In 1764, a ship christened Sally set sail from Providence, R.I., for the Windward Coast of Africa. Its mission was to trade goods — tobacco, candles, onions, and rum — for enslaved human beings. The traders hoped that most of the slaves would be sold in the West Indies at a tidy profit. The ship’s master also had special instructions to bring four slaves, preferably young boys, back with him to Providence.
The trip did not go as planned. It took months to round up a sufficient number of slaves, and 20 of them died, at least one by suicide, before the ship even left Africa. Others died en route to the West Indies, and still more once the ship arrived. In all, according to the ship’s detailed logbook, 109 slaves perished while 83, many of them sickly and no doubt near death themselves, were sold at a discount. One of the four boys destined for Providence did not survive the journey.
The date of the voyage is notable for another reason: It was also the year of Brown University’s founding. And, as it happens, the brothers who provided the financial backing for the disastrous expedition also provided financial backing for the fledgling university that would later bear their family’s name.
That disturbing story is part of a 106-page narrative examination of the early connections between Brown University and slavery. The report, done at the behest of Ruth J. Simmons, Brown’s president and herself a descendant of slaves, is an unsparing look at a shameful side of the university’s past. This act of institutional introspection, which was three years in the making, was prompted by an advertisement in Brown’s student newspaper arguing against reparations for slavery. The ad, placed by the activist and writer David Horowitz, caused an outcry on campus and attracted national attention. Later Ms. Simmons asked a group of professors to look into the question of reparations and to examine the university’s own possible ties to the slave trade.
The report recommended that Brown formally acknowledge its ties to slavery, build a memorial on the campus, and establish a center on slavery and justice. It stopped short of recommending monetary reparations or an institutional apology.
Even before the report was released, in late October, some critics had deemed the effort needless hand-wringing. Few longstanding institutions in the United States have been able to avoid the taint of slavery, so why single out Brown and the Brown family?
The scholars who prepared the report contend that it is an overdue reckoning with a blemished history and a step toward healing old wounds. They also hope that it will prompt other colleges to examine their own pasts. “It’s not for us to prescribe to other universities what they ought to do,” says James T. Campbell, an associate professor of Africana studies at Brown, who chaired the report committee. “But it does beg the question of what other universities should do.”
Still, the issue of slavery, and specifically reparations for slavery, provoke such strong feelings that many of Brown’s peers may be reluctant to follow its lead. The same holds true at many Southern institutions, where the reminders of a Confederate heritage are often clearly visible.
So while the report’s writers hope that it will inspire other colleges to begin their own investigations, it has been greeted — so far — with silence.
Students Look for Skeletons
Soon after the Brown report was issued, the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper published an article asking whether Penn had any closeted skeletons of its own. The headline read: “Penn says ‘all clear’ as Ivies decry slave ties.”
The source for that claim is Mark Frazier Lloyd, director of the university’s archives and records center. Several years ago, administrators asked him to find out whether Penn had any historical connections to slavery that they should know about. With rumblings about reparations in the news, it’s not surprising that officials were curious.
Mr. Lloyd looked through the minutes of trustee meetings and the correspondence of university administrators dating back to the founding of the university, in the mid-18th century. “I found that Penn’s founders did not participate, to the best of my knowledge, in the slave trade,” he says.
He did find evidence of slave ownership, including trustees who owned plantations in Delaware and Maryland. But there is a big difference, according to Mr. Lloyd, between slave owners and people involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Traders, he argues in essence, were much worse.
It’s an argument that Steven H. Hahn calls “ethical hairsplitting.” Mr. Hahn is a professor of history at Penn and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Belknap, 2003). While there is a distinction to be made between slave owners and slave traders, he argues, there is no moral gulf between the two. Nor does he believe that making such a distinction means Penn is “all clear.”
“If there were slave owners who were financially important at the University of Pennsylvania, or they were in leadership positions, then there is a tie-in,” says Mr. Hahn.
As for whether Penn should conduct an investigation like Brown’s, he doesn’t see why not: “It seems that we should want to find out about our past.”
Asked about its plans to pursue the matter by The Chronicle, Penn responded with a written statement saying that “slavery left an indelible mark on this country’s history,” and that “Penn, like other colleges and universities, seeks to educate as well as to eradicate the remaining vestiges of slavery and all forms of unlawful discrimination.”
In 2001 an investigation led by three graduate students at Yale University revealed unsavory facts abouts its past. The report found that most of the university’s colleges were named for slave owners. For instance, while Samuel F.B. Morse, for whom Morse College is named, is best known as the inventor of the telegraph, the report outlines his vehement pro-slavery views, including his belief that it was good for a “barbarous race” to be enslaved in order to be Christianized. The researchers also discovered that Yale’s first professorship had been endowed by a slave trader. The chair was in divinity.
