Black at Wake (and Carolina and Duke)
In 1836, two years after the founding of what would become Wake Forest University, the estate of John Blount, a planter in Edenton, was donated to the budding institution. The estate included land and enslaved black people, and the proceeds were intended to support “poor and indigent young men destined for the ministry.”
After the death of Blount’s widow, 14 enslaved human beings were auctioned on May 7, 1860, yielding a sum of $10,718 for Wake Forest’s benefit. The details of the transaction are plainly displayed on a website maintained by the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections.
For the first 128 years of its history, a university whose endowment was literally financed by profits from black bodies and black labor excluded black people from studying in its classrooms. When Wake Forest finally admitted its first black student in 1962, it was notably a Ghanaian named Ed Reynolds, not an African American descended from enslaved persons. Next fall, the university will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the entry of the first two black female residential students, Muriel Elizabeth Norbrey (now Beth Hopkins) and Janet Graves.
Wake Forest’s troubled history with white supremacy came crashing into the open this past February with the revelation that the university’s dean of admissions and an assistant dean of admissions posed with the Confederate flag as students in the 1980s.
Read more: https://triad-city-beat.com/black-at-wake-and-carolina-and-duke/
(Winston-Salem Triad City Beat)