Toward the end of his annual State of the University speech last month, President John T. Casteen III said, “[There is] substantial interest in the efforts that we’re making now to acknowledge the role of enslaved persons and other workers who contributed to the construction of this University and you’ll see more of this roll out in the next several days.”
Casteen was alluding to committees that he established to acknowledge the “first builders” of UVA. Comprising reps from the Office of the Architect, the Board of Visitors (BOV), the President’s Office and the student body, the first committee drafted wording for a memorial slate near the Rotunda. It will read: “In honor of the several hundred men and women, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.” The slate should be installed this spring.
A second committee, with similar membership, now faces a more difficult task: finding as many names of those first builders as the records will provide. “We really haven’t met yet, so I’m not sure how we’re going to do that,” says Alexander Gilliam, secretary to the BOV. “In theory, we’d like to get it done by the end of the semester. I don’t see how there’s any way we can because I think when we get into it, we’re going to find that we have an awful lot of research to do.”
One source to start with would be Professor Ervin Jordan. An archivist and researcher who is writing a history of blacks at UVA, Jordan says that old journals, covered in a brown rust that often discourages would-be researchers, document some names of slaves. One letter from a slave owner complains that the University didn’t compensate him for the work of four slaves: David, Aaron, Isaiah and Harry.
“Efforts like President Casteen’s are a start,” Jordan says. “I certainly welcome and appreciate it. And if I’m asked by him or anybody else at the University to provide assistance, I’ll certainly do so. The University just doesn’t deserve criticism when it does the wrong thing—it also needs to get praise when it does the right thing. But there’s a lot of weird stories about UVA.”
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
