Campus Activists Demand Free Tuition and Reparations

Tulane's Black Student Union presses administration to compensate the descendents of slaves who worked on campus grounds

Tulane University activists are demanding that the school offer reparations to the descendants of slaves who worked on the plantation that became campus grounds nearly 200 years ago.

Before the school's establishment in 1834—created as a medical university in response to the cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox epidemics—the land was used as a plantation. The school's Black Student Union (BSU) asked administrators to identify the descendants of the enslaved people who once worked on the plantation and offer them full tuition and more, according to alist of demands posted online.

"We demand that Tulane allocates funding to track down the descendants of the enslaved people who labored at the Tulane plantation and offer them full tuition and room and board scholarships that include a living stipend each semester of attendance at Tulane," the post reads. "Tulane must first acknowledge the trauma it has inflicted on black community members. It is Tulane's responsibility to recognize their longstanding history of racism and take actionable steps to reconcile those practices."

The Black Student Union did not return a request for comment.

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