US university Johns Hopkins confronts historic links to slavery

Johns Hopkins, the celebrated philanthropist who supported the abolition of slavery and whose wealth allowed him to found the prestigious US university that bears his name, owned slaves, the Baltimore-based institution confirmed Friday. 

The revelation by the university, which boasts a long tradition of inclusion, comes as the United States continues reckoning with its own history of racism after widespread protests against discrimination earlier this year.

Calls to dismantle statues of leaders from the historic slave-owning South have multiplied, and the legacies of some of America's "founding fathers" such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, also slave owners, have been reassessed.

"We have for almost 100 years communicated a story about our origins which is not correct," Johns Hopkins University president Ron Daniels said Friday in a Zoom discussion.

"The revelation of this part of Mr Hopkins' life is devastating," he added.

Hopkins came from a wealthy Maryland family and made his fortune in commerce and banking.

Raised in the Quaker faith, a Protestant movement opposed to slavery, he supported President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

When he died in 1873, he bequeathed part of his fortune for the creation of an orphanage for Black children, a university and a hospital where all patients would be accepted regardless of gender or origin.

But according to census records discovered this summer and dating from 1840 and 1850, Hopkins owned slaves -- one in 1840, and then four a decade later.