When Baylor University was founded 180 years ago in Independence, the fact that its founders were slaveholders might have seemed unremarkable to their fellow Texas Baptists.
Nearly half of the population in its home of Washington County was enslaved, and much of the prosperity of the county and state was tied to slavery. Judge R.E.B. Baylor, whose statue now presides over the Founders Mall at Baylor’s current home of Waco, had 33 slaves. Co-founders William Tryon and James Huckins were also slaveholders.
At 8:30 a.m Friday, Baylor will dedicate a new Memorial to Enslaved Persons, a landscape installation just 200 feet from the iconic Judge Baylor statue on Founders Mall.
The memorial recognizes the contributions that enslaved Americans made to Baylor dating back to its days in Independence, Texas. It also acknowledges the founders’ complicity in slavery and support for the Confederacy and postwar white supremacy.
The memorial stems from the Baylor Board of Regents’ “Resolution on Racial Healing and Justice,” in June 2020, which led to a Commission on Historic Campus Representations that sought to make a public account for the university’s racial history, including the memorial.
The Rev. Malcolm Foley, a leader of that commission and the memorial project, spoke to Bridge Editor-in-Chief J.B. Smith about the project this week for “Friday Forum with the Waco Bridge,” which Smith co-hosts on KWBU-FM 103.3.
Foley is a special advisor to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor. He has a master’s from Yale Divinity School and a doctorate from Baylor and is a scholar of racial history. He’s also co-pastor of Mosaic Waco, a multicultural, multiracial church.
The following is a lightly edited and condensed version of that interview, which airs at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Friday and will be available online.
JBS: Tell us about this memorial and what you hope it inspires the Baylor community to think about.
MF: It reminds us of the evil of racialized chattel slavery, but also points us toward a future. This is especially exemplified in the two Scriptural texts that flank the memorial. On one side is Exodus 20:2, when God introduces himself to his people and says “I’m the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, out of the land of Egypt.” On the other side, it’s Christ’s words saying, “So if the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.” That framing of material and spiritual liberation is thematically what we want to bear witness to in this memorial.
JBS: Historically, what do we know about the role that enslaved people played in the founding and early years of Baylor?
MF: When we think about the labor that built the actual physical campus (in Independence), that labor was most likely enslaved labor. … During that period, your wealth was your enslaved labor. The fact of the matter is … that the founders were not the ones cutting the stone.
JBS: Do you think these were pretty skilled artisans?
MF: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and that’s really important. One of the intentions of doing this memorial was also to affirm that the enslaved folks who built the campus are also founders of the university. It’s not just those who financed it, but the people whose hands and sweat and blood actually formed the campus. This is an opportunity to recognize them.
JBS: We learn from the commission’s report that Judge Baylor as well as cofounders William Tryon and James Huckins were slaveholders. So was Rufus Burleson, the Baylor president who was instrumental in bringing the university to Waco in 1886. Now, some people would say, that was another era, we can’t judge them by today’s standards. So why even do this?
MF: I want to emphasize, especially as a historian, that there were folks contemporary to Baylor and others who recognized slavery for the evil that it is. This is not the imposition of a foreign moral standard. Especially the enslaved at that time were not fans of being enslaved.
JBS: What do people in 2025 do with that? How should they feel about seeing this and thinking about these realities?
MF: This is not to blame anyone who’s alive now for what happened in the past. What it does, and this is the advantage of reckoning with one’s history, … you can also make a commitment to making sure that those things don’t happen again.
What this memorial does for us is allow us to tell some stories that the university had not told before. But it also reminds us of not only who we actually are, but who we want to be.
JBS: What has changed since all these discussions began in 2020 in our culture about the commitment to exploring our nation’s dark path with racial inequity?
MF: Especially back in 2020, there were some trends toward ideological policing and language policing and all those kinds of things. And that makes people nervous. And one of the things that I wanted us to emphasize, especially at Baylor, was that the commitment to doing this work doesn’t come from those commitments. It comes out of our Christian mission.
If we’re really seeking to build a truly just and truly equitable community because that’s the way Christ called us to live, then that means we need to not only understand our own history, but especially be open about our own failures. And that’s an ongoing work.
So, for example, I think about the fact that for the first 120 years of the institution, Baylor actively kept Black students out. Opening up the admissions process doesn’t in itself change the culture of the institution to build a culture where people are actually welcome. It requires intentional work.
JBS: You’ve been here for 10 years. Is Baylor a more welcoming place for African-Americans, for example, than it was 10 years ago?
MF: I would say so, and I think that’s because of intentional work by the administration and the board. It’s been because it’s been a priority of building a more welcoming campus. I think that’s the only way that it happens, because it doesn’t happen by accident.
JBS: What role does (the memorial) play in those discussions? And what are you hearing in general about this project?
MF: In the last few years we have put up statues of the first two Black graduates, as well as a new narrative of history around the Judge Baylor statues. Those physical representations remind people in some material ways, “Hey, you’re welcome here.” That when you join the Baylor community, you have an opportunity to shape its story. It’s not that you’re being invited in essentially to assimilate, but that you bring your story, you get to shape what it means to be a Baylor Bear.
