U. of Richmond's Leader Pushes City to Face Its Slave History

It was 5:30 a.m. when Edward L. Ayers received the e-mail. No hello. No signature. Just a forwarded copy of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's Confederate History Month proclamation.

The Virginia governor's proclamation last year celebrated the state's secessionist history with no mention of slavery. The anonymous forwarding of the statement seemed meant to taunt Mr. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and a historian of the Civil War. Mr. Ayers had for months argued publicly that the approaching sesquicentennial of the Civil War presented an opportunity for Richmond to have an honest and overdue dialogue about the centrality of slavery as a cause of the war, and here was Governor McDonnell effectively doing just the opposite.

"It felt like they were rubbing it in my face," Mr. Ayers recalls.

The broadened dialogue that Mr. Ayers had promoted would mark a stark departure from the centennial 50 years ago, he said, when Richmond "blew it" by espousing state's rights at commemorations and glossing over the experiences of black Americans, who struggled at every turn of the conflict to secure their own emancipation.

Mr. McDonnell's proclamation was widely and quickly condemned, and his mea culpa was soon to follow. But the incident illustrated that the war still provokes raw emotions about race and Southern identity, making it the kind of subject that some university presidents, particularly in the South, avoid. Mr. Ayers, however, has thrown himself headlong into the discussion by promoting a series of events in Richmond that are predicated on the notion that the city has historically failed to wholly face up to its troubling past.

The tensions for Mr. Ayers are reflected in his potentially conflicting roles as a renowned scholar of Southern history, who has a legitimate interest in how the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is commemorated, and a university leader trying to make nice with his community. Most university presidents sidestep political matters that are not directly tied to the promotion of their institutions' interests, but Mr. Ayers is taking up an issue that has been among Richmond's most politically controversial. While he would be expected as a president to promote the importance of diversity at the University of Richmond, it is a different matter altogether for Mr. Ayers to point out that the great-grandparents of his neighbors profited from the sale of human beings....