Oak Row

Oak Row is situated alongside With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited, which honors these individuals from across the centuries and includes them in the college’s history. 

It is a space for remembrance and reflection created in response to the 2020 report from the Commission on Race and Slavery. The commission sought to uncover Davidson College’s historical relationships with slavery and racial inequality, and findings of the report and subsequent research are explored in the Oak Row exhibition. Images throughout the exhibition highlight staff of color from throughout the college’s history. Some of their names and stories are known, and others are yet to be uncovered.

The individuals highlighted were part of the Davidson College community but excluded in many ways over time: from human freedom, from the dignity of equal treatment, from fair pay and from recorded history. Enslaved people in the 19th century farmed the college’s land and tended to the college president and faculty. They were counted as property. The campus financial ledgers sometimes included their first names. 

The enslaved people who made the bricks in the original buildings were on loan, for a fee, from nearby farms. The impressions of their thumbs in the hardened clay represent them to this day, but their names were never recorded. 

 After the Civil War, many stayed as laborers at an institution, and in a town, where leaders upheld Jim Crow laws and segregation. They washed the laundry, cooked meals or cleaned buildings – familiar faces in a close community. Yet they were deprived of fair wages, denied access to public services and businesses, and relegated, literally, to the other side of the tracks. Well into the 20th century, they endured segregation that grew more complex, but no less dehumanizing. 

Built from bricks made by enslaved laborers, Oak Row is one of the original buildings on Davidson’s campus. Oak Row and nearby Elm Row were constructed as dormitories in 1836, with each including four rooms for 16 students. Over the years, the buildings have been used as infirmary and classroom space, and have housed the music and art departments and fraternities. Most recently, Oak Row was converted to a permanent exhibition space in which to recognize the contributions of people of color to Davidson College.