William Marsh Rice

William Marsh Rice was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1816 and moved to the Republic of Texas in 1838. He became a Houston merchant, investor, landowner and financier whose businesses grew alongside the cotton and sugar economy. Rice University archival research documents that Rice owned enslaved people and benefited from a regional economy dependent on enslaved labor.

Rice chartered the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art in 1891 and ultimately left most of his estate to the institution. His 1900 murder during a forged-will scheme delayed but did not derail the bequest; the institute opened in Houston in 1912 and later became Rice University.

Rice's bequest created one of Texas's major research universities and permanently linked his name to Houston higher education.

Modern institutional history also requires acknowledging that the wealth behind the bequest was connected to slavery and the antebellum plantation economy.