VCU's medical college benefitted from slavery - Richmond Free Press

Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine “profited successful some factual and indirect ways from slavery,” according to a university-commissioned study released past month.

Founded arsenic portion of Hampden-Sydney College successful 1838, it became an autarkic instauration successful 1854 known arsenic the Medical College of Virginia (MCV). Tax lists and census information amusement that MCV owned oregon rented enslaved laborers who cooked, cleaned, did laundry, maintained buildings and adjacent helped to procure bodies— chiefly from African-American burial grounds.

“Although they seldom person immoderate notation successful assemblage records, these enslaved individuals played cardinal roles successful maintaining the institution,” New York University prof Peter J. Wosh wrote successful the 74-page report. And they did truthful “within an organization civilization that denied their humanity.”

The study was commissioned by VCU pursuing authorities successful 2021 that required the 5 pre-Civil War nationalist colleges to analyse their humanities engagement with slavery, to commemorate the lives of enslaved radical and to make programs that volition payment individuals and communities with connections to enslaved labor.

In a connection posted connected Dec. 9, 2022, VCU president Michael Rao said that portion the report’s findings were “expected, they stay harrowing and disturbing.” He went connected to outline immoderate of the ongoing efforts the assemblage is undertaking to code past wrongs.

In 2020, the assemblage began removing names and symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from its buildings and grounds, including past year’s renaming of the Department of African American Studies’ gathering to Gabriel’s House, successful grant of an enslaved Richmond antheral who organized a rebellion successful 1800 trying to extremity slavery successful Virginia.

A peculiar committee has been created to find VCU’s adjacent steps successful further pursuing “healing and efforts astatine reconciliation.”