WASHINGTON (WUSA9) — A connection was exposed between the founder of a well-known D.C. university and slavery.
A student at American University started asking questions and wrote an op-ed after learning the school’s founder owned slaves.
However, many people may have never heard about it because it is unclear if the school ever publicly recognized its founder’s past.
His name is etched in stone, honored on a plaque, and plastered on a building at American University.
Bishop John Fletcher Hurst founded the school 125 years ago, and a student uncovered some information about him.
“He was a slave owner about two hours from this campus,” Nickolaus Mack said.
Mack discovered Hurst inherited black slaves from his father after reading his biography and searching archives.
Hurst owned at least two slaves, but according to his biography, struggled with the notion of owning other human beings.
He set those enslaved people free.
Mack claimed the school never told students about their founder’s history.
WUSA9 asked if the university ever publicly recognized Hurst’s previous ownership of slaves.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Fanta Aw, vice president of campus life and inclusive excellence, responded.
Aw pulled together a panel of faculty, students, and clergy to look into the school’s history.
An AU spokesperson said it preliminarily appeared enslaved people lived on the land before the school was founded, but the school has no direct ties to slavery.
“For all of us who kind of know what the history is and what the peak periods were particularly around slavery and so forth, this did not fit that timetable,” Aw said after WUSA9 asked why the university is just now looking into a possible connection to slavery.
It was revealed two years ago that Georgetown University sold slaves to keep its school open.
However, AU was founded in 1893 which is 28 years after slavery was abolished.
There are new questions after this piece of history was brought to light.
How was the school first funded?
Is there more to Hurst’s connection to slavery?
“I’m really optimistic about what will come out of that conversation,” Mack said.
Mack is calling on the university to record, recognize, and rectify the history it finds.
“Rectify it by either memorializing that history or through a plaque of sorts,” he explained,
“What would be the best way to engage our community? Both in terms of education and how we then recognize what we have uncovered,” Aw told WUSA9.
Additionally, Mack is requesting the university working group be incorporated into and funded by money allocated to the university Inclusive Excellence Plan.
The student is also pushing for the creation of a ‘racial climate chronology/timeline’ of negative and positive incidents.
On Wednesday night, American University announced the following people would join a working group on AU's ties to slavery:
- Christine Platt, managing director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center
- Mark Schaefer, university chaplain
- Sybil Roberts, incoming director of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program
- Leslie Nellis, associate university archivist
- Nickolaus Mack, undergraduate student
- Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, director of the Graduate Program in Public History and assistant professor in the Department of History
- David Aldridge, AU alum and reporter for Turner Television Networks
- Bette Dickerson, associate professor emerita in the Department of Sociology and interim assistant vice president of campus life
On Thursday, American University will formally inaugurate former Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell as the college's 15th President.
Burwell is the first woman to hold the position.
