At Friday afternoon’s discussion with President Broadhead, I was troubled by one student’s comments about the Duke family. Making a point about last April’s noose incident, the student referred to Duke as “a school that was founded off of plantation money.” Some applause followed this remark, and she continued: “my great-great-grandfather was a slave in North Carolina and probably worked for the Duke family.”
I can’t excuse the student’s comments at the forum nor those who supported it with their applause. More than misleading, her representation of Duke’s history and the Duke family are incorrect. I support our black students’ demands for justice, but those demands cannot stand on sloppy history. Duke was not founded with “plantation money,” and if this student’s great-great-grandfather worked for the Duke family, he almost certainly did not do so as a slave.
Duke University was not founded with plantation money because the Dukes never had a plantation. The Dukes hardly grew much tobacco at all. Washington Duke, broke after the Civil War, kick-started a little tobacco trade by purchasing tobacco from his neighbors. He cured it, packed it and peddled it from a mule cart. In 1874 the family relocated to Durham, and the operation grew by 1881 into Washington Duke Sons & Co. A five-way merger in 1890 gave birth to the behemoth American Tobacco Company. This firm, under his son James B. Duke, controlled 80 to 90 percent of the world’s tobacco market. But at no point after 1874 did the Dukes grow the tobacco. The company purchased tobacco directly from farmers when they brought it to the Durham markets. Not even before the Civil War were the Dukes rich enough to be plantation owners. They made their fortune in industry: processing and selling tobacco for chewing and smoking.
Historians debate whether Washington Duke owned slaves, but it’s most likely that he did not. Neither the census of 1850 nor 1860 report any slaves among his property. There were never, in any case, expansive fields of tobacco or cotton worked by Duke-owned slaves.
The Dukes were industrialists, but like the Carnegies or the Rockefellers, they were also philanthropists. And much of their charitable giving was directed to the black community.
The Duke family built the first hospital for blacks in Durham. In 1901, no such facility existed and Dr. Aaron Moore, a black physician, sought funds from Washington Duke. Our university’s namesake donated the entire $13,000 ($350,000 today) needed to build and equip Lincoln Hospital. Over the next two decades, the Dukes donated over $105,000 ($1.7 million today) to the black hospital.
The Dukes did not only support white Duke University. Elder son B.N. Duke helped finance the North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University, when government support was lacking. Beginning in 1925, he put up over $50,000 (~$700,000). He is said to have had “a special interest” in NCCN.
Other black institutions which received aid from the Dukes included a black orphanage in Oxford, Kittrell College in Kittrell, a hospital for disabled black children in Gastonia, as well as both conferences of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in North Carolina and specific black congregations. The Duke Endowment was established in 1924 with specific allocations for black institutions.
The Dukes also invested in businesses owned by black entrepreneurs. Washington and B.N. Duke invested in a mining company in Concord which was owned and operated entirely by black men. J.B. Duke suggested to his friend John Merrick that he open the first life insurance company for black individuals in the U.S.A. Washington Duke provided the capital investment, and N.C. Mutual commenced operations in 1898.
The black community of Durham was outspoken in its gratitude to the Duke family. Spend an afternoon in the archives with the Washington Duke Papers: one finds letter after letter written by black community leaders thanking Duke for his support of black churches and institutions. Of course the Dukes’ philanthropy was at times paternalistic, and they still lived in a segregated South. Such were their times.
It is sad that Duke’s students have come to think so poorly of the Duke family. It is worse to see erroneous information used to make a point about racism on today’s campus. We can do better.
In fact, I think the Dukes would support our students of color. We shouldn’t forsake the facts and lump the Dukes in with antebellum slave-owners or post-reconstruction racists. The Dukes supported the black community in Durham and across the Carolinas with a practical progressivism hardly matched elsewhere in the South.
To students of color: when you walk by James B. Duke’s statue on the main quad, think about what he stands for. Don’t assume that because he was a wealthy white Southerner he’s standing against you or standing on your back. If I’m reading the history right, he along with his brother and father are standing with you. Read their story. They might be more sympathetic than you think.
Zach Heater is a Trinity junior.
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