The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism is an interdisciplinary forum focusing on the intersections of empire, migration, and racial hierarchy. To explore these issues, the Center hosts workshops and symposia, facilitates student publications, and offers research grants. The center is also home to the Critical Diaspora Studies major. The Chloe Center supports reparative freedom education among students, faculty, and staff on campus and across Baltimore.
“Research. Education. Reparation.” These three words continue to guide the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.
Critical Diaspora Studies (CDS)
In 2021, the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship—the predecessor to the Chloe Center—became newly engaged with undergraduate students on campus through what became the CDS initiative and undergraduate major proposed and designed by a group of student activists. The major launched in 2025.
Students in the major choose among these four tracks:
- Migration and Borders
- Global Indigeneities
- Empires, Wars, & Carceralities
- Solidarities, Social Movements, & Citizenship
The major also emphasizes community-engaged research and internships with partners in Baltimore, serving as a model for bidirectional relationships between students and the city. The Chloe Center operates with a participatory and democratic principle. We are proving that college curriculum and university programming can be determined through extensive and deliberate conversation and consensus among students and faculty.
Who’s Chloe?
“I give and bequeath to my servant woman Chloe the sum of one thousand dollars.”
—The Last Will and Testament of Mr. Johns Hopkins (1873)
Chloe is the name of a servant woman named in our founder, Johns Hopkins’, last will and testament. The historical record remains unclear about Chloe’s last name. It’s listed variously as Jotsy, Dodson, or Johnson. She may have been daughter to a teenage migrant from the Virgin Islands, and she seems, at least, to have been born in Baltimore. Beyond that, historians know she lived as a Black woman and remained in the employ of Mr. Johns Hopkins between at least 1850 and his death in 1873.
In Hopkins’s available will, the woman named only “Chloe” received a bequest of $1,000. This same document set aside $7 million establishing the Johns Hopkins institutions. According to census records, Chloe never gained the ability to read or write.
The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism has adopted Chloe’s name because it is a research center committed to expanding social and civic literacy, unmasking the workings of racism across the globe, understanding the complexities of Johns Hopkins University’s institutional legacies, and highlighting the connectedness within and across communities of color.
To adopt the name Chloe is to honor her, but also to recognize a tragic but fitting absence in her erased family name. The vagueness around Chloe’s possible migrant heritage and ancestry encapsulates the specificity of her personal history as a Black Baltimorean, and the general experience of working people worked to build the nations, empires, and institutions of the modern world. Chloe’s many unknowns affirm the Center’s commitment to search and research. They cement its bond to the history and responsibilities of Johns Hopkins as a global university.