Center for Mason Legacies
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Slaveholders compelled enslaved girls and women to give birth to children. The mothers and their babies lacked legal and moral rights to their bodies. To see the clear link between this statement and George Mason IV, a typical slaveholder who worshiped at the nearby Pohick church, consider his words on the campus statue: “I give and bequeath unto each of my four Daughters, Ann Mason, Sarah Mason, Mary Mason, and Elizabeth Mason, and to each of their heirs for ever, ... the following Slaves with their Increase, respectively from the date of this my Will.... I confirm ...a Negro Girl named Penny to my Daughter Ann.”

“Geographies of Inequity: Exploring the Hidden Lives Next Door,” draws on the Center for Mason Legacies’s Black Lives Next Door project, which was launched in 2021 OSCAR, and Mason researchers George Oberle, LaNitra Berger, Benedict Carton, and Wendi Manuel-Scott.

"Gabrielle Tayac, a Native American scholar and historian, still remembers as a girl hearing from her father the oral history passed down in his family for over 100 years: How the town of Indian Head and the highway through it got named..." Read more from the recent Washington Post article; photo by Julia Nikhinson/For The Washington Post.