MIT & Slavery
A Developing Story
By BAMIT Executive Board
“Our founder was a slave owner.” — Craig Steven Wilder, the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at MIT.
An MIT undergraduate research course, MIT and Slavery, taught by Prof. Craig S. Wilder and Institute archivist Nora Murphy, recently revealed the Institute’s historic connections to slavery: MIT’s first president, William Barton Rogers, possessed enslaved Africans in his Virginia household until the early 1850s.
Although Massachusetts had outlawed slavery in the early 1780s, Rogers lived in Virginia — where slavery was still legal — from 1819 until 1853. Historical documents reveal that he kept two and six enslaved persons in his household in 1840 and 1850, respectively.
MIT was founded in 1861, around the time the Civil War was ending the American tradition of chattel slavery. The institution of slavery nevertheless had a considerable influence on MIT’s evolution.
According to Craig Steven Wilder, the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at MIT and a leading expert on the links between universities,
“…by looking at MIT’s ties to slavery, what you start to see is the centrality of slavery to the rise of the United States and its institutions.”
MIT President L. Rafael Reif noted that the study is an important step toward unearthing the breadth of MIT’s history and sparking productive dialogue about the institution’s past, present, and future:
“At MIT, we believe in looking at the facts, even when they’re painful. So I am deeply grateful to Professor Wilder for giving us a mechanism for finding and sharing the truth.”
Professor Wilder’s award-winning book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), documents how slavery shaped U.S. colleges and universities from the 1600s onward.
In the future, Professor Wilder plans to explore the role of MIT in Reconstruction:
“The rise of MIT is in many ways a story of the transformation from a slave economy to a post-slavery industrial economy, with lots of racial legacies and lots of unresolved conflicts that continue to play out in the United States today, including the really quite critical question of the position of black people and black labor in American society, and how we will ultimately define freedom for people who aren’t white.”
The perspective of the Black Alumni/ae of MIT (BAMIT) on these findings is colored by the many ways in which race continues to play a significant role in our lives today. The vicious legacy of chattel slavery, the failure of post-civil war reconstruction efforts, state-sponsored Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, racial terrorism at the hands of the KKK, unequal voting rights, unequal education, residential segregation, mass incarceration, and the pervasive issue of race in American social, economic and political life — all these institutional and systemic social challenges are intricately woven into the fabric of American identity.
MIT is certainly not exempt from this tradition.
Are we surprised that there is a connection between MIT and slavery? No. Nevertheless, for many, the study will open up wounds that may long have been festering or shed light upon historical — and even current — events at MIT that may be shocking, inconceivable, and seemingly unreal. We all have stories to share that span both time and place. (Consider the impact Black Panther’s fictional Wakanda is having on real-life dialogue around Black excellence in STEM fields and in our culture.) However, meaningful dialogue always stems from a shared understanding of our historical and moral foundation.
BAMIT is excited by this dialogue, which we believe will strengthen our community and prepare us for a future of continued racial justice advocacy. And even as we look back, we must stay focused on the present and on the future.
READ MORE: “MIT class reveals, explores Institute’s connections to slavery,” MIT News, 12 February 2018
Do you have thoughts to share about these findings (or about Wakanda)? Let us know in the comment section below.
The Black Alumni(ae) of MIT (BAMIT) is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering the next generation of Black leaders, innovators, and dreamers. Find out more at www.bamit.org.
