, LeeAnn. "'You Can't Change History By Moving a Rock:' Gender, Race, and the Cultural Politics of Confederate Memorialization." Chap. 6 in Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
  • Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.
  • Willoughby, Christopher D. E. Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in the U.S. Medical Schools​. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Other Secondary Books, Articles and Essays

  • Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
  • Araujo, Ana Lucia. Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery. New York: Routledge, 2015.
  • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
  • Baker, Bruce E. What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
  • Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. New York: Belknap Press, 2003.
  • Berry, Mary Frances. My Face is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations. New York: Vintage Books, 2005.
  • Berry, Daina Raimey. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017.
  • Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Brophy, Alfred. University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.
  • _____, ed. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Clark, Kathleen Ann. Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
  • Case, Sarah H. Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
  • Cox, Karen L. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (New Perspectives on the History of the South). Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003.
  • ______, ed., Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012.
  • ______. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Reprinted with Introduction by David Levering Lewis. New York: Free Press, 1992.
  • Fitzgerald, Michael. Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
  • Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper’s and Row, 1988.
  • Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
  • Gilpin, R. Blakeslee. John Brown Still Lives!: Americas Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
  • Green, Hilary. Educational Reconstruction: African American Public Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
  • ______. "At Freedom's Margins: Race, Disability, Violence and the Brewer Orphan Asylum in Southeastern North Carolina, 1866-1872," Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians 24 (October 2016): 1-22.
  • Green, Sharony. “Alabama’s Female Academies: Educating Young Women Before and After the Civil War,” Alabama Heritage no. 129 (Summer 2018): 36-43.
  • Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  • Hill, Kimberly D. A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020. 
  • Hillyer, Reiko. Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
  • Hollars, B. J. Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2013.
  • Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
  • Hubbs, G. Ward. Searching for Freedom after the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.
  • Hyde, Sarah L. Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.
  • Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women and Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
  • King, Wilma. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
  • Kytle, Ethan J. and Blain Roberts. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: The New Press, 2018.
  • Mellown, Robert Oliver. The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013.
  • Morris, J. Brent. Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 
  • Pargas, Damian Alan. Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
  • Rainville, Lynn. Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
  • Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
  • Rubin, Anne Sarah. Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014.
  • Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in 19th-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  • Sellers, James B. History of the University of Alabama. Volume I: 1818-1902. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1953.
  • Wendt, Simon. “God, Gandhi, and Guns: The African American Freedom Struggle in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1964-1965,” Journal of African American History 89, no. 1 (Winter, 2004): 36-55.
  • White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985.
  • Williams, Heather Andrea. Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
  • ____. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
  • Williams, Kidada. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
  • Willis, Deborah and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.
  • Yoo, William. What Kind of Christianity: A History of Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Presbyterian Church. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2022. 
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