Stephen Allen Benson was six years old when he emigrated to West Africa. Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1816, he sailed from Baltimore on a brig named Strong with his free-born African-American parents and four older and two younger siblings. His father, a 36-year-old Cambridge farmer, and mother, a 30-year-old weaver, no doubt had high hopes for themselves and their children when they departed the Baltimore harbor.

Though not enslaved, the Benson family was part of a group of 37 leaving behind the brutal racism endemic to the country of their birth for the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the fledgling private colony of Liberia (literally “land of freedom”).

Motivated by the domestic politics around slavery and their own white nationalism, prominent Southern white Americans, including Maryland lawyer Francis Scott Key, had founded the American Colonization Society several years earlier. As an alternative to emancipation and citizenship, their answer to the growing “problem” of free Black Americans was “resettlement” in Africa.

Things took a tragic turn for the Bensons, however, after landing in Monrovia on Aug. 8, 1822, as it did for so many of their fellow passengers. Most of the African Americans aboard ships funded by the American Colonization Society would die from malaria and disease and in confrontations with the native West African populace. Stephen’s mother succumbed to disease three years after their arrival. Four of the Benson children died similarly over the ensuing two years. Underscoring the inevitable contentiousness of colonializing inhabited land, 16-year-old Joseph Benson was shot to death months after arrival by what his brother Stephen described as “an attack of the natives.”

Maryland, with other slave states, including Mississippi and Kentucky, later formed its own resettlement colony under the American Colonization Society umbrella in what is today’s Liberia. In fact, after seceding from the American Colonization Society, the short-lived Republic of Maryland—now the Maryland County in Liberia—became an independent country. More than half of the African Americans who ultimately emigrated to Liberia were emancipated on the condition of deportation to West Africa.

Stephen Benson would survive and, emblematic of Liberia’s settler colonialist roots, become the nation’s second president after it declared independence from the U.S. in 1847.

HE BELIEVED IT WAS BETTER TO “DIE IN MARYLAND THAN BE DRIVEN LIKE CATTLE TO…LIBERIA.”

Not surprisingly, Liberia has struggled with its dual heritage—a mix of minority Black Americo-Liberian settlers and indigenous Africans—since the constitution, “For the Government of the African Colony of Liberia,” was written 100 years ago.

“Liberia continued to mean different things to different people,” writes Claude Clegg, a Black historian of the African diaspora at the University of North Carolina, in The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. “Those who had come from America looking for liberty sometimes found a semblance of what they sought, but very few discovered absolute freedoms untampered by hardships and sacrifice.”

For many, however, it was worth the risk. “Particularly, for ex-slaves,” Clegg writes, “freedom meant legalized personhood, civil rights, and a documented existence. In essence, it was the unfettered ability to create one’s own familial, communal, and civic relations in a land beyond the overbearing control of white people.”

The role and identity of free and formerly enslaved African Americans evolved quickly in Liberia, taking a complex, empowering, but also surreal turn. With support from their U.S. backers, the Americo-Liberians constructed a replica of the antebellum society they had fled, oppressing the native population and denying them the right to vote, which still has political reverberations in Liberia.

“The Americans, in this case, are repeating what global, British colonizers did,” says local historian Lou Fields, author of Freedom Seekers: Early Abolitionists in Antebellum Baltimore. “Britain laid down a philosophy that says go somewhere, take somebody’s land, call it yours. Put people in charge, give them all the guns, and they’ll make the rules and regulations and tell the poor people, ‘You’re just a laborer, you don’t have much say.’ Unfortunately, we still see that elsewhere in the world today.”

The bonds between the country we know as Liberia, uniquely allied with the U.S. since its inception, and Maryland are profound, if generally little known. Stephen Benson was followed in office by Daniel Warner, who was born in Baltimore County to a formerly enslaved person and departed with his father and family aboard the Oswega, arriving in the teetering settlement of Monrovia in 1823.

Liberia’s capital, with a population of more than a million people today, Monrovia was named 100 years ago this month for then-President James Monroe, one of the largest slaveholders in the U.S. at the time and a staunch colonization advocate. (In a 442-page memorandum to Congress in 1845 from slaveholding President John Tyler, Black Americans emigrating to Liberia were documented as “recaptured Africans.”)

