Davidson College will unveil sculpture honoring enslaved people who built school

Nestled between four red brick buildings at the center of Davidson College, two bronze, work-weathered hands cradle the earth.

It’s a newly installed sculpture named “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited” that will be dedicated Thursday, Oct. 23, at 4 p.m. The bricks that comprise the surrounding buildings were created by enslaved people in the mid-1800s.

Davidson planned the sculpture to honor the enslaved people who were exploited on its campus, and it’s just one of a series of actions the school has taken over the last eight years to reckon with its ties to slavery.

In 2017, Davidson undertook a two-year examination of the college’s ties to slavery and racist policies by the college’s Commission on Race and Slavery. It was headed by Davidson alumnus, former Charlotte mayor and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. The school apologized in 2020 for supporting slavery during its first three decades and for what the school called “its embrace of the racist laws and policies” in the years that followed, The Charlotte Observer reported.

The commission made several recommendations as part of the report it produced in 2020, one of which was to erect a physical memorial to honor the lives of the enslaved and exploited people who built and served Davidson. The school officially announced plans for the sculpture memorial in 2023.

“It’s a place of refuge, a place of honor, to commemorate, to grieve, to celebrate and to be accountable,” Davidson trustee Virgil Fludd, who graduated from Davidson in 1980 and serves on the commemoration committee, said in 2023.

Now that it’s built, Davidson President Doug Hicks says it serves as a poignant reminder of the college’s past — and a charge for its future.

“It feels like it’s part of a much wider effort to add to our history and to make sure we’re acknowledging important people in that history who haven’t until recently been recognized,” Hicks told the Observer.

The dedication will take place at the site of the sculpture, between Oak Row and Elm Row, next to Cunningham Theatre Center. It will include remarks by the Brooklyn, New York-based artist, Hank Willis Thomas, Hicks and author and poet Clint Smith, who graduated from Davidson in 2010.

The design

The final product was a collaboration between Thomas and architecture firm Perkins&Will. Thomas said he was inspired when he visited the university and saw its original buildings up close.

“You could see in the bricks the imprints of the hands of the people that made them,” Thomas told The Observer. “That made me really reflect on the fact that these were objects which were made with real people’s hands, and I wanted to pay homage to that.”

The sculpture, which sits near Phi and Eu halls, next to Cunningham Theatre Center, is made so viewers can stand on the ground within the hands and look out at what they built. Thomas said that’s intentional.

“How do I get people, the public, to reflect on the power, the dignity and also the labor and the stress that went into the lives of the people who built this place? How do I create reverence for them?” Thomas said. “You can stand in the hands and feel that energy… I hope the descendants can reflect on that history with pride and we can all learn from the past.”

Malcolm Davis is an architect with Perkins&Will who worked on the project. He said viewers can choose how they want to engage with the piece — up close or further away.

“The arrangement of the memorial itself surrounding the sculpted work is all intentional, noting that we really want people to approach the story and the idea of this memorial at whatever distance they prefer.” Davis said. “There’s, I think, lots of healing and conversations that have to happen in the town … There very well may be some that struggle initially in approaching the story and the history, and we want them to still be encouraged to come in.”

The bronze hands, which were made at a foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, made their pilgrimage to North Carolina via two cargo bed trucks. They were installed on Davidson’s campus in August.

“Heard and seen”

The piece’s designers hope it sets the stage for more learning and reconciliation — not just a memorial to the past.

“We believe that there’s healing to be done,” Davis said. “And, we hope that as history continues to be discovered, long after we have backed away from the project, that this helps to serve and inform momentum, to help people discover this history, contend with it and learn more.”

Part of Hicks’s mission at Davidson when he assumed the role of president in 2022 was to increase campus diversity. That would require promoting a “culture of belonging,” he told the Observer at the time.

Hicks said the memorial aligns with that goal.

“I’ve already heard from students, faculty and staff, who say they intentionally go by that part of campus so that they can see the hands,” Hicks said. “One said she feels heard and seen by the hands themselves, and what it means for the college to make this acknowledgement.”

Davidson College history

Davidson College, like many institutions, was not a bastion of inclusion for most of its history. All of its students were white men up until the 1960s, and it was officially an all-male school until the early 1970s. Women were allowed to attend classes but weren’t eligible to receive degrees from the school until 1973.

In 2020, nearly 1,000 supporters signed a petition calling for Davidson to rename the Chambers building, located in the center of campus. It was originally named for Maxwell Chambers, a slave owner who left the school $260,000 at the time of his death in 1855. It was the largest donation at the time to an antebellum college in the South.

However, the school has not renamed the Chambers building. Hicks said the school’s goal is to, instead, add to the story of its history.

“We believe that our role as educators is to tell the full story, which means not removing names of persons from the past who lived imperfect lives,” he said. “The intention and the focus of the work is about expanding our history.”

Davidson is making an effort to “identify and reach out to” descendants of those enslaved by Chambers, as well as descendants of those enslaved by Davidson College presidents, trustees and faculty members, according to a letter Hicks sent to the community Nov. 7, 2023.

The school also promised to dedicate $100,000 annually to research initiatives “focused on the history of Davidson College and the ongoing inequality engendered by our nation’s history of enslavement, racism and other forms of identity-based discrimination,” according to the letter.

Hicks said the school has taken other steps to reckon with its past in recent years, including acquiring the Beaver Dam plantation, 3 miles from its campus. It is where the original charter for Davidson College was signed and where, for decades, individuals were enslaved. It also sits on land historically occupied by the Catawba people.

Hicks said the school will use the site for archival and archeological work and has hired staff to study Davidson’s past and its place within southern and U.S. history.