"Slavery, in every way imaginable, was central": U-Va. continues to explore its history

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After a five-year plunge into the history of slavery at the University of Virginia, a commission has concluded that slavery played an integral role in the founding, construction and operations of the public university. A new commission will continue the examination of race by studying the years of segregation there.

U-Va., like dozens of colleges, has been delving into its complicated racial past — an inquiry that has particular resonance in a place marked by white-supremacist rallies and violence last year.

In its final report, the U-Va. President’s Commission on Slavery and the University described a school designed by a man whose earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow by an enslaved person. Even the last moments of Thomas Jefferson — who never knew life without slavery — were eased by a slave who adjusted his pillows as he lay dying.