It was not until 1904, after Baltimore-born Garretson Gibson, who emigrated in 1845 and served a four-year term in office, that Liberia saw its last American-born president. Other prominent Americans who supported the colonization movement included Speaker of the House Henry Clay, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and President Abraham Lincoln, whose views on race would evolve during the Civil War.

Johns Hopkins made a small, one-time donation to the cause. John McDonogh, in whose name the McDonogh School was founded in Owings Mills, refused to free those he enslaved unless they agreed to deportation to Liberia. He eventually sent 118 formerly enslaved individuals to West Africa on American Colonization Society ships as part of an incentivized manumission “work” program on his New Orleans plantation.

The motivations behind those who supported colonization efforts are not easily unpacked 150-200 years later. Some could no longer tolerate slavery but, believing freed African Americans could not make it in a white society, viewed their “return” as a moral effort. Others recognized that slavery was a doomed institution and preferred deportation to citizenship. Meanwhile, slaveholders simply did not want free Black individuals near enslaved African Americans, fearing they’d encourage escape—or worse, revolt.

Frustrated with the pace of colonization, which he said would take “centuries,” McDonogh proposed a 50-year “removal” plan akin in theme to the infamous Trail of Tears. In an April 1830 letter to his friend, Louisiana Sen. Edward Livingston, McDonogh suggested marching free Black Americans to the Northwest Territory—similar in concept to the removal of Native Americans from the South, which would begin the following month and last two decades:

“How would it accord, Sir with your ideas, to have the country belonging to the U.S. on the North West Coast set aside by law as an asylum or place of refuge for the free people color of the United States where they might establish either a government of their own or become a state of the union forming a part of the American confederacy.”

In the U.S., the colonization effort had the opposite effect intended by its slaveholding founders—it galvanized early abolitionists. In the eyes of former Morgan State University historian Benjamin Quarles, the colonization movement “originated abolitionism,” arousing the free Black community and slavery opponents. The overwhelming majority of 19th-century African Americans saw through the embedded racism of the era’s white liberalism.

In his pioneering book, Black Abolitionists, Quarles makes the case that the “colonization scheme had a unifying effect on Negroes in the North, bringing them together in a common bond of opposition.” Certainly, it had that effect in the Washington and Baltimore area.

“There might have been a little support for colonization initially [in the Black community],” says Scott Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland, whose protagonist, Thomas Smallwood, supported colonization before his 1831 manumission and then reversed his stance. “I suspect Smallwood might have been influenced by Black abolitionist writer David Walker in this famous [1830] essay in which he denounces colonization in the strongest terms. I think there was a change of heart in the Black community, at least in Washington and Baltimore. There are recorded public meetings where people basically get together and say, ‘Screw these people.’”

The brig Strong was not the first the American Colonization Society sent to West Africa. Two years earlier came the Elizabeth, which carried 86 emigrants, including the Rev. Daniel Coker, a remarkable figure in the history of the Black church in the U.S. and eventually, West Africa.

An African American of mixed heritage born into slavery in Baltimore, Coker, after gaining his freedom, served as the first official pastor of the historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Druid Hill Avenue. Arriving initially in Sierra Leone, where the British had formed a colony of free and formerly enslaved Black individuals in Freetown, Coker became one of the founders of the West African Methodist Church.

Remarkably, the journal he kept of his voyage, chronicling his seasickness and then his heartbreak after learning of the death of nearly 400 enslaved Africans aboard a captured Spanish slave ship, survives to this day. So do letters to his wife, mother, and brother in Baltimore from his earliest days on West African soil. In one dispatch to his brother, he writes his group has met “such trials” and that only a handful of his cohorts remained together, and provisions were running low. He refers to his new home as “a strange heathen land,” adding he had not heard from America and does not know whether more people or provisions will be sent. He admits he does not know “what is to become of us, far distant from my dear family and friends,” but his faith in his mission and God is steadfast. Coker implores everyone who is able to follow his path:

“If you ask my opinion as to coming out—I say, let all that can, sell out and come; come, and bring ventures, to trade, etc. and you may do much better than you can possibly do in America, and not work half so hard. I wish that thousands were here, and had goods to trade with. Bring about two hogsheads of good leaf tobacco, cheap calico, cheap handkerchiefs, pins, knives and forks, pocket knives, etc.; with these you may buy land, hire hands, or buy provisions. I say come—the land is good…”

Interestingly, William Watkins, who attended and later ran the Bethel Charity School in Baltimore which Coker founded, rejected the invitation. He became, with Frederick Douglass, among others, one of colonization’s most vocal opponents.

