Exposing Our Roots: Trinity University’s Legacy of Slavery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Following the lead of other institutions, a group of faculty and students of the Roots Commission at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, have been researching racism and inequity in the university’s history. Since 2018, the research goal has been to uncover ways in which the institution and its founders benefitted from slavery. Student researchers used 19th century digitized archives, ethnographic narratives, genealogies, and census data to piece together Trinity’s story since its founding in 1869. They designed a website to synthesize their findings in the form of online exhibits. These exhibits explain the racism present in east Texas and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church during the founding, and on the founders of Trinity, their Confederate ties, former slave holdings, and anti-Reconstruction ideologies. This research sits within a broader movement recognizing the structural impacts of slavery in higher education and calling for change to rectify the injustice. This research, done with support from the current administration of Trinity University, highlights school ties to exploitation and racism at individual and institutional levels since its inception. Despite previous efforts to distance themselves from that past, we hope that these discoveries motivate Trinity to make restorative justice a priority in its mission.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32078