The University of Georgia has joined a group of nearly five dozen colleges and universities created several years ago to research its history involving slavery and explore ways to help descendants negatively impacted.
UGA joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium last week. Its participation comes a month after selecting a 21-member team of faculty members and others to research its history concerning slavery. The research initiative is expected to be completed by June 2021.
“We are excited to have a team of faculty from several units collaborating on this project,” UGA officials said in a statement on the consortium’s website. “The range of expertise represented by the research team will provide a rich academic examination of the history of slavery at UGA and contribute significantly to our scholarly understanding of the history of the institution.”
Credit: Imani Dennis
Credit: Imani Dennis
Records show enslaved workers cleaned buildings, started fires to keep students warm and performed other tasks for UGA students and the faculty and administrators who owned them.
A group of community leaders, faculty and students has held demonstrations on campus this year to pressure university leadership to take action on researching how slavery may have benefited UGA, which was chartered about 80 years before slavery ended.
“These are very important steps, hopefully the first of many more to come, towards uncovering the truth about our past, listening to voices we have long ignored, and collaborating to create a more just and equitable future,” the group said in a statement Friday, thanking UGA for joining the consortium.
The consortium is based at the University of Virginia. The schools, mostly located in the Southeast, share advice and resources. Wesleyan College is the only other Georgia school in the group, according to the consortium’s website. There’s no membership fee.
Some schools in the consortium have found they financially profited from slavery and apologized. Georgia’s largest private university, Emory University, issued a “statement of regret” in 2011 after its research “revealed the important role of slaves in helping to build and support the young institution.”
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