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Part of the 2025-2026 Humanities Lab, "Slavery, Freedom, and the Midwest: African Americans at Miami University and in Oxford,"  this project brings students, faculty, and community members together to uncover the lives and legacies of several generations of African Americans who shaped Miami University and Oxford. From the foundational labor of free and formerly enslaved African Americans that sustained the university during the antebellum and Reconstruction periods to the emergence of Black student life and leadership in the Jim Crow era, members have engaged in archival research, oral history, and descendant collaboration.

Humanities Lab students returned to Walter Havighurst Special Collections & University Archives to explore the University’s founding history, bringing into view the longer, overlooked history of African American presence, contributions, and experiences at Miami and in Oxford. From these investigations, students created campus tours, digital exhibits and collections, and individual research projects to share with the broader community. 

“Miami and Slavery” engages with scholarship from universities in Ohio, across the United States, and abroad committed to studying their institutional histories of slavery. How might a similar project at Miami provide an opportunity to confront its history and forge a path toward truth-telling, moral accountability, and reconciliation, embodying the true spirit of Miami’s Code of Love and Honor? “Miami and Slavery” offers a framework for answering these fundamental questions and understanding the generations of Black individuals and families connected to Miami University