The project is named for the year the Maryland Agricultural College (now UMD College Park) was founded and is part of Universities Studying Slavery, a broader group of institutions nationally that are researching how their institutions are connected to or benefited from enslaved people. The one exception to this tradition is a dorm named after Charles Benedict Calvert, a founder and acting president of the university who was himself a slaveholder, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, a university archivist and co-lead of the 1856 Project, said in an email.
But they are also significant: it’s the first time in a century that campus residence halls at UMD will be named for individuals, as they are traditionally named for counties in the state of Maryland, according to a university press release. The namings are “mostly symbolic,” Pines said in an interview.
Pines also launched several other antiracism-focused initiatives that touch various parts of campus, including the 1856 Project, which will research, examine and disseminate information about the university's history with slavery and racism, and the naming of two new residence halls after the first Black and Asian students who attended the university while it was still segregated and largely unwelcoming to nonwhite people. Honoring Collins with a scholarship in his name and establishing UMD and Bowie faculty-led social justice programs to combat intolerance were among President Darryll Pines’s first initiatives when he assumed leadership of the College Park campus in July 2020. Urbanski was sentenced to life in prison last month, and many believe racial animus played a central role in the killing Urbanski belonged to a white supremacist Facebook group, The Washington Post reported. Army who was visiting a friend who attended the university. The campus was shaken in 2017, when Sean Urbanski, a white UMD student, murdered Richard Collins III, a Black Bowie State University student and lieutenant in the U.S. But students, faculty and staff members at the college have also recently been confronting the ongoing and modern threat of white supremacy. The founding and early history of the University of Maryland at College Park are steeped in racism and slavery - a legacy of many land-grant institutions in the United States that is becoming more widely known and openly discussed.
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