A PECULIAR RESPONSIBILITY: COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES GRAPPLE WITH THEIR TIES TO SLAVERY

The Nation., NY
ies
July 2 2007

This article was originally published by CampusProgress. Campus
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university campuses.

Right-wing gadfly David Horowitz struck at Brown University in 2001,
buying a provocative ad in the Brown Daily Herald titled "10 Reasons
Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea–And Racist Too." The ad
contained twisted formulations suggesting, for example, that African
Americans owe whites a debt for liberating them from slavery. In
response, a group of angry students stole an entire day’s run of the
newspaper, setting off a national media frenzy debating race and the
limits of free speech.

But against all odds, this Horowitz fantasy scenario ultimately led
to positive moral and intellectual development. Brown’s incoming
president, Ruth Simmons, is said to have realized that the flap over
Horowitz’s ad could be a "teaching moment." And there was something
else: Brown, founded in 1764, had known ties to slavery and the slave
trade, even though the topic was absent from the university’s official
history. It was particularly striking that Simmons, the Ivy League’s
first black president and the great-great-granddaughter of slaves,
shared her office in University Hall with a portrait of one-time
slave owner James Manning, Brown’s first president.

So Simmons created the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,
made up of faculty, administrators, and students, and charged it
in April 2003 with examining Brown’s ties to slavery and making a
serious study of the reparations issue.

But getting students involved proved difficult. Brown’s committee
strove to encourage student participation and several undergraduates
contributed research. But even as events and speakers were widely
advertised, many students opted not to take part in a rare opportunity
to engage with history in a meaningful way. While over 300 people
turned for a lecture by historian John Hope Franklin, attendance at
committee events was often dominated by locals unaffiliated with
Brown. Even when the report came out last fall to national media
coverage, apathy stubbornly persisted. Forty percent of students in a
Brown Daily Herald poll said they had not heard of or were uninterested
in the committee.

However high-minded they are, institutions undertaking these types
of historical inquiries should expect criticism. At one slavery and
justice forum at Brown, a neo-Nazi group showed up to denounce the
"exercise in white guilt." One letter-writer told the committee, "You
disgust me, as you disgust many other Americans. Slavery was wrong,
but at that time it was a legal enterprise. It ended, case closed."

And columnist Thomas Sowell of the conservative Hoover Institution
asserted (backed up by zero original reporting) that Brown’s effort
was a classic example of "race-hustling" and "no academic exercise
of scholarly research."

University of Alabama law professor Alfred Brophy advises any school
considering such a commission, "Realize this is controversial and
will antagonize people. And make sure that you can articulate what
is positive that will come out of this."

Brophy, who has written widely on universities and reparations, led a
successful drive in 2004 to have Alabama’s faculty senate apologize
for its involvement in slavery. Faculty members at Alabama in the
antebellum period were not only pro-slavery advocates, they were
also responsible for whipping students’ slaves on campus. Brophy told
Campus Progress that an apology was not enough to overcome the past,
but it was a step in the right direction.

"When you see the reaction to this–there were people angry
about this–you realize an apology is not meaningless, it is very
meaningful," Brophy said.

Last fall, after three years of work and over 30 public programs,
Brown’s committee released its report. The 100-page document makes
recommendations on how the University should hold itself accountable
for its entanglements with slavery, "the prototypical crime against
humanity." Just as important, it provides a full history of Brown and
slavery, a comparative look at the problem of "retrospective justice,"
and a history of the reparations debate in America. The committee
also posted videos of lectures and forums online along with relevant
historical documents.

Other schools, too, have recently confronted their historical
ties to slavery–histories that often have been glossed over or
forgotten–and have attempted their own forms of redress. Still others
are now considering proposals to investigate their involvement with
slavery. Whether these efforts will spread is uncertain. But it is
clear that there’s no shortage of universities implicated in slavery,
and that there are lessons to be learned from Brown’s experience.

"I think any university of this vintage will have its own distinctive
web of entanglements with slavery and the transatlantic slave trade"
James Campbell, a Brown history professor and chair of the slavery
and justice committee, told Campus Progress.

The Brown committee’s report is a stark reminder of the bankruptcy
of what Robert Penn Warren called the "Treasury of Virtue"–the
idea that the North was not implicated in slavery, and that the
Civil War was fought solely to end the peculiar institution. Half
of slave-trading ships originating in North America left from ports
in Rhode Island. Of the leading citizens who served on the Brown
Corporation (the university’s governing board) in that era, about
30 owned or captained slave ships. Brown’s first endowment campaign
received donations from men like South Carolinian Henry Laurens, who
ran the largest slave-trading house in North America. And four slaves
helped build University Hall, Brown’s main administrative building.

