norman lebrecht
December 10, 2020
America’s oldest consevatory, the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is wrestling with historic issues of slave ownership. Intensive research has just revealed – shock – that Hopkins was a slave owner. Now they’re looking into George Peabody.
George Washington owned slaves all his life but no-one has yet got around to renaming the capital.
Universities, though, are in the frontline of rewriting history.
Here’s a note from the Peabody dean, Fred Bronstein:
To Members of the Peabody Community:
I am writing to follow up on the message from President Ron Daniels and JHU Medicine leadership sent today. As we now know, recently discovered documents reveal that Johns Hopkins owned and kept enslaved people in his household, at least up through 1850, according to census documents uncovered by university researchers. This very disturbing discovery places the assumed and oft repeated history of Johns Hopkins as an abolitionist in stark contrast to reality, indicating that Mr. Hopkinsâ behaviors around race were far more contradictory than had been previously known.