Amid the oak trees of Baylor University’s Founders Mall, a beautiful green corridor that stretches down the center of campus, a memorial is under construction. The oaks have their own history as part of a tradition of students planting trees on campus, and now Baylor is adding to the landscape a reminder of some of its darker history.
Going up is a memorial to the enslaved people who helped build the school’s original campus in Independence, Texas. It is slated for completion this year.
Amid national backlash to diversity initiatives and Black history celebrations, Baylor has undertaken new research into its institutional history with slavery and is making changes to its campus.
“Christian institutions have an opportunity because our commitment to justice extends beyond government compliance,” said Malcolm Foley, a Black pastor and historian of lynching who has served on the school’s commission about the memorials and helped lead the design efforts on the memorial to enslaved people. “This is something that we cannot water down.”
The commission’s report narrates Baylor’s history, saying the school came to be when Baptist missionaries from the South began moving to Texas in the 1830s. Texas was still a Mexican state that outlawed slavery, but the Baptists brought slaves and the institution of slavery with them, and Texas became an independent republic in 1836.
Baylor’s first four presidents, as well as 11 of the 15 first board trustees, were slave owners. Wealth generated from enslaved men, women, and children “directly benefited the University,” a history page on the school’s website now states. By 1850, half the population in the county surrounding Baylor were enslaved, according to the commission’s historical research.
Early leaders of the school supported the Confederacy. Rufus Burleson, the school’s second president, was a Confederate chaplain and urged students to join the Confederate army. The school recently moved a statue of him to a less prominent location on campus.
Last fall, the Christian university unveiled limestone blocks with additional historical information placed around a statue of Judge R. E. B. Baylor, a slave owner who founded the school with other Baptists in 1845.
“The Bible explains in both Exodus and John that freedom is central to the Christian life, and we should be transparent about the times in our history when Baylor was an obstacle to freedom,” the school website states.
The memorial to enslaved people will feature words from Exodus 20:2 (“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery”) and John 8:36 (“So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed”).
Baylor leadership and students pushed to address campus monuments to slave owners after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the school leadership formed a commission of students, faculty, staff, board members, and alumni to research the dark parts of its history and consider how it presented that on campus.
In a 90-page report in December 2020, the commission issued recommendations on changing certain campus statues and building a memorial to enslaved people connected to the school. Some commission members are still working on research projects about individual slaves who were part of Baylor’s history.
“Our goal at the outset of this process was not to erase Baylor’s history, but rather to tell the university’s complete story by taking an additive approach as we shine light on the past,” said Baylor board chair Mark Rountree in a statement in 2022 at the start of the reconfiguring of campus monuments.
The scope of the commission’s work—considering campus monuments— was “intentionally narrow,” wrote Rountree in a 2021 note to the Baylor community.
The work on campus memorials has ongoing backing from Baylor president Linda Livingstone and Foley, who is her equity adviser. With his four years on the job, Foley has lasted longer in this role than the average diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer because of Livingstone’s support, he said. People in DEI positions average three years in higher education, according to a 2016 study.
“Christians had such a significant role in not only justifying racialized chattel slavery but actively pushing it forward,” said Foley. “We have a unique responsibility to not only repent of it but repair the harm actually caused by it.”
This month, Foley has been preaching through Revelation at his nondenominational church, Mosaic Waco, where some Baylor professors and students attend. Mosaic emphasizes being multicultural as part of its mission.
And Foley is watching the growing national backlash to DEI work with dismay.
DEI can have many meanings, but for staff at Christian colleges, it has meant organizing talks about racism, addressing the diversity of staff, or looking at how schools portray racial minorities in promotional materials.
Some DEI objectors worry such initiatives impose a uniform ideology, like removing curriculum that might not conform to certain progressive ideals. Foley is sympathetic to that argument.
“If the stated issue folks have with it is it becomes an office of ideological policing—if that’s going on, that shouldn’t go on,” he said. But he added, “I know folks who have had divisions dismantled who weren’t doing ideological policing.”
As with any efforts designed to change an organization, DEI work can be isolating and unpopular. Foley says his work requires “everyone for it to actually go forward, because it’s culture shaping.”
Baylor’s student population is mostly white, but last year’s freshman class at Baylor had the highest percentage of racial minorities in the school’s history, at 38 percent of the class. Overall minority enrollment stands at 35.3 percent,
In 2021, 50 percent of Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) institutions reported having staff in diversity advocate roles.
Whether that number has changed is unclear. Updated CCCU data is still being collected, according to spokesperson Amanda Staggenborg, “due to changes in positions and titles related to diversity advocates on campuses,” but she added that “we remain committed to promoting biblical unity and fostering a sense of belonging for everyone at CCCU institutions.”
Baylor didn’t hire Foley because of “donor pressure,” he said, but a genuine commitment to try to understand how the culture of the school might retain some of its racial past.
The idea of abolishing DEI, he said, suggests that institutions operated in a colorblind way prior to DEI. Historically, he said, that is not true.
“I fundamentally don’t want us to lie to ourselves and one another,” he said. “People think this work is just about white people feeling guilty. My goal is not to make people to feel guilty for things they haven’t done. My goal is for people to be committed to treating everyone they come in contact with justly. It requires an understanding of history … and how far we have to go.”
Baylor’s process of racial integration in the 1960s, for example, didn’t happen naturally but came about “under pressure,” according to Foley. Segregation built a particular institutional culture, he said, that is not easily undone. Statues are just symbols, but he found that the process of addressing the statues made Baylor confront its history.
He believes Christian institutions should be committed to looking at history and understanding how it still affects their communities’ obligation to love and justice today.
“We need administrations of institutions that are deeply committed to doing the right thing,” Foley said. “For Christian institutions and people, we live our lives under the shadow of the throne of God and the Lamb. … That gives us the confidence to do what we have to do and then face the consequences that fall from it.”
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