The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., has released a report acknowledging its ties to slavery.

The 70-page report is a result of a year’s worth of research by scholars at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), according to The Washington Post. R. Albert Mohler Jr., the school’s president, wrote the denomination’s founders "were deeply complicit in the defense of slavery" in the report’s introduction.

The Louisville, Kentucky, seminary was founded in 1859 by James P. Boyce, John Albert Broadus, Basil Manly Jr. and William Williams, who owned about 50 slaves between them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 after faith leaders from the North and South couldn’t agree on the morality of slavery.

"The seminary's early faculty and trustees defended the righteousness of slaveholding and opposed efforts to limit the institution,” the report reads.

The founders’ successors also “advocated segregation, the inferiority of African Americans and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of Southern slavery,” the report continues.

Mohler told NPR making the acknowledgement was a hard task.

"It's a very difficult story," Mohler said. "But it needed to be told. It needed to be documented, and it needed to be done now."

Getting to this point took a long time. The SBTS did not admit Black students until 1940 and wasn’t fully integrated until over a decade later. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in the 1960s, but even following that speech, the school was still reluctant to recognize its history.

“We have been guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity,” Mohler wrote. “We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story. We comforted ourselves that we could know this, but since these events were so far behind us, we could move on without awkward and embarrassing investigations and conversations.”

The school didn’t formally recognize its link to slavery until 1995. Its first Black president, Fred Luter, wasn’t elected until 2012.

"Our relationship to African Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention,” the school wrote in a resolution. “Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves and either participated in, supported or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African Americans."

The report is a first step in a series of changes.

"One of the first things that will happen is that our institutional history will be revised," Mohler said.

The school doesn’t have any statues of its founders, but a few buildings are named after pro-slavery figures. Mohler said the names will stay.

"Taking the names off in a sense is just an effort to hide," Mohler said. "This is our story. This is exactly who we are. Our responsibility is to serve God faithfully, both in what we retain and in what we reject from those who came before us."

Blavitize your inbox! Join our daily newsletter for fresh stories and breaking news.

Now, check these out:

Gandhi Statue Removed From University of Ghana Campus Following Protests From Students And Faculty

FBI Claims White Supremacist Mob Proud Boys Isn't Extremist Group

Man Ticketed For Playing 'F**k Tha Police' During Traffic Stop Of Black Motorist Cleared By Jury