An essay by David Blight (2025)
CIC and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) began the Legacies of American Slavery project in 2019. It was before the COVID pandemic hit, before the racial reckonings and the contested election of 2020, before the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by mobs intending to overthrow the previous fall’s presidential election in favor of the defeated Donald J. Trump.
For the first two years of the project we conducted most of our work on Zoom—with much better results than expected. We selected seven colleges and universities, from dozens of applicants, to serve as regional partners. We finally held in-person institutes and meetings at Yale University in the summers of 2022 and 2023. We brought this extraordinary project to a rousing and memorable conclusion with an all-participants conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in September 2024. There I moderated a remarkable opening keynote discussion between journalist Jamelle Bouie and public historian Christy Coleman. All seven partner colleges and universities, as well as other invited speakers, addressed their projects and many enduring issues swirling in American society, especially in education at all levels.
Everyone involved in this project made new and valuable colleagues, learned a great deal about the worlds and communities of liberal arts colleges, and benefited from the work and wisdom of many distinguished historians, journalists, museum professionals, and creative teachers. We learned a great deal about collaboration as well as research in the public realm. Above all, we all learned a great deal about the complexities of just what “legacies of slavery” are, how they persist every day in our lives and institutions, how they change and surprise us in current political, economic, and biological events.
We learned this by asking deep questions about incarceration and migration at Lewis University; about citizenship and Black women’s political participation at Meredith College; about local community engagement in the urban history of Austin, Texas, at Huston-Tillotson University; about commemorations of slavery and the Confederacy at Sewanee: University of the South; about foodways and the lower Mississippi Valley at Dillard University; about medicine and racial disparities at Centenary College of Louisiana; about racial violence and the history of lynching at Austin College. Our partner colleges—and other institutions that became their partners—contributed insights to each others’ projects. Everyone learned as much as they could bear about difficult subjects and about the powerful and eternal connections of past and present, especially for an issue as old and pervasive as slavery and its aftermaths in America.
In an opening essay for the Legacies project, I suggested that a legacy of something like slavery could be an “idea,” a “reviving question,” or a set of “emotional” or “psychological” patterns. I argued that legacies could be deeply “political” in content and consequences, and they may almost always manifest in “law” or in “economic” growth (or decline). CIC and the GLC recommended that participating colleges consider big themes, like “health and medicine,” and seek out organizations and institutions devoted to “activism”; to think globally, yet never ignore the “local” or even family roots of legacies. We encouraged institutional applicants to tackle any kind of “ism” that seemed to swirl around discussions of race and slavery in their communities. And we knew that virtually all American colleges sit in the midst of some kind of problem of “commemoration” and institutional “memory,” on their campuses or in their cities and towns.
The opening essay was meant to be a challenge to any college that wanted to participate in the initiative. In time, all the ideas we sketched in the essay, and many more, rang loudly and true in the work our colleagues executed, and in the remarkable reports they wrote and delivered about their projects. They expanded on the starting conception of the meaning of legacies in both troubling and inspiring ways. Their reports catalogue changes in the curriculum, community engagements, archival projects, local and regional conferences, faculty–administration cooperation, and extraordinary uses of creative media such as websites, podcasts, and film. See the report from Lewis University for an especially compelling use of media. And for an example of a broad and lasting examination of historical memory at one institution, which then expanded its footprint regionally and nationally, see the report on Sewanee’s Locating Slavery’s Legacies database.
Now, at the end of the Legacies project in 2025, Americans live in a historical moment when the legacies of slavery—and, for that matter, the fate of all understanding of serious scholarly history as well as good, informed, critical teaching—are under direct threat from a presidential administration determined to alter and control how citizens learn and view their past. We could not assert the significance of this project on the legacies of slavery in a more needful time.
In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the writer Toni Morrison, in a moment perhaps a little less challenging than today, nevertheless warned about the threats of people in power to how we create knowledge, think, write, and teach. Beware, she warned, of “statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” Seeing ahead, she spoke in the voice of a prophet:
However moribund, it [statist control of thought] is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago.
Morrison summoned us to wake up to assaults on how we know the past and write the present, then and now. “Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.” This was 1993, in the wake of the end of the Cold War!
If one studies the legacies of slavery enough, as we have done in this project, one comes to understand viscerally that silence in the face of attempts to erase and control the past is not an option. When the language of truth and history “dies,” said Morrison, “out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat…all users and makers are accountable for its demise.”
With Morrison’s call to duty more than thirty years past, we cannot drop the baton today. Knowledge is power when its pursuit is kept free, when we use it to thwart the restrictive and divisive aims of those in power, and when we keep an ancient faith. James Weldon Johnson expressed such a faith in his poem “Fifty Years,” commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation in 1913:
This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil….
No! Stand erect and without fear,
And for our foes let this suffice—
We’ve bought a rightful sonship here,
And we have more than paid the price.
May the strands and tracks of prophecy in Morrison and Johnson strengthen our firmness of mind and spirit. May we use our hard-earned knowledge to extract the power out of lies and seek complex truths however they endure and wherever they are found.
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale’s MacMillan Center. The opinions in this essay are not necessarily those of Yale, CIC, or the Mellon Foundation.