From the Enslaved Children of George Mason to Black Lives Next Door: rediscovering the namesake of Virginia’s largest university in the “plantation” suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Established in 1972, George Mason University (GMU) lauds its eighteenth-century namesake whose Gunston Hall Plantation in Virginia is a national landmark. An author of the U.S. Bill of Rights, he is rarely recognized for enslaving people and bequeathing them as property. This changed when campus scholars in the Center for Mason Legacies launched investigative research. The article explains how their entwined projects, The Enslaved Children of George Mason, Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial, and Black Lives Next Door, revealed the unknown historical influences of the university namesake and his admirers who shaped GMU’s development in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.