Two articles by Center for Mason Legacies scholars are featured in the February 2025 volume of American Nineteenth Century History, the peer-reviewed, transatlantic journal of the Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians. A special issue on "Universities and Slavery," it was guest-edited by George Mason University's Benedict Carton, associate professor of integrative studies and a member of CML's founding faculty, with Natalie Zacek of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Along with Carton, CML article authors included founding CML Director George D. Oberle III, an associate professor of history and University Libraries' history librarian, and Wendi Manuel-Scott, the center's third founding faculty member and a professor in the School of Integrative Studies.
The articles describe the philosophy, methodologies and pedagogy informing the center's creation and work in the context of understanding race's role in our universities' origins. In "A memorial methodology from 'another field': a liberatory praxis," Manuel-Scott describes how CML's pedagogy looks to teach and studying such matters through ideological frameworks that resist replicating exclusionary practices. CML pedagogy challenges conventional understandings of plantation bondage and its legacies, Manuel-Scott writes, and addresses the “absent presence” of Black bodies in educational histories and spaces of learning. Based on the concept of "Black ways of knowing" expressed by Sojourner Truth, the article suggests how "emancipatory" praxis and liberatory geoespistemology can connect space and ideas with freedom in ways current curricular approaches do not.
While their labor on many college campuses effectively "territorialized" enslaved people as part of the scenery of higher education, Manuel-Scott suggests we make them visible by coming from "another field" and drawing on "subversive epistemes ... at the margins of the university." She also takes issue with a recent wave of "well-meaning slavery memorial projects ... [that] effectively re-territorialize Black bodies" by commemorating their subjects through spectacles of pain. In contrast, she describes the process of creating a memorial on George Mason's campus that emphasizes lived memories and experiences of those enslaved by Mason, exemplified by its early focus on the "aliveness" of Penny – an enslaved Black child. Having documented plain facts of her existence, ownership and forced relocations, the memorial's creators fleshed out her fuller narrative through the material evidence of the back stairs she would have used at Gunston Hall, Mason's extant plantation home.
"From the Enslaved Children of George Mason to Black Lives Next Door: rediscovering the namesake of Virginia’s largest university in the 'plantation' suburbs of Washington, D.C.," by Carton and Oberle, explains why CML founders—prompted by undergraduates' questions—engaged students in reexamining our school's namesake and his legacies, whether physical (in the form of Gunston Hall and the plantation economy), human (in the lasting effects of slavery) or ideological (in the form of ideas about property and "rights" that weigh differently depending on context). George Mason University, the authors contend, though founded long after slavery ended and after even the passage of landmark civil rights laws, and known today for its diversity, nevertheless has something in common with far older schools like Yale—"an association with slavery.” They trace previously unnoted strains of white supremacist thought that informed the twentieth-century "rediscovery" of George Mason IV as a pillar of individual rights, notwithstanding his ardent support for race-based slavery as among those rights, and led to his honoring at our university. At Yale, meanwhile, the predominance of "Lost Cause" reconciliation efforts into the 1930s likewise demonstrates that school origin dates matter little to questions of links between slavery and higher education.
Addressing these questions, they write, is "a crucial task that requires dedicated faculty, students, and staff to find evidence without fear or favor." The article's final section unpacks how CML methods turned up such evidence, previously "elusive" or unseen, in a research process that could be replicated elsewhere, in three projects: the Enslaved Children of George Mason, the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial, and Black Lives Next Door.
Researchers drew on a combination of evidence from sources including archives and special collections that chronicle academic affairs, primary sources revealing "the vital statistics of enslavement" (such as ownership deeds, transaction and tax ledgers, and records of births, marriages and wills), and, where possible, oral histories. Black Lives Next Door also demonstrates active use of maps and mapping tools to expose new layers of information, including how our campus grew through gifts of land from descendants of local enslavers and also through the erasure of a Black neighborhood first settled by people newly freed from slavery.
For assistance with their research and ideas, the three authors credited CML affiliates LaNitra M. Berger, professor of history and art history and director of African and African American Studies, and Georgia Brown, lead archivist of the Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center and an alumna of the university's history department, as well as Associate Professor of Psychology Lauren Cattaneo.
February 14, 2025