Johns Hopkins university reveals its founder owned slaves
- Hopkins was a wealthy businessman whom the university for ‘almost 100 years’ said was an abolitionist
- But census records from 1840 and 1850 that emerged recently showed that Hopkins owned slaves, with no indication he ever freed them
Johns Hopkins, the celebrated philanthropist who supported the abolition of slavery and whose wealth allowed him to found the prestigious US university that bears his name, owned slaves, the Baltimore-based institution confirmed on Friday.
The revelation by the university, which boasts a long tradition of inclusion, comes as the United States continues reckoning with its own history of racism after widespread protests against discrimination earlier this year.
Calls to dismantle statues of leaders from the historic slave-owning South have multiplied, and the legacies of some of America’s “founding fathers” such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, also slave owners, have been reassessed.
“We have for almost 100 years communicated a story about our origins which is not correct,” Johns Hopkins University president Ron Daniels said Friday in a Zoom discussion. “The revelation of this part of Mr Hopkins’ life is devastating.”
Hopkins came from a wealthy Maryland family and made his fortune in commerce and banking.
Raised in the Quaker faith, a Protestant movement opposed to slavery, he supported former President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
