Wake Work: Unearthing the Legacy of Slavery at the United States' First Publicly Chartered University

Athens-Clarke County, Georgia is home to the first publicly chartered institution of higher learning in the United States: The University of Georgia (UGA). For the last 200 thorn years, UGA has brought settlers to Athens and led them in Indigenous removal, slavery, Jim and Jane Crow politics, segregation, and racial discrimination. A reckoning with this history of slavery and the ongoing harms of settler-colonial higher education is long overdue. This paper describes the efforts of a group of faculty and students at UGA beginning this process. In particular, we utilize Christina Shape's (2016) notion of "wake work" to reflect upon a visceral moment of anti-Black violence on our campus: the unearthing and contested reburial of human remains that were likely enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals during the expansion of UGA's Baldwin Hall. Sharpe's wake work asks us to sit with the omnipresence of Black death, but to also imagine a future otherwise. We provide personal vignettes and remembrances about our experiences with the events and activism surrounding Baldwin Hall as a key component of coming to consciousness about the institutions and practices of white supremacy within the place we work and learn. We conclude with specific recommendations to other universities and their faculty, students, staff, and community members fighting for racial justice.