On October 15, 1855, Washington Duke walked into a Hillsborough slave sale and paid $601 for a slave named "Caroline."
It would be, according to known records, his only purchase of a slave, but it is just one of several possible links between slavery and the university that his son would one day endow.
As an institution, Duke is not alone in those links, which have prompted a lawsuit filed last week in New York asking for reparations from three companies that may have directly benefited from slavery. Filed on behalf of the descendants of slaves, the lawsuit is part of a growing national movement for slavery reparations. Much of the attention has focused on corporations, but leaders of the reparations movement have mentioned universities--including Harvard, Yale and Brown--as potential defendants, leaving the question of whether Duke could also be a target.
Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor, is co-chairing the Reparations Coordinating Committee, one of the groups preparing reparations lawsuits. The lawsuits are intended to show, Ogletree has said, how the effects of slavery in America continue to the present.
"A full and deep conversation on slavery and its legacy has never taken place in America," Ogletree wrote this week in a New York Times column. "Reparations litigation will show what slavery meant, how it was profitable and how it has continued to affect the opportunities of millions of black Americans."
Whether the University profited from slavery is unclear, and John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, said he did not know of any investigation into the question. The 1860 U.S. Census does not show Washington Duke owning a slave, suggesting he had sold or freed Caroline. In fact, the tobacco farmer made most of his money after the Civil War, when he started W. Duke, Sons & Co., later to become the American Tobacco Company.
Those companies may have bought tobacco from plantations that grew out of slavery, but such an indirect link may not be enough for a suit, said Donald Beskind, a senior lecturer at Duke's School of Law and a litigation expert.
"Any claim against Duke would have to be considered completely speculative without factual information that supports it," Beskind said. "You only have liability for conduct, and you need to find proof of conduct."
Such proof might be hard to come by for a university like Duke, founded in 1924, but could more likely be found in an older institution, such as Harvard, founded in 1636, or Trinity College, Duke's predecessor that was founded in 1839.
Braxton Craven, the second Trinity president, owned two slaves. However, most of the school and its supporters, which included many abolitionist Quakers and Methodists, seem not to have profited from slaves, according to materials in the University Archives.
"Most of the people in the vicinity of Trinity owned no slaves; and those who did for the most part possessed as few as Craven. Large slaveholders were a widely scattered minority in the counties of Randolph, Guilford and Davidson," writes Nora Chaffin, who wrote Trinity College 1839-1892: The Beginnings of Duke University.
Ogletree's mention of the three universities cites "grants and endowments traced back to slavery," and Duke may have benefited in a similar manner. The Campaign for Duke has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from seven companies mentioned as potential defendants, said Peter Vaughn, director of communications and donor relations for university development.
Even if direct benefits from slavery can be proved, a lawsuit faces other obstacles, Beskind said. First, claims of wrongdoing usually are subject to a statute of limitations that prevents lawsuits on decades-old crimes. Second, slavery was legal before the Civil War.
"Money can usually only be reclaimed for illegal activity," Beskind said.
However, the lawsuit could still succeed in another way, said James Coleman, professor of the practice of law. As is the case with many lawsuits, he said, reparations suits are intended as much to draw attention to an overlooked issue as they are to result in monetary awards.
"I don't read that article as saying that the goal of this effort is to obtain damages from the defendants," Coleman said of Ogletree's column. "I think the goal appears to be something different: to force a discussion of the issues and to get the country to look at the legacy of slavery... by targeting institutions that may have benefited from slavery."
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