This week, a lecture about slave labor in 19th century Virginia.

Stony Brook University President, Maury McGinnis, teaches a class about the slave trade

in Richmond, Virginia, and enslaved labor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

And the city has moved forward in other deeply symbolic and significant ways.

Throughout the city, the monuments that marked the exertion of white power and Jim Crow segregation,

those monuments to the generals of the Civil War have been removed.

Professor McGuinness also discusses what the University of Virginia campus looked like in the

1800s, shortly after it was built, and how enslaved labor was so essential to keeping the

school running.

Welcome, welcome History 327, the Arts is History students.

You know me.

I'm Professor April Maston.

We are very fortunate today to have a guest lecturer, President of Stony Brook University,

Maury McGinnis.

I'd like to tell you a little bit about her.

The title of her, Dr. McGuinness's lecture, as you can

see, is the shadow of slavery and public life. This topic is relevant not only to our inquiry

into how the arts can be researched as a window onto the past, but also how they affect

the present, or in the words of James Baldwin, how history

does not merely refer to the past. History is literally present in all we do. The research

and for this lecture and the lecture itself was inspired by the students of the University of

Virginia who thought that the university wasn't adequately representing how the students of the University of Virginia, who thought that the university

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