Virginia College To Examine Its Racial History: WILLIAMSBURG Va. – The College of William and Mary is examining its role as a slave owner and its discrimination against Black people for decades after the Civil War and will look at current race relations.The school has formed a panel to study how the history of the nation's second-oldest college was intertwined with the history of Black people. Before the Civil War, for example, President Thomas Roderick Dew used his position as a platform for promoting and justifying the slave trade.
William and Mary adopted a resolution last spring acknowledging that it owned and exploited slave labor from its founding in 1693 until the Civil War and that it discriminated against Black people during the Jim Crow era.
The Lemon Project Committee will examine slavery and race relations from the end of the Civil War to present times. It takes its name from a slave named Lemon, owned by William and Mary in the 1800s.
