University revises text on founder’s ties to slavery
Opposing scholars say edit does not go far enough
Sixteen months after making global headlines with an announcement that founder Johns Hopkins owned slaves, Johns Hopkins University has updated a biography of the 19th-century business tycoon on its website, revising the language in what a university official described as “minor edits” to the information about Hopkins’ relationship with slavery.
Prominent scholars who pushed back against the school’s 2020 announcement welcomed this week’s change, saying that while it was a step in the right direction, it didn’t go far enough.
The university said Wednesday that its “perspective and straightforward approach to presenting the evidence and ongoing research regarding our founder and slaveholding has not changed.”
In an email sent to members of the Hopkins community in 2020, University President Ron Daniels and others announced that researchers at the school had determined Hopkins — long believed to have been a staunch abolitionist — headed a Baltimore household that included at least five enslaved people, one person who was counted in the 1840 census and four people counted in the 1850 census.
Martha S. Jones, a professor and specialist in African American history who led the research effort, said that the findings made it certain the founder
involving police.
After Thursday’s hearing, Frosh said that he hopes the ruling will deter future challenges to his office’s authority under the new state law.
“I think a reasonable litigant in these circumstances would say ‘Oh, we’re not going to win a case against a preliminary injunction,’ ” the Democrat said.
The shooting occurred at about 4 p.m. Saturday, about an hour after calls came in that Fauver was expressing thoughts of suicide and carrying a gun. Officers located Fauver behind a CVS store in Forest Hill, and ultimately two deputies fired their guns, killing him. The man’s family has said he suffered from chronic pain, which impacted his mental health.
Up until Thursday, the attorney general’s office had been permitted to view footage from the incident in the offices of the sheriff, but not to receive copies.
During Thursday’s hearing, David Wyand, an attorney brought on by the county’s law office, expressed concerns about the potential public release of the footage after it passed to the attorney general’s office, which has a policy of releasing such footage within two weeks whenever possible. He said the sheriff was operating on the orders of Harford County State’s Attorney Albert Peisinger not to release the footage.
“They’ve seen the videos. They still have an open invitation,” Wyand said at the hearing. “[State investigators] can have a room and watch it to their hearts’ content.”
Gahler declined to say what potential criminal conduct the sheriff ’s office may be investigating in this case that would require his office to be in control of evidence.
But Frosh countered that without copies of the footage, his investigators could not use their in-house software to analyze it and splice together video from different officers taken at the same time. Frosh also said he felt that reviewing the video in the sheriff ’s office did not offer his investigators sufficient privacy.
“We don’t think it’s appropriate for us to go to his office to investigate his deputies,” Frosh told the judge.
Frosh said that his office does not release the video until it has been reviewed and all witnesses have been interviewed in police-involved deaths.
Because there are “hours and hours” of footage from numerous police officers and vehicles from Saturday’s shooting, alongside videos from a few civilians, it likely will take the office more than a few weeks to release it, he said.
“It’s highly unlikely that we would release these videos within 14 days,” he said.
Frosh also said his office needed an emergency order from the judge because the sheriff ’s office had only sent over the identity of one witness to the incident, and there were “at least three,” based on the videos taken at the scene.
“This is an emergency because we need to talk to witnesses as soon as possible,” he said. “We know that memories fade. We know that people disappear.”
Frosh also took issue with the sheriff ’s office retaining the physical evidence from Saturday’s shooting.
In a court filing Wednesday, Wyand wrote that the sheriff’s office recently began using the Frederick County Sheriff ’s Office lab to process ballistic evidence, because it could get results in “less than a week” — as opposed to waiting as long as eight months for results from the Maryland State Police lab, which the attorney general’s office uses.
Frosh said his office’s cases are prioritized by the state police forensics team, and so they receive quicker turnaround times for results.