<p>Institutions of American higher education have recently begun to grapple with the darkest parts of their racial histories. This is a significant undertaking, as many American colleges and universities were built upon a foundation that relied on systemic racism, including by owning and utilizing enslaved labor to build and enrich their campuses. Institutional recognitions have varied in their form and have included formal apologies or statements of regret, community-wide conversations and archival displays about the history of campus enslavement, and the creation of memorials to the enslaved on campus. This paper explores the content of these institutional recognitions of enslavement histories by analyzing all publicly available statements on enslavement from American higher education consortium members of the Universities Studying Slavery (<i>N</i> = 85). We first document the “reasons for reckoning,” or the articulated motivations that institutions give for committing to understanding and documenting their histories with enslavement, which include expanding the historical record, creating an inclusive campus community, inspiring others to do similar reckoning work, and viewing this work as a form of redress in itself. We then analyze the “rationales in reckoning,” or how the institutions situated those histories, describing strategies that institutions utilized to soften their enslavement histories, including regionalizing, historicizing, broadening, softening, and highlighting. In so doing, we provide insight about how racial histories are preserved, retold, and addressed at the institutional level.</p>