Looking Back To Look Beyond Article by Ann Manser, AS73
Posted on June 29, 2021 at: 2:14 pm
UD alumna Jody Allen directs the groundbreaking research and reconciliation project at William & Mary that explores the university’s history related to slavery and segregation.
Jody Allen started her academic career at UD as an undergraduate with thoughts of law school, went on to attend graduate school instead and then to work in higher education for several years before returning to her first love—history—and earning a doctorate in that field.
All those experiences led her to the position she has today as an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary and the Robert Francis Engs Director of the groundbreaking research and reconciliation project that explores the university’s history related to slavery and segregation. The Lemon Project, named for a man the college once enslaved, was established in 2009 as only the second such initiative in the U.S., after Brown University, but which is now part of a growing network of similar projects.
“It’s been a twisting path,” Allen says of her career, “but I really feel that I’ve found where I want to be. And all those things I learned working in residence life and student affairs [at universities]—I still use those every day.”
Allen grew up in Virginia and came to UD, where she was a resident assistant and graduated in the 1980s with a double major in criminal justice and political science, to prepare for law school. Long before she graduated in the 1980s, however, she had second thoughts about a career in law and was encouraged by Lewis Randolph, who was then director of the University’s Minority Center (now the Center for Black Culture) to instead consider graduate school. It was a new idea for Allen, but she was interested.
“I wanted to work with kids, and I wanted to help keep them out of trouble,” she says, so she entered a graduate program in criminal justice, with a focus on delinquency prevention, at Michigan State University. While there, she worked in residence life and found that she enjoyed that experience more than her academic studies.
She and her husband, who also worked in residence life, went on to positions at Stony Brook University and then—“exactly 10 years after I first left Virginia”—Virginia Commonwealth University, where she had a position in student affairs.
When she started thinking about the next step in her career, she kept coming back to her love of history. In high school, a future as a history teacher hadn’t been appealing, but after years of working with students in higher education, Allen says she realized how much she would like to teach at that level.
She enrolled in William and Mary’s graduate history program, earned her doctorate in 2007 and took a visiting faculty position at the university. When the Lemon Project was established a couple of years later, she became its coordinator and is now the director.
About the Lemon Project
The project was launched with a report summarizing research findings that the College of William and Mary had owned slaves but had never addressed its history on the subject.
At first, Allen says, the community was skeptical that the Lemon Project would have any meaningful impact.
“When the project was announced during an Africana Studies symposium that included community members, a gentleman said, ‘OK, William and Mary, we’re going to be watching you,’” she recalls. “That meant a lot to me.”
She realized that the initial plan to create an intensive, eight-year archival research project needed to expand.
“We cannot spend eight years in the archive doing scholarly work—even if we come out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book—that doesn’t engage with the community,” she said. “The scholarly work is extremely important, but it’s not enough by itself.”
Today, the project has several facets in addition to the scholarship, including actively building bridges with the African American community, through activities such as public presentations, symposiums and Lemon’s Legacies Porch Talks for students, faculty, staff and community members. It also specifically works with others to create a positive experience for William and Mary students, especially students of color.
The college was one of the first to be funded for this kind of research and reconciliation project, but “it’s become a movement,” Allen says, with about 60 institutions of higher education (including two in the United Kingdom) doing similar work. Those institutions aren’t all in the South, and not all directly enslaved people, but they understand the importance of the research and outreach, she says.
This spring, UD became one of the newest members of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, organized by the University of Virginia.
Allen applauds this milestone.
“It’s a recognition that slavery has such a far reach, obviously for institutions that owned slaves but also for others whose founders profited from slavery,” she says. “It’s intertwined in our past and in our present.”
At William and Mary, a celebration to mark the project’s 10th anniversary last spring was postponed due to COVID restrictions. “Our 11th anniversary will be big.”