The police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in September 2016 inspired days of protest in Charlotte, NC and nearby Davidson College. We Wildcats joke – or lament – that we “live in a bubble.” On September 29, African American students challenged their white classmates and faculty to recognize that the feeling of safety on campus and isolation from larger social problems beyond it that some of us enjoy does not always extend to students, faculty, and staff of color. Following a walk-out and march, students shared their experiences of harassment and discrimination. Racism remains a part of daily life at Davidson College.

This was new to me, and it was old news. I began teaching at Davidson in fall 2016, and as one of the major events in Charlotte’s modern history played out, I was still figuring out who was who and where the copiers are on campus. At the same time, I have been doing anti-racist work in higher education since I was an undergraduate student.

I listened to Davidson students share painful experiences and demand that the mostly white crowd of friends and educators do something. Historians have a role to play in difficult discussions about issues like police brutality and racial profiling by providing accurate contextual information and modeling how to engage civilly and ethically. This is particularly true regarding dialogues about race. Most of the time, white folks like me get to walk away and get on with our lives. Ask many (most?) faculty of color what it is like to be a racial minority at a majority-white institution like Davidson, and they’ll tell you how they so rarely get to put down the burden of having to engage issues of race on others’ terms and timeline.

On of the gifts of being a history professor is being able to reconceptualize courses in response to current events. We don’t “teach to the test.” On that September day, I committed to emphasizing race in the U.S. Women’s History course I was scheduled to teach in spring 2017. In a meeting with college archivists soon after, I learned about a small collection of letters written in the 1850s by Mary Lacy, the wife of one of the college’s presidents. After reading the letters, I decided these would be the basis of a web page on gender and slavery at Davidson College. That project (or at least the first phase of it) is now done. You can access it here.

Old letters are onions. Teaching students to peel back the layers of meaning by analyzing language, researching the people mentioned, and putting events described in context is challenging and rewarding. Sometimes, old letters make you cry. As I read Lacy complain about being unable to find a black child to tend to her white toddlers, I recognized that she was oblivious to the traumas slave owners inflicted on the enslaved when they separated families. Davidson College has historically been a place comfortable with black discomfort. I as read Lacy applaud mob violence against slaves following a robbery assumed to have been committed by one of them, I realized that Davidson College has been a place where African Americans have been racially profiled and harassed for far longer than we have been an integrated educational institution.

I am proud of the work that students have done transcribing, annotating, and contextualizing these letters. I hope these serve as a resource enabling thoughtful and deliberate discussion about the kind of place Davidson has been – and the better kind of campus community we can be.