The resources listed here provide an opportunity to research the contextualization of Ole Miss buildings, monuments and other campus locations. Debate about Confederate symbols on the UM campus has occurred since the 1970s, and the current initiative to contextualize local sites is part of a long-running dialogue. This is an opportunity to research and discuss these topics as part of a community of scholars. Archival assistance provided by Dr. Leigh McWhite.
Craig Steven Wilder, the author of Ebony & Ivy, started the national discussion about enslaved people and higher education. Wilder is a professor of American history at MIT and formally Dartmouth.
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by
Historian Wilder examines the emergence of American higher education from approximately the early 1600s to the mid-1840s. Among the book's many contributions, it frames America's earliest colleges as agents of Native conquest and assimilation as well as beneficiaries of the wealth created by the African slave trade. Most notably, Wilder illuminates how Harvard, America's oldest and most prestigious higher education institution, initially languished but flourished after it began to actively recruit and cater to the sons of the South's slaveholding elite. It is common knowledge that US universities were racially segregated until the late 20th century. However, Wilder reveals that enslaved blacks had a substantial presence on Colonial and antebellum college campuses as personal attendants for students, staff, and administrators. Wilder shows not only that the earliest colleges in the US benefited from uncompensated slave labor, but also how they bolstered slavery by advancing theories of black inferiority that would later become known as scientific racism.
