Tulane History Project

In March 2021, President Michael Fitts announced the establishment of the Tulane History Project, charged with researching and developing a detailed history of Tulane and its campuses with respect to its racial history and founding – including the impacts of slavery and segregation. The pandemic stalled the project’s initial progress but co-chairs Sally Brown Richardson and Halima Leak Francis hired Marcia Walker-McWilliams as Executive Director of the Tulane History Project in March 2023. She has forged ahead with setting up a framework, timeline, and deliverables for the project. The project’s website says that it “will acknowledge and build upon existing research and scholarship of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and others who have engaged aspects of Tulane’s racial history” and will “explore new questions and pathways of learning that aid in producing a chronological biography of Tulane’s racial history.”

Much of the research for this critical study will be conducted in the published and archival holdings of Special Collections University Archives, Louisiana Research Collections, Hogan Archive, and Rare Books collection. Beginning with minute books from the university’s first iteration, the Medical College of Louisiana, through records of the University of Louisiana to the donation documents of Paul Tulane and Josephine Louise Newcomb that created the 20th century Tulane University, and then continuing through to the present day, post-doctoral historians will delve into the physical record of activities to uncover and describe our past, ultimately to produce a “nuanced, complex, and honest history of the university that engages its relationship with slavery, segregation, and issues of racial equity.”

University Archivist Ann Case was named an ex-officio member of the Advisory Board of the Tulane History Project. She looks forward to assisting the researchers with their work in TUSC.

10/5/2023