The report took particular aim at John C. Calhoun, a Yale alumnus and the seventh vice president of the United States, who was a leading supporter of slavery in the mid-19th century. In the 1930s, a college at Yale was named after him, and a statue was erected to commemorate Calhoun as one of Yale’s eight “worthies.”
One of the report’s authors, Antony Dugdale, says it was prompted by the university’s tricentennial celebration. “This was all sparked by Yale’s triumphalism, the ‘Be so proud of Mother Yale because we were always on the side of the abolitionists,’” he says. “My friends and I were like, ‘There’s more to this story.’”
‘Warts and All’
Some at the university dismissed the report as a public-relations stunt by union activists. (Indeed, Mr. Dugdale and his co-authors were active in the graduate-student labor movement). It was also criticized for supposed factual errors. In a recent e-mail message to The Chronicle, Helaine Klasky, a Yale spokeswoman, wrote that the students’ report was “riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentation.”
Asked for examples, the Yale media-relations department sent another e-mail message spelling out the report’s alleged shortcomings — among them that Yale eminences like Timothy Dwight, who was president of the university at the turn of the 18th century and has a college named after him, were unfairly dismissed as slaveholders even though they later became stalwart abolitionists. “While it may be true that they all had been slaveowners at some point, their documented opposition to slavery, while acknowledged, is brushed aside in the report,” the message said.
Mr. Dugdale acknowledges a “complexity” in Dwight’s role in slavery but says the intent of the report was to show that “he’s not just the abolitionist figure that others would make him out to be.”
The report did not make demands or even recommendations; it simply laid out an inglorious version of Yale’s history. Mr. Dugdale says it is important to tell Yale’s story “warts and all.” He also argues that having a college named after Calhoun is “problematic” considering that, unlike Morse or other college eponyms, the politician was largely defined by his pro-slavery views.
As for what Yale should do, he thinks Brown had the right idea. “From my perspective, some kind of monument or public admission of the complex relationship that Yale had with slavery would be in order,” he says.
The president of Yale, Richard C. Levin, turned down an interview with The Chronicle, but in an interview with the Yale Daily News, he acknowledged that previous leaders of the university had owned slaves, calling it “simply a fact of history.”
While the slavery ties of Yale and Brown have received the most attention, other Ivy League institutions are known to have connections, too. Harvard Law School’s first professorship was endowed by Isaac Royall, who made his fortune from slavery. That professorship, which is held by Janet Halley, provided the seed money from which the law school grew.
But the law school has come to grips with its past, says Michael A. Armini, a spokesman for Harvard. In 2000, at around the same time the school held a celebration for black alumni, an article was published in the Harvard Law Bulletin about the founding of the school, including Royall’s slave trading. “We don’t feel like it’s anything we’ve hidden,” says Mr. Armini. “Everyone knows where the money came from, but we’ve obviously put it to good use.”
Is that enough?
Alfred L. Brophy, a professor at the University of Alabama’s School of Law, isn’t so sure. Mr. Brophy, author of Reparations: Pro and Con (Oxford, 2006), led an effort at Alabama to confront its history that resulted in an apology from the Faculty Senate in 2004 for the university’s involvement in slavery. He believes that Brown’s report will eventually force other colleges to dig deeply into their own pasts. He has been dismayed by the “arrogance” of some universities, he says, particularly those in the Ivy League. “It’s one thing if people say, We don’t know what the truth is and we don’t care. But people at these universities are saying, without researching the issue, We have nothing to atone for. They’re letting themselves off the hook.”
History on Display
At many Southern institutions, reminders of a less-than-laudable history are often in plain sight.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a prominent monument to the Confederate war dead has inspired protests for years. Dubbed Silent Sam, it was erected early in the 20th century by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that encouraged colleges to teach a pro-South history of the Civil War. “There is nothing subtle about our history,” says James C. Moeser, Chapel Hill’s chancellor. “Our first buildings were built by enslaved African-Americans. Slavery was part of the founding of our university.”
And Chapel Hill has made an effort to confront that unsubtle history. In 2005 a monument to the “unsung founders” was erected on the campus to honor the African-Americans who had helped build the university. The design of the monument, however, has been widely criticized as unimpressive, especially compared with the grander Silent Sam, which is more than 15 feet tall. The unsung-founders monument is a knee-high table held up by African-American figures. Students sometimes eat lunch on it.
Chapel Hill also recently unveiled a Web site, which officials call a “virtual museum,” that allows visitors to explore the university’s past, including its ties to slavery. Harry Watson, a professor of history who is one of the site’s creators, says it is meant as a response to the “triumphalist and self-congratulatory” version of the university’s history. “We want to lay out the story so no one would accuse us of covering up or not telling the truth,” he says.
