Samson Occom requests a slave or ox for labor from Eleazar Wheelock

Dear Old Dartmouth Built on the Back of Slaves

When Eleazar Wheelock set out for Hanover, New Hampshire with a charter for Dartmouth College, he brought eight enslaved black people: Brister, Exeter, Chloe, Caesar, Lavinia, Archelaus, Peggy, and an enslaved child. At this time,  “there were more slaves than faculty, administrators, or active trustees; in fact, there were arguably as many enslaved black people at Dartmouth as there were students in the college course” (Wilder, 2013). Dartmouth College profited from the sale, purchase, and labor of human beings. The College was built on the backs of Black bodies and the rewards received from involvement in the slave economy demonstrate Dartmouth’s legacy of investing in the subjugation of black bodies.

In Winter 1978, students spray painted the Winter Carnival snow sculpture with black and red paint in order to symbolize the presence of Black and Native students at Dartmouth College. Students protested “the unrecognized presence of other ethnic groups on campus” in order to demonstrate that Dartmouth is “a hostile environment for those who do not fit in the traditional mold—that is white Anglo-Saxon male.” In Fall 2015, over 150 students and faculty members wore black and demonstrated through Baker Berry library in solidarity with the larger movement of #BlackLivesMatter, as did the University of Missouri, Yale University, and other college campuses across the nation that have demanded their institutions acknowledge the historical legacies of structural racism.

While the admissions office boasts the class of 2020 as the most diverse class of students in Dartmouth’s history, the College’s deep ties to slavery cannot be forgotten or ignored. Dartmouth’s founder, who we often revere and celebrate, was a slaveholder. The 1979 defacement of the winter carnival sculpture and the 2015 Black Lives Matter Protest are two examples in which students of color actively resisted their erasure on this campus. In both instances, black and brown students boldly declared their rights to exist at an institution that would have shackled and sold them two hundred years earlier. By showing these two instances alongside Wheelock’s purchase of slaves, we hope to demonstrate that the existence of students of color at Dartmouth is resistance.

 

Further reading:

Craig Steven Wilder. (2013). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.