Distorted accounts of the lives of famous men have consequences, historians say
When Kobi Little was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, he was curious to learn what events the school had planned to commemorate Black History Month.
The possible subjects, he says, were many. There was the story of Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, the civil rights pioneer whose f ather was a member of the slave-owning Carroll family, which owned the land that became the main campus. There was Levi Watkins Jr., the Black Johns Hopkins heart surgeon who knew and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. There was Baltimore’s own complex history of racial struggle.
The only event Little heard of that February in 1993 was a library exhibit about the Birneys, a white family that freed its slaves during the 19th century.
“They could have talked about any number of amazing things,” says Little, now an ordained minister and president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. “The absurdity was that a tribute to Black history would consist of the actions of white people.”
He helped lead a student protest that led to the display’s removal.
Little says he recalled the story not to malign his alma mater, which he says has made notable progress toward fuller racial inclusiveness, but to offer perspective on what could become a pivotal moment in the university’s history.
Hopkins researchers went public this month with the finding that, according to U.S. census records, Johns Hopkins, the university’s founder - a man long revered as a bold abolitionist - was a slave owner.
The news flew in the face of beliefs about the founder that have been central to the school’s image, and Baltimore’s, for nearly a century.
Some in the university community and beyond have downplayed the finding, arguing that it’s hardly news that a wealthy white man owned enslaved people in mid-19th century Baltimore. Others have said it shouldn’t erase the legacy of someone who
left $7 million in his will to create a university and, among other things, start an orphanage for Black children. The contrast between narrative and reality has left some stunned and hurt.
But to Little and others, what hurts most is that a distorted portrayal of Hopkins survived so long in the first place.
“When you don’t have an accurate and inclusive history, it has a deep impact, from the way it malforms individuals’ psyches to the policy decisions we end up making and accepting,” he says. “If we don’t tell that full history, we spread the very kinds of prejudice that led to a false narrative in the first place.”
The question of historical storytelling - who writes it, what it emphasizes and what it leaves out - has preoccupied intellectuals for centuries.
It was in the 1700s that a French essayist, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, posed a question some historians still find interesting: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” An adage often attributed to Winston Churchill says that history is “written by the victors.”
The findings on Johns Hopkins struck Jonathan Zimmerman particularly hard. A longtime history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he received his doctoral training at the Baltimore university.
Zimmerman has made a
study of what can happen when the public accepts myth rather than history, and even he was swept up in the Hopkins narrative recently disproved by Hopkins history professor Martha S. Jones and her small team.
“Like a lot of other Hopkins grads, I had drunk the Kool-Aid,” he said. “Thank goodness for people like Martha Jones and those who are working with her. Without that, we’d just keep drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Zimmerman says it will be the work of historians to determine what, exactly, led to the creation of a narrative about Hopkins that was insufficiently complex, why it went largely unchallenged for so long, and what specific damage it has caused.
It certainly didn’t help that Helen Hopkins Thom, the founder’s adoring grandniece, wrote the 1929 book on which most of the lore is based. And it’s an open question, Zimmerman says, as to whether someone happened on the facts years ago and decided to keep them quiet.
Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels has said the university will investigate the matter - including the genesis of the narrative - wherever the research leads.
“As President Daniels noted when announcing this new information, finding out how the previous story about Mr. Hopkins went unchallenged and
unverified since 1929 will be one of the areas of focus for our research,” spokeswoman Karen Lancaster said. “We have no indication that it was previously known but ignored or suppressed.”
The problem of incomplete history is hardly new on the American scene. For generations, traditional lore remembered figures from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee mainly for the conquests they made. It took later generations of historians to explore the costs to others of their feats, and that has had consequences.
“Thanksgiving is the classic example,” Zimmerman said. “In elementary school, we teach that the Pilgrims came, the natives helped them learn how to grow things, and they had a great, lovely feast together.”
But, he added, we leave out the fact that, within a year, Myles Standish had killed and decapitated a native warrior and put his head on a stake outside of Plymouth colony.
“If you tell people that, the entire story around race in America takes on a different meaning. It’s a perfect example of how a myth can have an enormously distortive effect on how people look at their entire world.”
A similar dynamic is evident locally, according to one prominent Baltimore author.
Antero Pietila’s 2010 book, “Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” is considered a landmark examination of the factors that led to the demographic patterns now evident in the nation’s urban areas.
Pietila showed that the origins of white flight - the movement of millions of whites from increasingly diverse cities, including Baltimore, into the suburbs after World War II could be traced to such factors as federal and local housing policies that were shaped by white supremacist attitudes.
For years, Pietila says, scarcity of research on the subject allowed explanations to take hold that were falsely tinged with racist stereotypes.
“For example, the tense and complicated relationship between the city and Baltimore County from the 1960s until recently was caused by the absence of a frank public discussion about the reasons for white flight,” Pietila said.
“That, in turn, allowed county politicians to exploit anti-city resentments among those who felt that Blacks had pushed them out. I believe the whole region has been harmed,” he said.
In Johns Hopkins’ case, the distortion seems to have begun when Thom decided to gather a collection of reminiscences about her forebear and his upbringing.
In “Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette,” she wrote that his grandfather, also named Johns, enslaved people at the family plantation in Anne Arundel County, but freed them in 1778 as a matter of conscience, and that his f ather, Samuel, did the same, manumitting his slaves in 1807.
This, in her telling, inspired young Johns to grow up a fierce opponent of the institution of slavery - in her words, an abolitionist.
This year, though, Hopkins researchers discovered census returns from 1840 and 1850 that show the founder owned five enslaved man at his estate in what is now Baltimore’s Clifton Park.
They found evidence the elder Johns Hopkins freed nine enslaved people, but also that he transformed the status of 32 other peo- ple to that of “term slaves.” That kept them in servitude into their 20s. The researchers came across no sign of Samuel Hopkins manumitting anyone. And Jones, the history professor, says that however else the younger Johns Hopkins might have supported racial equity, he was no abolitionist.
“Our failure to know his story has delayed our efforts to reckon with and address 1 / 8the university’s3 / 8 origins in slavery, and it has kept us from joining what is a national reckoning with slavery across dozens of colleges and universities,” she said.
For his part, Wes Moore says the findings didn’t come as a complete shock.
The Baltimore-born author and TV producer earned his bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins in 2001, and he says school representatives repeatedly shared the long-standing narrative with students.
He never bought it whole cloth — “If you have a basic understanding of American history, you know the complexity of those narratives,” he said — but it was still “hurtful and harmful to learn that the narrative we were told was not just inaccurate, but actually the opposite of reality.”
Moore, the author of The New York Times bestselling book “The Other Wes Moore” and a native of Baltimore, says growing up as an African American in such a “racially complicated” city by its very nature “forces a psychological question that takes actual work to overcome: the question of, ‘Do you belong there?’”
Moore is a veteran who did his military training at Fort Bragg, an Army post named for a Confederate officer. Moore later won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship, an honor established in the name of an ardent British colonialist.
For Moore, the Johns Hopkins findings completed that mind-boggling circuit.
“With this news, I realize that every institution that has helped to shape me as a young man was founded by or named after men whose fortunes and fates and legacies all came off the subjugation and the oppression of Black lives,” he says.
“We cannot underestimate the psychological twister that we are asking people of color to be able to endure as we continue to smile and move forward.”