On Friday, November 7, Baylor University unveiled its Memorial to Enslaved Persons, a cornerstone of the commitments outlined in the final report created by the Commission on Historic Campus Representations. The report was presented to the Baylor Board of Regents in December 2020 and was approved by the board in 2021.
The memorial, situated within Founders Mall on Baylor’s Waco, Texas, campus, is designed to recognize the enslaved people owned by Judge R.E.B. Baylor, one of the institution’s three co-founders. It provides a space for meeting, reflection, and telling a more complete story of the university’s history.
Michael McFarland
At an event celebrating the memorial, Dr. Michael McFarland reminded attendees that “we sit under shade trees we did not plant, we drink out of wells we did not dig, and we are warmed by fires we did not light.” McFarland, a Baylor regent and member of the Commission on Historic Campus Representations, said of those whose hands involuntarily helped build the institution, “Their names may not appear on Baylor’s official record, but their fingerprints are etched forever in the stones and soil all over this campus.”
Baylor was originally located in Independence, about 95 miles southeast of Waco. In 1845, the year of the university’s founding, about half of the area’s population around Independence consisted of enslaved persons. According to Baylor’s president, Dr. Linda Livingstone, “those individuals contributed to the construction of buildings and activities of daily life in that area for nearly two decades.”
Linda Livingstone
Speaking to this stain on Baylor’s history, Livingstone said, “We believe that the incompatibility of Baylor’s Christian mission and its roots in slavery requires a reckoning with this legacy.”
Dr. Alan Lefever, the director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection, framed the monument’s installation within Baylor’s Baptist roots. “Ironically,” he said, “the cornerstone of the Baptist faith is freedom. And when you look at our history, especially Baptists in the South, the one thing they denied so many people was freedom.”
Lefever, who also served on the commission that led to the memorial, noted how often the phrase “Baylor family” is used in telling the university’s story. Although he is proud of those words, he discovered “there were so many members of that commission that didn’t feel like they were part of the Baylor family because their story was not told.”
Alan Lefever
He added, “Being part of a family means you tell the deep and uncomfortable stories.”
The memorial, made of limestone similar to that used to build the original campus in Independence, includes two scriptures related to freedom: 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.”
The outer rings of the monument include 33 illuminated voids, representing each of the enslaved people owned by Judge Baylor. One of those includes Ann Freeman, a woman who had been enslaved by both Judge Baylor and Henry Graves, Baylor’s first president. Freeman is known to have visited the Waco campus on at least two occasions in her later years.
The Memorial to Enslaved Persons was built following the installation of other monuments on campus. They include representations of the late Rev. Robert Gilbert and Mrs. Barbara Walker, who, in 1967, became Baylor’s first Black students to earn undergraduate degrees.
At the end of the ceremony, Dr. Livingstone and members of the commission turned on the water that flows in seven sheets down the monument’s bricks. Ian Shirley, the landscape architect for the project, said the intent for the fountain is “that each of us, as we see our reflection in that veil, as the sound of the fountains blocks out the sound of the rest of the environment, will be able to connect in some way to the humanity of those we wish to honor.”
More information on Baylor’s Memorial to Enslaved Persons can be found on Baylor’s website.
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