This year marks the 150th anniversary of the opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. The milestone has been commemorated by special events and branding that began last semester and will last throughout the rest of the year. Clickable “JH150” ribbons lie atop nearly every university webpage, proudly proclaiming Johns Hopkins as “America’s First Research University,” while the sesquicentennial website features videos and curated reflections celebrating a century and a half of innovation and impact.

But amid this well-deserved recognition, one absence is striking—the university’s founder and first benefactor, Johns Hopkins himself. Beyond a short biographical paragraph and a handful of stock images, Hopkins is largely missing from the official JH150 materials. He appears neither among the university’s designated “thought pioneers” nor among those “dedicated to community.” Even the recent Commemoration Day activities held on and around February 22 included no event that focused, even in part, on the founder, and the same appears true of the planned Alumni Weekend celebrations in April.

The omission is all the more notable given the scale of Hopkins’ achievements. A fortune earned through commerce, banking, and investment was converted into a philanthropic bequest that permanently redefined American higher education and health care. The institutions he founded now rank among the most influential in the world. Johns Hopkins enterprise is Maryland’s largest private employer, contributing billions to the state economy every year. Yet the man who made all this possible has been excluded from the university’s commemorative narrative. In this sesquicentennial year, sadly, Johns Hopkins has been cancelled.

How did we get here? The answer, I think, lies largely in events that unfolded in late 2020. On December 9 of that year, the university announced that it had “strong documentary evidence” that its founder was a slaveholder. It was a stunning rush to judgment based, as we now know, on a misinterpretation of a single page from the 1850 federal census listing four enslaved men at Hopkins’ country estate called Clifton (more on this later). The hasty conclusion was reinforced by press statements, campus conversations, and revisions to the university’s History & Mission webpage. Later, a bust of Johns Hopkins was removed from its central location on Charles Street and placed in storage, where it remains to this day.

Thankfully, a fuller account of Hopkins’ life has begun to emerge. A recently published, peer-reviewed article in the Maryland Historical Magazine, coauthored by three colleagues and me, draws on extensive archival research to reach a markedly different conclusion about Johns Hopkins and slavery. Our investigation shows that when the 1850 census is read in its proper technical and historical context and weighed alongside tax records, legal documents, Quaker records, and contemporaneous accounts, the available evidence does not support the assertion that Hopkins was ever an enslaver.

In fact, Hopkins’ long-standing reputation as an antislavery businessman turns out to be largely accurate after all. The evidence shows that he rescued a man named James Jones from slavery in Virginia, secured his freedom in Baltimore, and employed him for nearly twenty years. It shows that Hopkins contributed financially to the emancipation of an enslaved family of five seeking to emigrate to Africa. It also shows that he supported leading abolitionist figures in establishing a school for free Black girls in Washington, D.C., a project so radical that even Frederick Douglass warned its backers, among them Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, that it bordered on “madness.”

The record further shows that decades before Baltimore established a public school system for Black children, Hopkins advocated for one. His close friends and family members were likewise engaged in progressive causes, including abolitionist work and efforts to support formerly enslaved people as they navigated freedom. Many of these individuals—including Richard M. Janney, Francis T. King, and James Carey Thomas—were among the first trustees of Hopkins’ charities. They formed the core of a moral and religious network guided by Quaker values and antislavery commitments, expressed in ways that were often quieter and less obvious than modern expectations often demand.

Our research also reveals that during the Civil War, Hopkins was no passive supporter of the Union. He was an early adherent of the Unconditional Union movement, which held that immediate emancipation was essential to national survival. He financed Unionist political campaigns, including that of the Radical Republican Henry Winter Davis, organized pro-Union rallies, and interacted with members of Lincoln’s cabinet. In October of 1861, at a moment when Maryland’s loyalty was deeply contested, Hopkins helped stage a major pro-Union demonstration at Baltimore’s famed Washington Monument.

Responsible history also requires acknowledging complexity and contradiction. Hopkins’ grocery firm, known as Hopkins Brothers, participated in a commercial economy defined and disfigured by chattel slavery, which was legal in Maryland until 1864. They conducted business with slaveholders and lent money to them. They sold commodities like molasses that were produced by enslaved laborers toiling under brutal conditions on Caribbean sugar plantations. Letters and legal records show that Hopkins Brothers sometimes accepted enslaved people as collateral for loans. In one such case, an enslaved woman named Harriet, probably associated with a debt dispute, was confined in the Baltimore City Jail by Hopkins Brothers for six weeks for “safekeeping.” We do not know what happened to Harriet. Was she returned to her master or was she liberated?

Johns Hopkins’ family life reflected similar tensions. His brother Samuel held enslaved people in his Baltimore household. And for a brief period around 1840, Samuel and an enslaved boy named George resided in Johns’ home on Franklin Street. Although Samuel was eventually disowned by the Baltimore Monthly Meeting for slaveholding, Johns and his siblings never severed ties with him. Such relationships were common in antebellum Baltimore, a city where more than 4,000 enslaved people lived alongside approximately 18,000 free Black residents and in which many elites employed a combination of free, indentured, and enslaved people of color in their homes and businesses.

What, then, of the four men listed on that census form cited by JHU in its 2020 announcement? Why were they living at Johns Hopkins’ country estate during the summer of 1850? The details are complex, but new evidence we have uncovered suggests that these men may have been in the process of emancipation, assisted by Hopkins’ sister Eliza and her husband, Nathaniel C. Crenshaw. The Crenshaws lived near Richmond and were heavily involved in Quaker-led antislavery work. The men were likely brought to Maryland to escape mounting threats to their freedom in Virginia and to improve their prospects for successful emancipation and resettlement.

With a fuller historical picture now in view, a thoughtful reconsideration of the university’s public narrative is warranted, not to canonize Johns Hopkins but to represent him accurately and proportionately. Hopkins was not a radical abolitionist in the mold of William Lloyd Garrison or John Brown. Yet his sustained support for Black education, his documented participation in efforts to free enslaved individuals, his assistance to family members engaged in emancipating enslaved people from Virginia, and his unwavering dedication to the Union all point to a principled opposition to human bondage, pursued within the social, political, and legal constraints of his time and place.

As Johns Hopkins University marks its sesquicentennial, its founder should occupy a central place in the commemorations. Revisiting the university’s 2020 statements, updating the language on its JH150 and History & Mission pages, and returning Hopkins’ bust to a prominent place on campus would signal a willingness to correct the record as historical understanding evolves. For America’s first research university, honoring its commitment to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to revise conclusions when the evidence changes, is a core institutional obligation. As President Ron Daniels has argued in What Universities Owe Democracy and elsewhere, truth is the “indispensable foundation for all of our education, research, and service activities.”

The same convictions motivated Johns Hopkins himself, who, more than 150 years ago, chose to devote his enormous fortune not to enriching his descendants but to benefiting the city and state he loved so dearly. He did this not only by creating an institution of advanced academic study but also by founding a world-class hospital that would admit patients “without regard to sex, age, or color.” His gift, and the enduring legacy created by that singular act of benevolence, are achievements the entire Hopkins community should be immensely proud to celebrate.