Hood’s family slaves

By Genesis Lemus//

Recent discoveries have shown that Hood’s very own, Margaret Scholl Hood, was part of the slave-owning white class.

As we honor and celebrate Black History Month, it is important to recognize that Hood College does have a past with slavery.

Emilie Amt, a history professor at Hood, recently wrote a piece on her blog about Hood’s family owning slaves from when Margaret was a young child until adulthood.

“I started researching for this several years ago around 2016,” Amt said. “It was not my discovery, it was something that some people knew.”

A copy of Hood’s diary was released in 1992, which showed that she talked about her family’s slaves. She would mention a John Jackson, which is said to be enslaved, also a Joe and a Jane.

The editors of the diary put the information in their footnotes. “It wasn’t highlighted,” Amt said. “I think they even played it down a little bit.” 

As a historian of African American history and slavery, Amt said it was important for her to get that information out there and also inform Hood about the discoveries.

“When I shared it with President Andrea Chapdelaine back in 2017, some of that information was put on the historical pages of the website,” Amt said. “The college acknowledged it, they worked to be more open to that history.”

Amt was sad but not surprised to find this information about the school’s past, but she wanted to make sure that it was a part of the school’s history that would not get overlooked. “For any American institution that’s bound to American history we have to acknowledge the bad along with claiming the good,” she said.

The reason why Amt didn’t publish her research earlier was because she wanted to nail down all of the facts. “But it is time to finish that research,” she said.

Amt also said that it was important to recognize that Margaret wasn’t the owner of the slaves. “It was her father that was the legal owner, and she was a young woman growing up in the household as part of a slave-owning family,” Amt said. “It doesn’t make it any better, but you must acknowledge the facts.”

“It reminds us as an institution that we benefited from slavery, her growing up in privilege was due in part from her father owning people,” Amt said. “Things we value today were made possible by the labor stolen from, and the suffering inflicted on, enslaved African Americans.”