Brown University Programs Committee Activities and International Studies

The president’s charge to the steering committee had two dimensions. Our primary task was to
examine the University’s historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade and to report our findings openly and truthfully. But we were also asked to reflect on the meaning of this history in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present day confrontation with past injustice. In particular, the president asked the committee “to organize academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised” by the national debate over reparations for slavery. Reparations, she noted, was a highly controversial subject, presenting “problems about which men and women of good will may ultimately disagree,” but it was also a subject on which Brown, in light of its own history, had “a special obligation and a special opportunity to provide thoughtful inquiry.”

In her letter of charge and in a public statement following the announcement of the committee’s appointment, the president stressed that the committee would not determine whether or how Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor did she expect it to forge a consensus on the reparations question. Its object, rather, was “to provide factual information and critical perspectives to deepen understanding” and enrich debate on an issue that had aroused great public passion but little constructive public dialogue.
The steering committee has endeavored to fulfill this charge. Members of the committee, assisted by other Brown faculty as well as by undergraduate and graduate student researchers, gathered information about Brown’s past, drawing on both published sources and various historical archives. The committee also sponsored more than thirty public programs, including scholarly lectures, panel discussions, forums, film screenings, and two international conferences exploring the experience of other societies and institutions that have grappled with legacies of historical injustice. In all, we entertained more than a hundred distinguished speakers, ranging from Professor John Hope Franklin, who discussed his tenure as chairman of One America, President Clinton’s short-lived national commission on race, to Beatrice Fernando, a slavery survivor from Sri Lanka, who spoke on the problem of human trafficking today. The committee is currently preparing a selection of these presentations for publication in a scholarly anthology.

The steering committee also organized programs and activities beyond the University’s gates. Committee members addressed community groups and participated in workshops for local teachers and students. A museum exhibition about the Sally, mounted by undergraduate research students working with the committee, is currently touring public libraries across the state. The exhibition, “Navigating the Past: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally, 1764-1765,” has also been exhibited at the John Brown House, the historic home of one of the ship’s owners, and at the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St. John’s, Antigua, the final destination of surviving captives from the ship. Members of the committee also collaborated with the Choices Program, a curricular development group affiliated with Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies, to write and publish a high school curriculum, “A Forgotten History:

The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England.” With the support of the office of President Simmons, the committee was able to donate copies of the curriculum to every high school history and social studies classroom in Rhode Island.

The report that follows represents the culmination of the committee’s work. It contains three sections, reflecting the different elements of the president’s charge. The first focuses on history, exploring different aspects of the University’s relationship to slavery. This section reveals the complicity of many of the University’s founders and benefactors in slavery and the slave trade, and outlines some of the direct benefits that accrued to the University. Yet it also seeks to do more. Brown’s formative decades coincided with many of the signal events in America’s tortuous racial history: the peak of thetransatlantic slave trade and the appearance of a popular movement decrying the trade as criminal; the birth of a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, and the emergence of racist ideologies insisting that people were not equally created or endowed; the gradual abolition of slavery in the northern states and the rapid expansion of the institution in the South.

Brown University was shaped by all of these developments, and members of the campus community, including students, vigorously debated their meaning and significance. We are not the first members of the Brown community to confront our University’s historical complicity in slavery and the slave trade or to debate our own responsibilities in light of it.