NATALIE: The town of College Park really developed in response to the start of the University of Maryland.

The Maryland Agricultural College actually existed before the university.

It was sort of the brainchild of Charles Benedict Calvert.

Calvert was an agriculturalist, briefly a Congressman, also a plantation owner and a slave owner.

And it was sort of his idea to establish an educational institution and to sort of bring a sense of professional pride to farming and to share knowledge.

The school officially opened in 1859.

The original three classes were agriculture, which included things like chemistry and mineralogy.

Exact sciences, which is more of what we think of engineering, mathematics, surveying, and then there was ancient and modern languages.

Then in 1887 the federal government passed the Hatch Act, which basically allocated federal funding towards land grant institutions to be able to create agricultural experiment stations on campus.

The university was created and then sort of started drawing in things like the railroad.

And with the railroad bringing students and bringing faculty, it also brought people who were interested in building and starting businesses.

Going from a campus of 34 wealthy gentlemen farmers in 1859 to now we have over 50,000 students from all over the world taking classes in more than 300 different academic programs, it doesn't even compare.

There's a lot of hard history when you look at institutions that have been around this long.

LAE'L: So now we're really trying to do this intentional effort to bring forward the story of the African-American experience and its relationship to the University.

There's definitely records that indicate when the University was established the Calvert family still had enslaved laborers.

And so it's not a far jump to say that it was Black folks that were helping teach those students, the all-White males that were attending this institution at that time, the new agricultural techniques.

The University has a long history of employing Lakeland members for a very, very long time.

Lakeland is one of the immediate surrounding community around College Park and it is a historically Black community.

Lakeland members worked here, at the University, in hospitality and food services, building the campus, and also with the agricultural experimental station.

We're starting to put names to these stories and how that history impacted the trajectory of our institution.

Here at Hornbake Library we have our latest exhibit, "Rising Up: 100 Years of Civil Rights and Social Justice Activism" at the University of Maryland.

This exhibit was definitely inspired by the summer of 2020 with the protests pertaining to George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and trying to push for new policies for the safety of, of students of color on campus.

Our students help push us forward.

We just really want to celebrate our students who paved the way for us to be the institution that we are now.