Family helps campus delve into its history
As a child, Becky Vanderslice often visited family near Prairie View, where her relatives had lived for generations. One day while playing, she and her cousin came upon a ledger listing names, ages, skin colors and dollar amounts. The document was part of her family’s seldom-discussed history. Her relative, Col. Jared Kirby, had owned the Alta Vista Plantation — one of several in the area that belonged to the family — before it later was sold to the state and turned into Prairie View A&M University.
When they saw the names of the people enslaved there, her cousin asked why those people hadn’t left. “It was just much more complex than that, sweetie,” is how Vanderslice remembers her great-aunt responding. “It was like, OK, well … then you put the probate list back in the bottom drawer of the desk.”
Many years later, she’s taken that list — and other family records and stories
— out of the drawer and shared them with the university faculty and staff. The result has been a rich new chapter in the history of the place where Texas’ first institution of higher learning to welcome Black students has stood since shortly after its founding in 1876.
Growing up in Dallas and later Colorado, Vanderslice, whose greatgrandmother was the daughter of Kirby’s first wife, said she struggled with her family’s connection to slavery.
She knew she wanted to share the documents and family lore that detailed life on the plantation, but she didn’t know how. Once, she drove to Prairie View but turned back. Who would she talk to? Would they really want to hear from her?
The answer, it turns out, is a resounding yes. When she finally did call an archivist at the university, she felt great relief, nearly crying as she recounted the moment with the editorial board in April.
Phyllis Earles, the archivist, remembers the moment, too. “I’d been waiting or hoping that somebody from the Kirby family would call,” she recalls telling Vanderslice. Earles told us could sense Vanderslice’s hesitation but treated her with empathy. “I put myself in her place. For her to have the courage to make that phone call and to continue the conversation is in itself monumental.”
Now, as universities across America are confronting the legacy of slavery on their campuses, Prairie View has embarked upon a different kind of self-reflection.
That’s because its connection to slavery is multi-dimensional — it sits on the site of a former plantation and many who work or even study there can trace their ancestors to the people enslaved there and nearby.
The Kirby family’s involvement forms a critical part of the universitywide research projects undertaken ahead of the school’s 150th anniversary in 2026. Work on multiple projects from students and professors, including undergraduate Asha Mahamud and history professor Tyler Moore, have added to the new historical understanding and led to more than $650,000 in grants and private support.
Searching archives and census records, Mahamud has tracked down details about several of the people enslaved by Kirby, including Elizabeth Burney, whose recollections recorded in a 1930s dissertation recalled the brutal treatment by “Marster Jack” and how she received her first pair of shoes only after Emancipation. Before that, enslaved people working in the fields used animal hides to wrap their feet. Mahamud also learned of three enslaved men, John, Dan and Bill, who escaped the plantation and headed for Mexico. Kirby posted a notice in the newspaper, hoping to hunt them down.
“I hope they made it,” Mahamud said during an April presentation to community members of the ongoing research efforts.
“Our purpose is to be truth-seekers and -tellers,” Marco Robinson, an assistant professor of history and the assistant director of the school’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice, told the crowd gathered to learn about the center’s ongoing research.
By coming forward about her own family’s history as slaveholders, Vanderslice and her children Allison and Mara Vanderslice have helped fill in holes in the historic record of a county that was a stronghold of Confederate support, and one that has a long history of intense racial violence and oppression, as well as resistance on the part of the Black community.
“There are people right here in the county that don’t necessarily want us to talk about that,” explained Robinson.
But those stories need to be told. The history of America’s era of slavery includes people who owned slaves and those who didn’t, as well as those who were enslaved. Unless more families step forward with the information they have, some stories will be lost, some histories will remain incomplete.
“When we cannot get access to their stories, we cannot get access to our own,” Melanye Price, a political science professor and director of the Center for Race and Justice, told the audience.
Vanderslice’s contributions have helped paint a fuller picture of the campus and the more than 1,400 acres it sits on. The work continues. It’s a partnership that represents a model other institutions should emulate, with help from all of us.
Unless more families step forward … some stories will be lost.