Slavery at Brown
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Brown University yesterday released the report of its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, and it makes for compelling, fascinating, and educational reading. The report begins by noting that the committee had been meeting for months in an office on the second floor of University Hall before it noticed, in the corner of the room, an antique clock identified by a plaque as “The Family Clock of Admiral Esek Hopkins.”The admiral, a Brown trustee from 1782 to 1802,turned out to have also been the captain of a slave ship, the Sally, that sailed from Rhode Island to West Africa. The ship, the report says, was owned by Nicholas Brown and Company, of the same Browns whose donations gave what had been the College of Rhode Island its present name. The report says that the clock itself was a metaphor for the questions the university was confronting: “Is it appropriate to display it? Should we remove the plaque honoring Esek Hopkins? Attach another plaque?”
The slavery question, as it resurfaces now, is often thought of in terms of reparations. The Brown report explores that question extensively, but does not recommend them. It does recommend, among other things, a competition to design a slave trade memorial for placement on campus, and the creation of an academic center at Brown for further research on slavery and justice. Brown joins a growing number of mainstream institutions that have confronted their own history on slavery — the report mentions J.P. Morgan Chase, the Hartford Courant, and the Episcopal Church.
In this city, the New-York Historical Society last fall mounted a memorable exhibition, “Slavery in New York,” documenting not only New York’s sins of slavery, which were many, but also the beginnings of abolitionism. Of the four Brown brothers who owned Admiral Hopkins’s slave ship, one of them, Moses Brown, freed his own slaves after becoming a Quaker. Moses Brown, the report says, became an advocate of anti-slavery laws and a founder of the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the relief of Persons unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Conditions of the African Race. The report examining Brown is in the best tradition of Moses Brown, which those who did such a fine job of researching it will know is high praise indeed.