In 1827, Watkins penned a letter to Freedom’s Journal urgently reminding readers that many prominent colonization supporters were slaveholders who wished to remove the influence of free Blacks on those enslaved. He also wrote anti-colonization and anti-slavery essays for the Baltimore newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation while becoming acquainted with journalist and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who had initially supported colonization. Garrison credited Watkins with changing his views and their relationship linked Baltimore’s Black community with the larger abolitionist movement.

Watkins believed it was better to “die in Maryland, under the pressure of unrighteous and cruel laws than be driven like cattle to the pestilential clime of Liberia.”

It goes without saying, even free Black men and women in Maryland did not have statutory guarantees of their rights before Emancipation. (Watkins, like so many liberty-seeking African Americans, eventually emigrated to Canada.) They could not vote, testify in a trial, or sit on a jury. They paid taxes, but their children could not attend public school.

The laws in Maryland, and elsewhere in the South, worsened after the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in neighboring Virginia. In May 1832, the General Assembly banned free African Americans from other states from moving to Maryland—and prohibited free African Americans from returning to Maryland after leaving for employment elsewhere. New legislation denied free African Americans in Maryland from owning firearms without permission from local officials.

By the end of the decade, the state passed legislation that could, for all intents and purposes, re-enslave free African Americans by permitting courts to sentence forced servitude for debts, vagrancy, and some criminal convictions.

Four months after Turner’s uprising, the Maryland legislature allocated $10,000 annually for 26 years “for the transportation and removal of emigrants to Africa.” Maryland representatives subsequently purchased land from native peoples just south of the Liberian settlement in Cape Palmas.

The deportation effort struggled from the outset, however. In a report to the Maryland State Colonization Society’s board, one of the state’s traveling “recruitment” agents clearly summarized the reasons that African Americans overwhelmingly opposed colonization. They unyieldingly believed they were as entitled to the human rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence as all others born here.

“They [free Blacks] are taught to believe, and, do believe, that this is their country, their home. A Country and home, now wickedly withholden from them but which they will presently possess, own and control. Those who Emigrate to Liberia, are held up to the world, as the vilest and veriest traitors to their race, and especially so, towards their brethren in bonds. Every man woman and child who leaves this country for Africa is considered one taken from the strength of the colored population and by his departure, as protracting the time when the black man will by the strength of his own arm compell those who despise and oppress him, to acknowledge his rights, redress his wrongs, and restore the wages, long due and inniquitously withholden.”

From 1831 to 1851, only 1,025 emigrants—a fraction of manumitted African Americans in the state—were sent to Liberia. Colonization had been an issue upon which white supporters and opponents of slavery found common ground—as well as at least a handful of African Americans. Some of whom, it should also be remembered, persisted and thrived on foreign ground.

“I expect to give my life to bleeding, groaning, dark, benighted Africa,” Daniel Coker later wrote to Baltimorean Jeremiah Watts. Coker died in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1846, but not before founding the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church there and helping establish a lasting community. His descendants would become prominent citizens and leaders in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, where they remain to this day.

Decades after his death, his family would still recall their roots in Baltimore. In a letter from November 1891, West African A.M.E Bishop Henry McNeal Turner recalls a visit from two of Daniel Coker’s great-great granddaughters, 20-year-old Jane Coker and 11-year-old Susan Coker, describing them as “two beautiful ginger-cake-colored children, and very smart and bright.” He explained that they had “called upon me to inquire about their relatives in Baltimore.”