The university should do more, according to Yonni Chapman, who recently finished his doctoral dissertation at Chapel Hill on the university’s history. For one thing, he believes that Silent Sam should go. “It’s by far the most imposing monument on campus,” he says. “And it says that the university doesn’t see anything wrong with having a monument to white supremacy as the image that welcomes people to campus.”
Gerald Horne agrees. Mr. Horne, a former professor of history at Chapel Hill who is now at the University of Houston, says the statue should be put in a “more appropriate context,” such as a museum, so it will be clear that the Confederacy is nothing to be celebrated. When Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad, Mr. Horne wrote a letter to the local newspaper suggesting that it was time to do the same to Silent Sam. Needless to say, he received plenty of hate mail from students and alumni.
Still, the professor remains undeterred. “I thought we were supposed to be institutions of higher education, not propaganda,” he says. “Especially not reprehensible Confederate propaganda.”
Chancellor Moeser, however, is not persuaded that getting rid of Silent Sam is the answer. “I don’t believe in hiding or erasing the past,” he says. “I think it’s an opportunity for a teachable moment.”
Mr. Watson, the history professor, says Silent Sam is a “monument to a cause most of us would repudiate,” but that removing it would cause a “firestorm of criticism” from both inside and outside the university.
At Vanderbilt University, the administration tried and failed to dispose of an on-campus reminder of the Confederacy. The ensuing controversy and lawsuit shows how a university’s well-intentioned effort to deal with its history can backfire.
A dormitory bearing the inscription “Confederate Memorial Hall” has inspired protests for a quarter-century. Like Silent Sam, it was built with a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It was originally part of Peabody College, which Vanderbilt acquired in 1979.
After years of complaints, the university decided to change the building’s name. But the Confederacy group sued, arguing that Vanderbilt had a contractual obligation not to change the name (even though the contract had been made with Peabody, not Vanderbilt). When it became apparent that the legal wrangling could drag on for years and create further uproar, the university backed down.
The name remains on the building, but all official university materials refer to it simply as “Memorial Hall.” Vanderbilt plans to add a plaque to the building at the end of the academic year to explain the inscription and the university’s failed attempt to remove it.
Reactions at Brown
More than 200 people gathered recently at Brown University to discuss the slavery report. While there were a few quibbles and the occasional raised voice, the forum was remarkable mostly for its congeniality. Those in attendance seemed anxious to praise the committee’s work.
But not everyone has received the report so warmly. Anonymous comments on the Brown Daily Jolt, an Internet forum, have been consistently disparaging. One comment called the report proof that President Simmons was “out of control.”
Other critiques have been more temperate. Sylvia Brown, a descendant of the Browns for whom the university is named, wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that her family had been a “very minor player” in the slave trade. It “would have been nice to see a few sentences about all the anti-slavery and philanthropic activities of the Browns in the last 200 years,” she wrote.
Richard A. Epstein wrote skeptically of the report before it was even issued. Now that he’s read it, Mr. Epstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose son recently graduated from Brown, calls the report “childish” and “kind of embarrassing.” He accuses Ms. Simmons of choosing professors for the panel because they were sympathetic to the notion that Brown should have to make amends for its past. And he contends, like Ms. Brown, that the report unfairly overlooks the positive chapters in the university’s history. “By making yourself appear worse than you are, you alter the historical debate to make it appear that the country is incapable of self-correction,” says Mr. Epstein.
On the other side, there are people who feel that the report didn’t go far enough. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has been active in the national movement for slavery reparations. He says the Brown committee’s recommendations, by failing to suggest monetary reparations or an institutional apology, were “underwhelming.” Still, he says, he was impressed by the depth of the report: “It is a model that other institutions and entities could follow to address their own histories.”
Several years ago, the law professor raised the possibility of a lawsuit over slavery reparations against Yale, Brown, and Harvard. While talk of litigation seems to have died down, Mr. Ogletree says it remains an option — which might certainly discourage some universities from examining their pasts.
The head of Brown’s committee, Mr. Campbell, says he and his fellow panel members are now concerned with making sure that their recommendations for a formal acknowledgment of Brown’s ties to slavery, a campus memorial, and a center on slavery and justice, among other things, are actually carried out. Ms. Simmons, who called the report “dense and provocative,” has so far remained mum about its recommendations. (She declined to be interviewed for this article. A spokeswoman said the president wanted the committee to have center stage).
As for the criticism that the report focused too much on the unsavory sections of Brown’s past, Mr. Campbell points out that the committee’s mission was to closely examine the university’s ties to slavery, a mission he believes the committee accomplished. “The only claim that we would make is that this is about a university trying to act like a university,” he says. “Universities profess to revere their pasts, but they also profess to seek the truth. And, truly, that’s all we’ve done.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 14, Page A32