At Johns Hopkins, Revelations About Its Founder and Slavery

Jennifer Schuessler
Wed, December 9, 2020, 2:59 PM EST

It’s a tale that has long been repeated at the university and medical center in Baltimore that bear his name: In 1807, 12-year-old Johns Hopkins was summoned home from boarding school to work the fields of the family’s sprawling tobacco farm in Maryland after his father, following the directives of his Quaker faith, freed the family’s slaves.

Young Johns grew up to be a wildly successful businessman and, as the story goes, a committed abolitionist. And on his death in 1873, he left $7 million — the largest philanthropic bequest in American history at that time — to found the nation’s first research university, along with a hospital that would serve the city’s poor “without regard to sex, age or color.” ... Hopkins’ Quaker rectitude has been a touchstone for the institution he founded. But an important part of that origin story, it turns out, is untrue.

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On Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University released new research revealing that there were enslaved people in its founding benefactor’s household as late as 1850. And while the Hopkins family’s entanglements with slavery are complicated, the university has so far found no evidence of Johns Hopkins’ father freeing any enslaved people.

As for the long-standing claims that Hopkins himself held abolitionist beliefs, it is unclear whether they rest on any evidence at all.

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