Jane Coker, Bishop Turner noted, worked as an interpreter for the missionary United Brethren of America among the native tribal population. “She wishes to visit Baltimore, but money is wanting,” Turner writes. “I told her if she dared to visit Baltimore…she would never get back; that the people would feast and honor her to death…”

Perhaps it is fitting that the “discovery” three years ago that enslaved individuals were held at Johns Hopkins’ Clifton Mansion was made during a graduate seminar at the university named in his honor.

In the summer of 2020, former Maryland state archivist Edward Papenfuse led a class that was looking into how Hopkins had come upon his great wealth in a fast-changing Baltimore in the years before the Civil War.

“In other words,” Papenfuse says, “where did he get his money from in order to leave as much as he did for the purposes outlined in his will? And what was the world like that he operated in?”

As part of the effort, Papenfuse suggested an examination of Hopkins’ sprawling Clifton property, which he had developed into a summer estate, and an investigation into how he put his wealth to work in his personal affairs. Papenfuse does not know if he was the first historian to come across the 1850 census and accompanying “slave schedule,” which listed four enslaved men as the property of the head of the Clifton household—Hopkins, in this case—but he may have been. Under normal circumstances, it would not have been considered especially unusual. Enslaved African Americans were held on estates in surrounding Baltimore County and elsewhere. Except, of course, the esteemed, 147-year-old university and associated hospital and medical school had long held up its benefactor as an abolitionist with no direct connection to slavery.

One of the attendees of the seminar was Allison Seyler, the program manager of Hopkins Respective, a university-wide public history initiative begun in 2013. She had previously worked with Papenfuse while part of the Legacy of Slavery team at the Maryland archives. At Papenfuse’s suggestion, she located a digital copy of the 1850 slave schedule through the genealogical website, FamilySearch. She also found the 1840 slave schedule, which showed one enslaved person—likely owned by Hopkins’ brother—held in his household in Baltimore City. After further research led by Seyler along with Winston Tabb, dean of the university’s libraries and archives, and Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and historian Martha Jones, Hopkins announced the finding in late 2020.

“It was a moment that stopped me in my tracks,” Seyler says of seeing the slave schedules. “The record suggested a narrative that ran counter to the narrative we’d been told [as employees] by the university. I’m also a native Baltimorean, and so I had also heard ‘abolitionist’ associated with Johns Hopkins’ name even before I began working here.”

For Jones, a contributor to the acclaimed 1619 Project who has written extensively about the period, including the award-winning Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, which was set in Baltimore, the finding certainly felt historically significant. But the fact that it went unreported for so long was not surprising.

“It was a moment that stopped me in my tracks,” says Allison Seyler—the program manager of Hopkins Respective, a university-wide public history initiative started in 2013—of seeing the slave schedules.

“It’s important for an institution to understand how it is when you put the telling of the past in the hands of understandably admiring family members, or staff, or people whose job it is to raise money or promote the image of the institution,” Jones says, highlighting a grandniece’s hagiography that became the basis for much of the understanding of Hopkins’ life. “If you leave your history to those sources, it’s nothing exceptional that we wind up with a self-serving version of the man and never bothered to look carefully at the slim but important archival record related to things like, ‘Who is in his household in the decades before the Civil War?’ We just had never done it. The story had served us well.”

Ultimately, the fuller picture of Johns Hopkins that has emerged since the revelation of enslaved people in his household—the interpretation of which has been debated by a handful of local scholars—lays bare the myth that the university’s founding benefactor was an abolitionist.

Along with Hopkins’ announcement of its troubling finding about its namesake benefactor also came complicating information regarding his paternal ancestors. Johns Hopkins’ grandfather, also named Johns Hopkins, held a large number of enslaved people, manumitting some, but hardly all, Jones, Seyler, and their team learned in the run-up to the school’s official statement.

The elder Hopkins, an Anne Arundel tobacco plantation owner, had indeed manumitted nine enslaved adults in 1778, but in the same year, he merely switched the status of 33 enslaved young adults and children to “term slaves,” which meant girls and boys had to serve him until 21 and 25 years old, respectively. When died, he bequeathed 14 enslaved individuals that he still considered his property to his children, including one boy to Johns Hopkins’ father, Samuel.

