NOTE:
Throughout its work, the SMJP focused on intellectually rigorous, exceptionally thorough historical research; honest and unyielding historical interpretations; efforts to center student-scholars’ independent voices, free from administration influence; and taking a truly democratic approach to shaping college policy in ways that upheld academic freedom. In keeping with those guiding principles and values, the SMJP criticized significant elements of the Jewell administration’s flawed efforts to address the college’s pro-slavery past. As a result, in 2022, the SMJP’s student, alumni, and faculty members voted 28 against, and only two in favor, of affiliating with the college administration in any way.
Reading the newspaper articles listed below will show that the SMJP strongly objected to efforts to sideline students’ voices and criticized the lack of research access rights held by students, alumni, and faculty seeking to examine historical records in the college’s archives and nineteenth-century sources held by the office of the president.
It is also important to note that although the SMJP’s work has recently been highlighted on the college’s website, any impression that the SMJP received support from the college administration, or that the SMJP was in some way affiliated with the the college administration, is false.
For more information, please watch the documentaries and lectures available on the SMJP’s YouTube channel.
——
Origins and Aims of the Slavery, Memory, and Justice Project*
Over a century and half after the formal end of slavery in the United States, Americans continue to grapple with how best to understand slavery’s significance in U.S. history. Those conversations have taken on particular significance in higher education, as academic communities seek to reckon with slavery’s influence not only on U.S. history, but also their own. In the past two decades, more than one hundred U.S. colleges and universities have launched investigations seeking to construct more accurate narratives of their institutions’ historical relationship to slavery. In August 2020, a group of students and faculty at William Jewell College, inspired by pioneering work done by Brown University between 2003 and 2006 and more recently by other institutions associated with the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, launched an inquiry designed to answer these questions:
What influence did slavery have on William Jewell College, from its founding in 1849 until the end of the Civil War and beyond?
To what extent did the coerced labor of enslaved people contribute to generating the wealth used by the college’s founders and early trustees to establish and sustain the college?
What actions did the college’s founders take to promote—or undermine—slavery as an institution?
What information can we recover about the lives and identity of the enslaved people whose labor was essential to establishing William Jewell College?
How can this history be remembered in ways that promote the creation of a more just and inclusive community in the future?
The SMJP’s work is guided by these principles:
This research into Jewell’s history with slavery and discussions on how to address this history is student-centered, faculty-advised, and based on grassroots intellectual activity. Empowering students to publish their own research and views and have their independent voices heard is at the heart of the SMJP’s work.
All historical research published by the SMJP will be entirely and demonstrably accurate. Although interpretations of the meaning of these sources will vary, and members of the SMJP may frequently take different points of view on how to address it, an overall commitment to rigorous historical inquiry and unimpeachably accurate historical research is at the heart of the SMJP’s work.
This research will primarily focus on uncovering the college’s history with slavery. Although the wider history of race and Jewell from the founding to the present is a vital subject that deserves extensive attention, slavery’s influence on Jewell in its early years is the least studied and remembered aspect of that history and therefore is the focus of this project.
The research will continue for as long as is necessary to write an exceptionally detailed, historically accurate, powerful, and lengthy account of slavery’s influence on Jewell’s history, similar to reports published by Brown University, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia. [NOTE: in place of a report, in 2023 the SMJP began to publish its research in a documentary form, hoping to reach a wider audience than a report might receive. 1 episode has been published on the SMJP’s YouTube channel, and more episodes will be available at a later date.]
Whenever possible, within the larger subject of Jewell and slavery, the stories of the more than one thousand enslaved people whose coerced labor helped generate the wealth used by Jewell’s founders and major financial backers to establish and sustain the college will be at the heart of the SMJP’s work. Currently, the SMJP has identified the names of 250 people held in slavery by Jewell’s founders, and will continue to work to identify as many as possible and illuminate the conditions under which they lived and labored and how Jewell has benefited.
The SMJP will particularly emphasize stories that illuminate enslaved people’s resistance to their enslavement, demonstrating that slavery in Missouri was far from the benign institution it has sometimes been portrayed as, and showing that many enslaved people took action to secure the freedom that had been stolen from them.
The work will be conducted in light of the SMJP’s recognition that authoring a more accurate account of Jewell’s history with slavery can be used to help build a more diverse and genuinely inclusive community in the future. Through student-led, faculty advised educational initiatives, SMJP members hope to contribute to ongoing cultural change at Jewell.
Although the SMJP’s formal work will conclude with the publication of its documentary, individual SMJP members will work to continue to highlight this history, in various ways, over the long-term, to ensure continued attention to this vitally important element of Jewell’s history.
Please note that this is a working space created to enable collaboration by Jewell students and faculty regarding this research, but is not an official college webpage, and makes no claim to represent the college’s views on these matters. The SMJP is an independent voice regarding the history of Jewell and slavery.