Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor has a book coming out next week that looks at the connection between Thomas Jefferson’s beloved University of Virginia and slavery. According to the Washington Post:
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, male students studying at Southern universities regularly mistreated, beat and raped the enslaved men, women and children who catered to their everyday needs, Taylor said. The brutal behavior was ignored or accepted by professors, administrators and local authorities.
“These men are 16 or 17 years old, they’ve been raised on plantations and been trained from youth that it is their job to command people and abuse them if there is any resistance to their command,” Taylor said. “For a student to lash out and hit an enslaved person, that was routine in this world.”
Little, if any, previous scholarship has explored the horrific abuse endured by enslaved people working at Southern colleges in the lead-up to the Civil War, according to Maurie D. McInnis, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s now coming to light courtesy of two books — Taylor’s and “Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University,” which McInnis co-edited with Louis P. Nelson — that tackle the subject at U-Va., Thomas Jefferson’s pride and joy.
Both books (Taylor’s publishes Oct. 15, while McInnis’s published in August) draw on years of painstaking scrutiny of archival records, which U-Va. made available as part of its ongoing attempt to grapple with its slaveholding past.
Last year, the university produced a 96-page report that concluded slavery was “in every way imaginable . . . central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.”
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