The Plantation, the School, and Dred Scott

In eighteen eighteen, a Virginia-born planter named Peter Blow moved his family to a farm near Huntsville. He brought with him six enslaved people, one of whom was named Dred. The farm failed. By eighteen thirty, Blow had given up and moved the family to Saint Louis, Missouri.

Dred would later be sold to a military doctor named John Emerson, who took him to posts in free states and territories. Dred Scott, as he had become known, eventually sued for his freedom on the grounds that his time in free territory had made him free. In eighteen fifty-seven, the United States Supreme Court ruled against him in a decision that concluded Black people had no standing to sue in federal courts and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Dred Scott decision removed the legal foundation from decades of compromise over slavery's expansion and accelerated the country toward civil war.

The land near Huntsville where Peter Blow had farmed, and where Dred Scott had spent years of his early life, was eventually purchased by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In eighteen ninety-six, on that same land, the church opened the Oakwood Industrial School to provide vocational education and spiritual instruction to African American students in the post-Civil War South. The institution grew, eventually achieving four-year college status in nineteen thirty-two, and was renamed Oakwood University in two thousand and eight.

The ground has changed hands across a span of nearly two hundred years: an enslaved man's farm, a school for his descendants. That continuity was not planned. It is simply what happened.