Professor helping Clemson uncover its legacy of slavery collaborates with similar efforts at Virginia Tech

I'm Rhonda Robinson Thomas. I'm the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University. I am the faculty director of Call My Name, a research project that documents and shares stories of Black people in Clemson University history. A group from Virginia Tech came down to Clemson to learn more about Call My Name and the cemetery project and then reciprocated the invitation for me and several members of our team to share what we're doing, learn from each other, and also form a collaborative partnership so that we can continue sharing and learning and working together as we all are committed to, you know, building good relationships with descendant communities, with telling the whole truth as honestly and as carefully as we can about these historic sites, as well as about the history of our universities. We saw a lot of commonalities in our work. There are people here at Virginia Tech who are seeking to ensure that the complete history is documented and available. At the Reynolds Homestead, we enjoyed interacting with the community members who came out and learning more about their lives and their interests in the work was very heartening. There's a lot of information available that could easily be incorporated into the house tour. The entrance to the house where enslaved people were bringing in food from the kitchen. It was worn down so much that you could actually see almost like an imprint on the house. You know, you have the house, you have the kitchen, burial ground. You have the area by the creek. A very nice tour could be created to incorporate that story as an option for people coming to learn about the Reynolds Homestead. Coming to campus, the site of Solitude and the Fraction house and cabin. Probably the most impactful thing was the little exhibit about the interior of the slave ship to help us visualize that tiny space that human beings were stuffed into. Very simple but extremely powerful. It's just making what you're doing more visible. Figuring out how to make sure both the campus and local communities know what the good work that's being done and come in and see and learn. So they too, can appreciate that history and learn from that history.