The slave-owner never found them. Now, on the same grounds from which the men escaped, historians are working to piece together their stories — plus other accounts of plantation life on land that later became Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college.

“We’re trying to understand how you take a place that was a site for degradation, violence, and then transform it into the place that it is today,” said Melanye Price, director of the university’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice. “On the exact same soil, how do you go from being a slave plantation to being a university that has educated generations of African-Americans?”

The nation is confronting similar questions throughout February, which is Black History Month. The annual celebration takes place this year against the backdrop of a debate over President Joe Biden’s plans to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, and whether the role of systemic racism should be taught at schools and colleges.

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Want to help?

Anyone who is a descendant of enslaved people on the Alta Vista Plantation, has artifacts related to the plantation, or artifacts related to early Prairie View A&M University is asked to contact simmonscenter@pvamu.edu.

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On HoustonChronicle.com: Center for Race and Justice launches at Prairie View A&M University

Price is one of several Prairie View A&M scholars delving into the history of the campus, using archives, oral histories and technology such as GIS and ground-penetrating radar systems.

The school turns 150 in 2026, and by then she and the Simmons Center’s Epa Committee on the Legacy of Slavery and the Impact of Segregation aim to present a comprehensive history examining those issues at the Waller County campus.

Many of the records describe horrific conditions, but Price said she ultimately finds them to be stories of promise. That notion is compounded by the inherent purpose of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said N. Joyce Payne, founder of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which financially supports HBCU students.

“We change not only opportunities for our students, but we make democracy and the notion of American exceptionalism true,” she said.

The founding of HBCUs

Most Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established after the Civil War, many for the purpose of educating the children of formerly enslaved people in “separate but equal” institutions in the South. After years of struggling to attain more funding, 19 such institutions, including Prairie View A&M, were designated “land grant” schools for agriculture and mechanics through an 1890 federal law that required state funding for the Black colleges.

On HoustonChronicle.com: A history of funding failures at Texas HBCUs

Prairie View A&M was founded in 1876 on a 1,388-acre plot of land purchased from Alta Vista Plantation, more than 40 miles northwest of Houston. The plantation owner’s widow, Helen Marr Kirby, sold the land to the school’s board of directors for the establishment of the “Alta Vista Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for Colored Youths,” according to the school website.

Eight Black men began their studies two years later, making it the second-oldest institution of public higher education in Texas.

Harry L. Williams, CEO and president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, said he knows of at least four HBCUs built on former plantations, making them outliers among the 107 total universities. But he said he doesn’t find it surprising that states would have purchased plantations, because they contained an appropriate amount of land to create schools.

The state surely knew at the time the significance of making Black students learn on former plantations — “it wasn’t lost on them,” Price said.

More coverage: An interactive guide to HBCUs across Texas

Dealing with complex stories

Prairie View A&M students are told about Alta Vista, Price said, but they don’t know the intricacies of how their school began. Price was struck when she saw a bill of sale from Kirby, purchasing an enslaved woman named “Lucinda” in Galveston in 1858.

Another appalling find came in the form of newspaper articles that revealed Kirby had sent slaves to tend to Confederate soldiers, clothing and feeding the same troops who were fighting to ensure that they remained property, Price said.

The team has identified about 50 enslaved people, said Marco Robinson, associate director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center. The study comes at an important time in Texas, he and Price said, especially with the Texas Legislature taking aim at the teaching of so-called “critical race theory,” which focuses on the prominence of systemic racism in United States history.

Many people don’t want to deal with complex stories, Robinson said, but some people do. One of the Kirby descendants, for example, left her results open on the DNA genetic testing site 23andMe, so any potential relatives — Black or white — could connect with her.

“You have people who are attempting to look past all this shadowing of history that you don’t want to face, and they are trying to seek truth,” Robinson said. “When we don’t want to know that truth, then we’re not being transparent with each other.”

'Look what we turned this plantation into'

Students from various fields such as political science, history and architecture, are also contributing to the work. One architecture student, Milton “Javari” Henderson,” is reconstructing a digital rendering of the main “Kirby House” on the plantation, which is no longer standing.

History student Kalyse Houston said she has always kept the plantation in the back of her mind, especially through student customs such as not stepping on the campus’ grass because of uncertainty where slaves were buried. But now, through her work tracing the lineage of those on the plantation, she said she has gained a deeper understanding of the pain and torture that people experienced there.

“A place that has been so terrible for our history and the way it has transformed everybody’s lives to be an institution of higher education is a blessing,” Houston said. “It really makes me happy to know I made a choice to go here, to know where we came from and where we are now. To be a part of that history is very monumental to me.”

Some schools, such as Rice University, are currently seeking to make amends for their pasts — founder William Marsh Rice was a slave owner and founded the private college for whites only. The University of Virginia last year dedicated the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers, which honors the roughly 4,000 enslaved people who lived and worked at the campus in the decades before the Civil War brought an end to slavery.

The work that Prairie View A&M is doing is different, Price said, because the college doesn’t have anything to apologize for. It can instead serve as an example to others.

“In this historical moment we need to understand the power of transformation, and that is the ability for groups that have been marginalized to use their own agency, their own skills, their own fortitude to transform their lives,” Price said.

“That’s the story here for me,” she said. “You put us back on this plantation, but look what we turned this plantation into.”

samantha.ketterer@chron.com