Between 2020 and 2025, Meredith College (Raleigh, NC), served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Meredith is a single-sex college with a tradition of creating opportunities for women (for many decades, just white women) and a history that reflected the political, economic, and religious roots of white supremacy in the region. With these legacies in mind, the project team chose to focus on the legacy theme of Contested Citizenship. Individual projects included the annual Voices of Change political institute (designed to encourage political engagement and office-seeking by women of color); an ambitious oral history project to “document the lives, activities, and voices of women of color who have engaged in activism or public service,” which now includes contributions from a network of colleges and universities across the region; and a reckoning with the college’s own complicated history that led to the renaming of two campus buildings.
This is an excerpt from a presentation at the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024. For more details about the activities undertaken by Meredith College, download the presentation slides.
Reflections on the Legacies initiative by Sarah N. Roth and Daniel Fountain
From the project team’s final reports:
When Meredith was chosen as one of the regional hubs for the Legacies of American Slavery project, we planned to highlight the systems that over time had methodically and effectively diminished the citizenship rights of black North Carolinians. The main initiative we pursued to this end involved researching and publicizing Meredith’s own connections to the state’s white supremacist leaders in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The grant funded four open forums during the 2022-23 academic year aimed at increasing campus-wide awareness of the ways North Carolina’s own particular brand of white supremacy was intertwined with the college’s early history.
To produce these forums, … [a] team of faculty historians and archivists joined with the Black Student Union, the Student Government Association, undergraduate researchers, and the Arts & Humanities Common Experience Committee. The events hosted by these groups helped inform the student body, as well as faculty, staff, and alumnae, about the involvement of Meredith’s early leaders with anti-Black movements that included eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, and the proslavery ideology of the Lost Cause.
The political legacies of slavery in North Carolina, however, have included more positive developments than state-imposed contested citizenship for African Americans. Since emancipation, Black North Carolinians have engaged in activism to counter voter suppression efforts and other means of exclusion from the political system. It seemed appropriate for Meredith, as a women’s college, to focus another grant project on ways Black women have persistently fought for the rights guaranteed to those with full citizenship.
Perhaps the greatest value our projects have had stems from the personal nature of the initiatives we began as a result of our participation in the Legacies grant. White supremacist structures can sometimes seem abstract and intangible, even from the perspective of those most directly affected by those structures. Exploring the specific history of a college with which students, faculty, and alumnae are directly associated in the present day has brought home in a very real way the fact that the legacies of slavery are local, that they have real impacts on actual people’s lives, and that they last long past the dismantling of the laws that originally put the system in place. … Our hope is that the many people we have had the good fortune to partner with in this work will use the experiences they have had to help dismantle the legacies of slavery.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.