Samuel Hopkins’ estate did not report enslaved individuals among his property when he died, but Johns Hopkins’ father did enter into an indentured service contract with the mother of two Black boys—Thomas, 7, and Jeremiah, 10—until they reached 21. It’s worth noting that the typical indentured contract of the period—along with an obligation to house, clothe, and provide food—included a promise to teach the bound children to read and write. The surviving indentured contract reveals Hopkins’ father had that stipulation stricken.

Interestingly, Papenfuse is one of several scholars with Hopkins ties who have pushed back against the conclusion from the 1850 census that Hopkins owned slaves. Papenfuse, along with Hopkins senior lecturer Sydney Van Morgan, School of Public Health professor emeritus Stan Becker, and Samuel Hopkins, a descendant and retired attorney, believe that because there is no record of Hopkins buying, selling, or paying taxes on the enslaved men held on his property, they likely “belonged” to someone else—a contractor, maybe. Or Hopkins or someone in his family held them under a temporary arrangement. It is not quite a distinction without a difference, but legally, while the four enslaved men, aged 18-50, were held at Clifton Mansion, the head of the household would be considered their “owner,” as indicated by the census.

Van Morgan, who started a House of Hopkins blog after the university announcement, believes Hopkins’ affiliation with the Quakers of the period, who were largely opposed to slavery, his support for the Union cause, and his bequests—including for a hospital that would serve Black Baltimoreans, if separately—remains evidence of his abolitionist feelings. But Van Morgan, like Papenfuse, readily acknowledges that Hopkins’ main interest was his business interests, which included a large financial stake in the B&O Railroad.

“[Mayor] Swann, who owned slaves, was a good buddy of his,” Van Morgan says. “When the Civil War breaks out, most of the unionists leave the Maryland Club and it becomes very much a Confederate club, and Hopkins did not leave. My instinct was he was playing both sides. He wasn’t going to alienate those prominent businesspeople in the Maryland Club.”

None of this makes Hopkins comparable to say, Joseph Donovan or Austin Woolfolk, owners of the notorious Baltimore slave jail/holding pen. Or the Ridgelys, who held enslaved people on their Towson estate until the Civil War. But to put it simply, in the context of previously known information about Hopkins—his business ties to enslavers, his friendship with Swann, his support of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party, his involvement in an effort to ship free Black Americans to Africa—his life is now cast in a different light.

“As a historian who studies slavery in Maryland in the 19th century, I would not use the word abolitionist when referring to Johns Hopkins,” Seyler says. “In my studies and going through the historiography, the primary sources, archival records, looking at documents that talk about this period and what folks are doing, I believe that abolitionism requires action. It’s speaking on the abolition circuit; it’s going to church and interacting with the Black community. It’s outright doing things to help folks on the Underground Railroad. It’s financing freedom-seekers. I don’t have historical records, letters, documents, newspaper articles that tell me that Johns Hopkins was taking these abolitionist actions.”

At the same time the revelations were made public, the school announced the launch of a new initiative: Hard Histories at Hopkins, which has since produced an ongoing, meaningful series of webinars, events, classes, and research-based writing. Just last month, Hard Histories hosted its second two-day symposium: “Reckoning with Racism, Forging Just Futures,” which featured a conversation with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Baltimore Museum of Art director Asma Naeem.

Directed by Jones, it’s been the mission of Hard Histories to examine how racism has persisted over a century and a half at Hopkins, as well as a broader exploration of racism related to the university, hospital, and medical school’s environs—Baltimore and Maryland. Hard History talks have included discussions with Hopkins professor, author, and native Baltimorean Lawrence Jackson about Frederick Douglass, a contemporary of Johns Hopkins; Savannah Wood, who is archiving the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper; and scholar Jennie Williams, who has created a database of the coastal slave trade between Baltimore and New Orleans. Hard Histories has also dug into the remarkable life of Kelly Miller, Hopkins’ first Black student and a polymath known as “the Bard of the Potomac” in the early 20th century.

“History is not an artifact,” says Jackson, who is also the founder of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, “it’s a process.”

