Slavery, Segregation, and the Second Founding of Rice University

By Alexander X. Byrd and W. Caleb McDaniel

With Alexander X. Byrd, a new history of Rice University based on the work of its Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.

Available for Purchase

• Louisiana State University Press
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Description

During the first quarter of the twenty-first century, more than one hundred institutions of higher education in the United States launched projects to study and share their histories concerning slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. Slavery, Segregation, and the Second Founding of Rice University joins these wider efforts. Authored by award-winning historians Alexander X. Byrd and W. Caleb McDaniel, with a foreword by Ruth J. Simmons, the book engages questions specific to Rice’s history as the last major private research university in the country to begin desegregation. Although Rice did not open its doors for classes until 1912, it was connected to the history of slavery through the life of its first founder and namesake, William Marsh Rice, whose fortune was deeply intertwined with the enslavement of Black people.

Byrd and McDaniel place the history of one of the nation’s most renowned universities within a longer and larger context, showing that desegregation required changes to Rice so fundamental that they amounted to a “second founding” of the school. Following the story from slavery through segregation to the second founding, they highlight pivotal points of intersection between the history of Black Houston and the history of Rice University, revealing the seldom acknowledged roles of Black students, Black communities, and HBCUs in creating change at and around Rice. Their study challenges readers to consider anew who counts as a university’s founder—a question relevant to ongoing discussions about statues, naming, and the history of higher education. They also reveal what higher education institutions do at their best: create new knowledge and forge solutions to trenchant social problems, thus providing guidance for those committed to doing the valuable work of the “second founding” at colleges and universities today.

Media

• An interview with the authors about the research behind the book

Resources

• Rice University’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice (2019-2023)
• Digital Collections from the Woodson Research Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library

Praise

How did Rice become the place that so many love and admire today? It was by dint of courageous individuals who were willing to teach Rice something about what it was and what it could ultimately be. … That Rice is firmly and undeniably among the top universities in the world today, with the potential to become ever more prominent, rests in large part on the willingness of so many to undertake and follow the perilous journey from segregation to full integration and inclusion.

–From the Foreword by Ruth J. Simmons

A brilliant, surprising, sometimes disquieting book. In presenting the full history of their university, Byrd and McDaniel also offer a moving meditation on memory, on the “untold, rarely told, or half-told” stories that bind and separate us as Americans.

–James T. Campbell, coeditor of Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies

Slavery, Segregation, and the Second Founding of Rice University illuminates in rich and sophisticated fashion, linking the birth of a private Texas university in the early twentieth century back to slavery and the Civil War, while also highlighting how slavery’s afterlives have shaped Rice from its Jim Crow–era founding through hesitant desegregation to the present.

–Kirt von Daacke, coeditor of After Emancipation: Racism and Resistance at the University of Virginia