Slavery Funds Helped Found Brown University

Proceeds from the slave trade were used to found Brown University and slaves helped build the campus, according to a report released yesterday.The 106-page report, which documents the university’s ties to the New England slave trade and makes recommendations on how to right historical wrongs, was produced by Brown’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.When the university’s president, Ruth Simmons, convened the committee in 2004, she said she wanted it to explore Brown’s links to slavery and the possibility of granting reparations.“We were able to show that it was possible for an institution in our society not only to take a forthright look at its own history, but also to engage with questions that are awkward and painful and controversial in a reasoned and thoughtful way,” a professor at Brown and the chairman of the steering committee, James Campbell, told The New York Sun.The committee’s recommendations to the Providence, R.I., university, include publicly acknowledging its involvement with slavery, building a slavery memorial on campus, creating a research center on slavery and justice, and continuing to vigorously recruit African and African-American students.Although the committee did not recommend monetary reparations, Ms. Simmons called the report “provocative.” In a statement released yesterday, she lauded the committee for demonstrating that “there is no subject so controversial that it should not be submitted to serious study and debate.”The Brown report comes after a number of Northeastern institutions have confronted, under varying circumstances, their ties to slavery. The New-York Historical Society featured a “Slavery in New York” exhibit in 2005, and the bank J.P. Morgan investigated its founders’ involvement with the slave trade in 2003. Yale University became embroiled in a bitter debate in 2001, when three of its doctoral candidates published a report on the school’s ties to slave owners, after whom many campus buildings are named. That same year, Yale founded America’s first center for the study of slavery.Asked about other institutions’ possibly doing similar self-examination, Mr. Campbell said: “I’m certain that other institutions would find things to study, but it’s not for us to tell them to look at their own history.”

Slavery Funds Helped Found Brown University

Slavery Funds Helped Found Brown University

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