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A more complicated love
It’s important to embrace the entire institutional history of Duke. | BY VALERIE GILLISPIE
am writing two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, as protests against white supremacy take place across the country. Many Americans are reckoning with the impact of racism, especially as it relates to American history. I, too, am reckoning with the past, especially here at Duke. There are hard truths to accept in a place where many people feel warmly embraced—a place that many of us love. As university archivist, I also love Duke University. It is undeniable that Duke is a place of extraordinary scholarship and research, as well as beauty and wonder. And it is undeniable that Duke has parts of its past that are disturbing and ugly. How do we reckon with these two truths? The University Archives provides only glimpses into the past, but those glimpses can educate us on where we went wrong, and how we can go right.
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While we became a university only in 1924, we began our life as an educational institution in 1838. Our records are scant about who worked at the school beyond faculty, but we have information from the 1850s that Braxton Craven, president of the institution, owned enslaved people. He also sought to purchase two children, according to an affidavit in the State Archives, but chose not to—the price was higher than he wanted to pay. I have spent a great deal of time looking into the financial ledgers and account books of antebellum Trinity. It appears that the school itself “rented” enslaved labor at times, a heartbreaking discovery. Although Trinity did not engage in slavery on the scale of many other universities, we cannot deny that the school participated in the practice. After the Civil War, Trinity managed to survive and even-
Photography Duke University Archives