The news from Johns Hopkins, of course, came on the heels of even more profound revelations from other elite universities and their connections to slavery. In December 2021, a year after the 1840 and 1850 records came to light, Jones and the Hard Histories initiative hosted a symposium, “Conversations on Slavery, Racism, and the University.” The virtual event included historians from Hopkins and other schools, including Georgetown, which acknowledged in 2016 that it had benefitted from the sale of 272 enslaved individuals from Jesuit-owned Maryland plantations. Hopkins, like Georgetown, is now one of more than 90 institutions in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England, including Allegany College, Goucher College, Loyola University Maryland, Morgan State, Towson University, and the University of Maryland, that has joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium based at the University of Virginia.

Christopher Celenza, dean of Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Hopkins, who served at Georgetown as it worked through the acknowledgment of its debt to enslaved individuals, says looking at the past truthfully can bring our own actions in sharper relief.

“It was important to memorialize and apologize for what took place,” he says. “But at Georgetown, much of the effort was also a kind of scrutinizing. What could it be that we’re doing now, that 100 years from now, 200 years from now, might seem misguided or immoral?”

Closer to home, Hard Histories recently hosted a discussion about writing “hard histories” with Harvard professor Andy Jewett, who is at work on a history of Johns Hopkins (both the man and the institution) and historian Ken Lipartito, who is co-authoring a biography of the founder of the McDonogh School. The Owings Mills private school has always known John McDonogh was an enslaver—he owned at least 654 people in his life—and was deeply involved in the slave trade. Yet, the school continued its annual Founder’s Day celebration until just three years ago. Hopkins commissioned Jewett following the 2020 discovery and his book is due in 2026, coinciding with the JHU’s sesquicentennial celebration.

“History is not an artifact,” says Hopkins professor and native Baltimorean Lawrence Jackson, who is also the founder of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Art, “It’s a process.”

Some of the most compelling student work from Hard Histories involves Hopkins Hospital’s Colored Orphan Asylum and the identity of more than 200 children who lived there. Conceived by Hopkins as a home for 400 “colored” orphaned boys and girls, its mission was changed by trustees after his death. From 1875 to 1914, it cared for only a fraction of that number, and girls-only, providing them with housing, food, medical care, a basic education, and Christian religious instruction. The girls also were trained in domestic service, which would enable them to pursue what Hopkins had described in his will as “respectable employment.” Student researchers, re-combing Johns Hopkins’ archives with new tools, learned that “respectable employment” for the girls—sometimes referred to as orphans, sometimes as inmates—meant working for white families.

That research spurred an end-of-semester lawn installation of the girls’ names in front of the Wyman Park Building, where coincidentally, the Hard Histories lab met, and where the Colored Orphan Asylum once sat.

“Discovering the stories of the girls who had been residents at Orphan Asylum is, arguably, as important as anything we might learn about Hopkins himself, when it comes to thinking about who we are and what our foundation is institutionally,” says Jones, whose most recent book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All, won The Los Angeles Times book prize for history. “As well as what our relationship is, and what our obligation is, to Baltimore and Black Baltimore in particular.”

At the conclusion of this academic year, Jones plans to wrap up the Hard Histories initiative, at which point much of its work will continue under Hopkins Retrospective, with Seyler’s guidance. In fact, similar to Hard Histories, Hopkins Retrospective launched its own initiative, “Reexamining Hopkins History,” which has come with funding for several new positions within the program.

So why does all this matter? Why not put the past behind us, as some say? For Jones, it’s because the past is always present, no more so than in the current moment.

“Look at Florida right now, which is banning books and passing laws that would ban certain subject matters and approaches to teaching,” says Jones, who was a housing rights attorney in New York before changing careers. “We’re in a full pitched battle now.

“Even if you’re not fascinated by the treasure hunt, the discovery, and all the things that just make history fun and interesting and jaw-dropping,” she continues, “I think everyone has to appreciate the power that comes from the storytelling—or people wouldn’t be pushing back so hard and taking the tactics they do. The hardest moments around Hard Histories, for me, have come because everybody believes there are stakes in this.”

*This story has been updated to clarify that the story the university long told about Johns Hopkins’ paternal ancestor manumitting enslaved people relates to his father, not his grandfather.