Southern Progress and Southern Honor: Slavery and Jim Crow at Auburn University

Abstract

Slavery built Auburn University physically, ideologically, and monetarily. After emancipation, slavery’s impact on Auburn does not vanish, instead it transforms into the violence of the Jim Crow South. Auburn played a key role in helping to develop the ideology and enforcement of the Jim Crow society in East Alabama. White supremacy changes form and emerges in new ways in the late nineteenth century, most notably in the 1895 Auburn Race Riot, the attempted lynching of a local Black man by a mob of Auburn students. The impact of violence such as the race riot and other instances of racial violence and the university’s role in perpetuating white supremacy remain to be examined as the community still lives with the legacy of these actions today.