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UNPACKING EMORY'S HISTORY OF
SLAVERY AND DISPOSSESSION BY KELUNDRA SMITH
A
vis Williams 78Ox 98C 08T 18T never considered going to Oxford College of Emory University. Though she grew up
nearby, she didn’t think she would be welcome there, even
not 1976,” says Williams. She recognized that humor might be an effective means to get her point across.
The next time Williams had a shift in the library, her grand-
with grades in the top 1 percent of her class. But when she was
mother’s friend was eating lunch in the employee break room.
attend. When she arrived on campus, her work-study assignment
says Williams.
admitted with a scholarship, her grandmother insisted that she was in the library.
It was 1976. Although school desegregation had been the
national law for more than twenty years and Emory had graduated its first African American students in 1963, there were still few
Black or other students of color at the university. Williams was re-
lieved to see a familiar face in the library; her grandmother’s friend was a custodial worker there.
She recalls inviting the woman to have lunch with her in
“She said to me, ‘I don’t know what you did, but thank you,’ ” That lunch incident is but one in a series of injustices that
mark Emory University’s history. As a member of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium, the university is committed to un-
packing its participation in acts of prejudice and discrimination so Emory can pave a new path forward, one characterized by unity
and equity. This requires going all the way back to the early nineteenth century before the original campus at Oxford was built.
the employee break room. Her grandmother’s friend refused,
THE ORIGINAL SIN
Williams watched as a woman she’d known her entire life ate her
and Oxford campuses now sit as a result of the 1821 Treaty
saying that custodial workers were not allowed to eat in that area.
The state of Georgia acquired the land where Emory’s Atlanta
lunch in the mop closet. There was no formal policy that Black
of Indian Springs. This treaty was one in a decades-long
custodial staff could not eat in the break area, but there was an unspoken understanding that they were not welcome. For Williams, this simply would not do.
“I approached my supervisor, and I said that I thought the
woman might be senile because she thought it was 1866 and 12
EMORY MAGAZINE
WINTER 2021
attempt to move the Muscogee (Creek) Indians off their land in Georgia and Alabama. Like previous treaties, the tribes
agreed begrudgingly and under duress. By that time, the Muscogee had already ceded millions of acres due to threats of war by white settlers.
PH O T O G R A PH Y E M O RY U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S , K AY H I N TO N , L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E S S , A N D P E R S O N A L C O N T R I B U T I O N S F R O M M A R S H A H O U S TO N , AV I S W I L L I A M S , A N D A N D E R S O N W R I G H T.
SOBERING VIEW This partial panorama of Oxford College from the 1890s includes Phi Gamma Hall, which is believed to have been erected by enslaved people.
