Johns Hopkins University

The university takes its name from 19th-century Maryland philanthropist Johns Hopkins, an entrepreneur with Quaker roots who believed in improving public health and education in Baltimore and beyond. Previously adopted accounts portray Johns Hopkins as an early abolitionist whose parents had freed the family’s enslaved people in the early 1800s. New research has uncovered census records that indicate enslaved people were among the individuals living and laboring in Johns Hopkins’ home in 1840 and 1850, with the latter document denoting Johns Hopkins as the slaveholder. Other new findings documented additional links between the Hopkins family and slavery, as well as indentured servitude. Researchers are investigating these records in tandem with other archival documents to offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of the Hopkins family’s relationship with slavery. More information about the university’s investigation of this history is available at the Hopkins Retrospective website.