University Founder Johns Hopkins Revealed as Slave Owner
“The fact that Mr. Hopkins had, at any time in his life, a direct connection to slavery … is a difficult revelation for us”
Does this mean Johns Hopkins University will change its name? Of course not. Like Yale, it’s a brand that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so cancel culture will not apply.
CNN reports:
Johns Hopkins University thought its namesake was an abolitionist, but records show he owned enslaved people
The founder and namesake for one of the top medical schools in the nation owned enslaved people in the mid-1800s, Johns Hopkins University leadership announced Wednesday in a letter.
Census records indicate Johns Hopkins owned one enslaved person in 1840 and four in 1850, according to the school. The information came to light via the Hopkins Retrospective, a university effort to deeply explore the institution’s history. Hopkins founded JHU in 1876 and opened the hospital in 1889.
“The fact that Mr. Hopkins had, at any time in his life, a direct connection to slavery … is a difficult revelation for us, as we know it will be for our community, at home and abroad, and most especially our Black faculty, students, staff, and alumni,” the JHU letter read.
The latest revelations shatter what the JHU system previously believed of Hopkins.
“For most of the last century, our institutions believed Johns Hopkins to be an early and staunch abolitionist whose father, a committed Quaker, had freed the family’s enslaved people in 1807,” the school said.
JHU’s announcement comes as the US is coming to terms with its racist past thanks in part to ongoing protests that were sparked over the summer by the police killings of Black people. Schools and companies are reconsidering racist imagery and/or names of people who were connected to slavery.
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Comments
Anyone who has done post-doctoral work at Hopkins will attest that slavery is still alive and well. Flex-time was working the 70hrs a week of our choosing. Hopkins was a great place to leave.
Why does LI feel it has to use the new BS PC term “enslaved people” instead of “slaves”?
Negroes, blacks, Afro-Americans, blacks again, African Americans, capitalized Blacks — the name keeps changing but nothing else does because they’re still the same people.
That’s a direct quote from the source, not LI.
My uptick is for pointing out the constant name changes, as if they ever did any good. The American Negro remains the American Negro. Regardless of title, they are still everything from H Rap Brown and Michael Brown to Walter Williams and Clarence Thomas.
Maybe they should rename it George Floyd university.