Humanities in Action

Untold Truths Book Launch

Exposing Slavery and its Legacies at Loyola

April 15, 2024 at 7pm in McGuire Hall / Free + Open to the Public

This event, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, also celebrates the Center's four decades of funding and promoting humanities scholarship and programming on Loyola's campus and beyond. Untold Truths exemplifies the kind of faculty, student, and community collaboration that the Center has been proud to support for forty years and looks forward to supporting for decades to come.

About the book

Untold Truths is a part of the Aperio Series of Humane Texts, a unique Center for the Humanities initiative that enables faculty and students to collaborate on original research and publish their work with Apprentice House Press, Loyola’s student-run publishing company.

Untold Truths brings together scholars, students, staff , and descendants to explore Loyola University Maryland’s historical connections to slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice. They do so through a variety of forms, including historical narratives, analysis of newly uncovered archival sources, and creative works inspired by this history. Privileging the voices of descendants of the men, women, and children Jesuits enslaved and sold, this collection of essays explores Loyola’s connections to slavery and its ongoing reverberations for the university and all those connected to it. This diverse and rich volume contributes to ongoing eff orts to gain a fuller understanding of Loyola’s past in hopes of finding pathways towards racial justice and inclusion on its campus—and on all campuses that seek to address historical injustices.

What the experts are saying

This volume is impressive not only for its bold research and reflections, but also for the extensive contributions of Loyola students and the striking selections written by the descendants of the 272. Demanding a robust institutional and municipal reckoning, Untold Truths serves as a gold standard of undiluted truth-telling for historically segregated universities in Baltimore and Jesuit universities nationwide. Untold Truths sets a new standard for presenting archival evidence and exposing secrets of the past that underpin racial inequality today.

—Lawrence T. Brown, OSI-Baltimore Bold Thinker and author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America

Never resting on myths or half-truths, and never satisfied with silence or a turning-away, these reflections reveal Loyola’s roots in slavery, white supremacy, and racism and then ask us to let these truths drive us toward justice. The future of Loyola and of our nation is reassuringly in the capable and concerned hands of these young historians who know that we are stronger than any facet of our troubled past.

—Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Director of Hard Histories at Johns Hopkins University
 

Untold Truths is not only an overdue reckoning with a university’s fraught founding and early years, but a fascinating window into Baltimore’s complex racial history. It’s inspiring to see students taking it upon themselves to dig deep into the archives to hold their own institution accountable and to enlighten the rest of us about overlooked chapters of the city’s past.

—Alec MacGillis, award winning reporter for ProPublica and author of Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is appreciated.

About the Series

Humanities in Action is a new limited event series sponsored by Loyola University Maryland's Center for the Humanities. The series invites scholars, artists, and public figures to campus to talk about timely issues of broad significance that affect what it means to be human in our society and the world.