Background

During the 2016-2017 academic year, the Provost’s Office convened a group to examine Wake Forest’s history, particularly with respect to correcting historical inaccuracies and acknowledging the University’s dealings with slavery and its legacies. The group began meeting in the fall of 2016 and recommended several initial courses of action:

• Join the Universities Studying Slavery consortium to help us understand and acknowledge the role enslaved peoples had in building and growing our University (WFU joined in 2017)
• Expand the initial planning committee to include a broader cross section of campus
• Broaden the diversity of people interviewed for the Wake Forest Oral History Project to include a fuller expression of all the voices that have made up the history of Wake Forest.
• Develop an interactive  historical timeline that documents important milestones in the University’s history and will pay particular attention to honoring Wake Forest’s relationship to slavery and its legacies.
• Create a more accurate history of Wake Forest by commissioning a Southern historian to write a one-volume history of Wake Forest’s founding and development, based on original research.
• Plan for a series of academic conferences on campus, each giving rise to several of the essays in a new Histories of Wake Forest volume. One or more volumes would be devoted specifically to the experiences of historically marginalized communities at our institution.

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