Lemon Project Statement on Current Events
Contact: lemon@wm.edu
Full Description
View the full statement dated June 2, 2020.
Excerpt of the Statement: The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation was established in 2009 at the urging of the Student Assembly, the William & Mary (W&M) student chapter of the NAACP, and faculty. After 316 years, these groups called on the university to disclose its full story, not the story that inspired the appellation, “the Alma Mater of a Nation,” but the story that included slaveholding and adherence to Jim Crow laws—in short, its seedier side. For just over a decade, The Lemon Project has worked to uncover this history and make it public. Not simply for the sake of airing dirty laundry, but to finally acknowledge the Black men, women, and children who built and maintained the institution—the people who made life comfortable for the White males who studied here. They were the enslaved people who toted the water, chopped the wood, laid the fires, washed the clothes, cooked the meals, and labored on the W&M owned plantation that provided financial stability for the institution and scholarships for less wealthy students. Without the enslaved people, there would be no William & Mary.