They are identified in construction records only by the names of
their owners ("Earle’s Negro," for example), who lent the slaves’
labor as a form of donation to the college. The enormous scope of
slavery, however, makes it impossible to peg exact numbers on slave
money in Brown’s history. "[S]lavery was not a distinct enterprise
but rather an institution that permeated every aspect of social and
economic life in Rhode Island," the report says.

The most arresting part of the report is the story of the slave ship
Sally, a joint venture of the four Brown brothers, prosperous merchants
who were heavily involved in the early governance of the College
of Rhode Island–later to be renamed Brown University. The ship set
out for Africa from Providence in 1764, the year the university was
founded. Most of its cargo was taken up by 17,000 gallons of rum to
trade for slaves on the African coast. They would later be sold in
the West Indies to harvest sugar cane, a product in turn bound for
the rum distilleries of Rhode Island. Of the 196 Africans acquired
by the Sally, 109 died from disease, suicide, and other means by
the time the ship arrived back in Providence. This notation from the
ship’s account book reported an uprising on the eighth day at sea:
"Slaves Rose on us was obliged fire on them and Destroyed Eight and
Several more wounded badly 1 Thye and ones Ribs broke." [sic]

But the report is not merely a catalogue of sins. There are heroes,
too. There is James Tallmadge, the undergraduate who gave the 1790
commencement address denouncing the slave trade as "repugnant to the
laws of God"–before an audience that likely included practitioners
of the trade. And there is Moses Brown, who broke with his brothers
when he converted to Quakerism, freed his slaves, and became a zealous
abolitionist. Ironically, Moses the anti-slavery activist also became
the pioneer of Rhode Island’s textile industry, which thrived on
slave-produced cotton.

It is crucial for universities pursuing such projects to present
historical findings in all their complexity, according to Campbell.

"Our starting point was, we think we know this history, but we don’t.

It has much to teach us," he said. "If you’re going to talk about the
legacy of history and its implications for the present, let’s figure
out what happened."

Brown’s slavery and justice report presents a comparative study of
attempts at retrospective justice, from South Africa’s truth commission
and compensation for Holocaust victims to, on the other end of the
spectrum, the Turkish government’s continuing denial of the Armenian
genocide. The report also addresses the "familiar extenuations" for
slavery: "that direct victims and perpetrators are long since dead" and
"that many, even most, Americans are descendants of immigrants who came
to the United States after 1865." These are true, the report says, "but
they neither expunge the crimes nor erase their enduring legacies."

The committee concluded that the most successful initiatives contained
three elements: acknowledgement of an offense, a commitment to
truth-telling, and the making of amends in the present. In Brown’s
case, the report says, this third element should include increasing
recruiting in Africa and the West Indies, creating a center to study
slavery and justice, and dedicating resources to improving public
education in Rhode Island.

But for universities, the most important form of
repair–reparations–may simply be recovering lost historical
narratives. "Folks really need to have a thorough investigation even
before they begin to call for further action. You need some good
historians on the case," Brophy said.

In April, the board of the University of Virginia unanimously passed
a resolution expressing "particular regret" for the school’s past use
of slave labor. It was hailed by Brophy and others as an important
step from a well-known university. But the apology was unceremoniously
announced in a press release 11 days after the fact and unaccompanied
by any investigation or process of self-discovery.

Another storied Virginia institution, William and Mary, is poised to
take a different route. English professor Terry Meyers told Campus
Progress he has introduced a resolution in the faculty assembly to
fund a two-year position for a scholar to research the history of
slavery and race relations at the college. Meyers said he came upon
a document showing that in the early 1700s the college purchased a
tobacco plantation and 17 slaves to support a scholarship program. He
turned to the three major histories of William and Mary, and while
each referred to the scholarship program, none mentioned the slaves
and the plantation.

He said he expects his resolution to pass when it is voted on in
September. "We’re a mature corporate body and we have a glorious
past," Meyers said. "But there are things that we did that are very
ugly and that we need to take a look at."

Meyers likes to quote Thomas Hardy, who wrote, "If way to the better
there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." Other universities
considering a fresh examination of their ties to slavery would also do
well to consider the words of Campbell, chair of the Brown committee:

"Maybe it’s just an occupational hazard as an historian, but I
believe that the past matters. I believe that the more a society is
able to understand and confront its past, the healthier it will be,"
he said. "The stories that we tell about our past not only shape who
we are as a society but also shape the matrix of political possibility
in the present."