“Johns Hopkins University is taking steps to scrub the name of a Maryland slave owner’s wife from a professorship program to advance the university’s DEI “values,” campus officials said this month,” reports The College Fix.
Based on a recommendation by the university’s Name Review Board, officials plan to “de-name” the Caroline Donovan Professorship in English Literature and create a new professorship to address the “harm associated with the original funding,” the university news center reports.
Caroline Donovan, whose husband, Joseph S. Donovan, owned and sold thousands of slaves, donated $100,000 to Johns Hopkins for the professorship in 1889 after her husband died and she inherited his fortune, according to the board’s investigation.
“The committee reviewed archival records and documents and determined that Caroline Donovan’s conduct and views, enacted and expressed without acknowledgement of wrongdoing or repair, and the use of funds linked to the domestic slave trade run counter to the institution’s values,” including its “unwavering commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the university stated.
However, because Donovan attached legal restrictions to her gift, including the requirement that her name be used, university officials said they cannot change the name without a court order. They recently filed a petition with Baltimore Circuit Court seeking permission to do so, according to the university…..
The “de-naming” recommendation is the first action by the university’s Name Review Board. The board is also considering removing President Woodrow Wilson’s name from a fellowship and changing the name of its Gildersleeve Professorship in Classics….in 2020, the university said its namesake also was a slave owner, according to The Baltimore Sun. The Name Review Board website does not mention if Hopkins’ name is among its current considerations.
Colleges sometimes wrongly disparage their deceased donors, blaming them for things they had nothing to do with. Middlebury College renamed a chapel named for a Vermont governor, based on false claims that he pushed eugenics. In fact, Middlebury College itself pushed eugenics, not the deceased governor, whose estate sued Middlebury over its renaming of the chapel named for the governor.
Many historical figures have been canceled in recent years, or had their statues vandalized or desecrated.
BLM protesters tore down the statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco on Juneteenth in 2021. Grant is the general who did the most to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. Later, as president of the United States, he appointed black people and Native Americans to office and tried to protect blacks against racist violence in the South, even though keeping federal troops in the South to protect blacks was costly and unpopular in the North. Grant’s contributions to black freedom were so great that he was celebrated by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
The reason for tearing down his statue was that he once briefly owned a slave that he had been given. But he voluntarily freed that slave in 1859, before the Civil War, and long before slavery was abolished.
Grant’s statue was not alone in being torn down. As Newsweek notes, “The statues of St. Junipero Serra, the first saint of the Roman Catholic Church to be canonized in the U.S., and Francis Scott Key, the author of the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ were also torn down at the park on the same day.”
Police in that progressive city allowed it to happen: “Nearly 400 protesters were reported at the scene around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to police, who did not engage with the demonstrators. No arrests were made, NBC Bay Area reported.”
Earlier, a George Washington statue in liberal Portland was toppled, and covered with a burning U.S. flag. George Washington held slaves, but freed them in his will. Authorities in Portland have not reinstalled the statute, saying it caused “harm” to those offended by it.
By contrast, BLM protesters have left alone the Seattle statue of Soviet Communist dictator Lenin, who relied on slave labor and forced labor on a vast scale. As The New Yorker notes:
[Lenin’s 1918] Resolution on Red Terror provided for the “safeguarding of the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolating them in concentration camps.” The idea was to separate, suppress, or destroy “categories of individuals” — priests, landowners, and other “enemies of the Revolution” — and to begin creating a pool of slave labor. Construction began in 1919. By the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four camps, with around fifty thousand prisoners; within three years, the number of camps had quadrupled.”
Yet Black Lives Matter protesters are busy defacing or toppling statues of people who made America a more just and equal place. One example is Revolutionary war hero Tadeusz Kościuszko. His will dedicated his property to finance the emancipation or education of black people. Yet his statue was spat and urinated on and spray-painted with the words “F*ck You” and “BLM.”
Protesters also vandalized a statute of Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf, defaced the statute of abolitionist Matthias Baldwin with the words “colonizer” and “murderer,” and spray-painted profanity and “BLM” on the statue of Union Admiral David Farragut, who helped defeat the South in the Civil War. Protesters also vandalized Jewish schools and synagogues.
