In the Wake of Brown University's Slavery Report
Brown's report will inspire, I think, other educational institutions to undertake similar investigations. Which ones are most likely to follow Brown's lead? I'll tell you below the fold.
Perhaps most likely is Yale University. The Yale Daily Herald is already talking about further investigation of that university's past. Of course, there is already the 2001 report by Yale graduate students. But that report was criticized for the bias of its supporters and there has not yet been a University-established committee. So I'm predicting that Yale will follow Brown's lead soon.
Harvard is probably not far behind, either. Given the presence of Henry Louis Gates and Charles Ogletree on the Harvard faculty, I'm surprised that more hasn't happened already. There's a lot to talk about here, about Harvard's connections to slavery and to anti-slavery as well. Harvard Law School's first endowed chair was established by Isaac Royall, who made a fortune off plantations in the West Indies. Of course, Harvard educated leading anti-slavery thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
A recent Harvard Crimson article charges Brown with greater culpability than Harvard and attempts to relocate culpability to their neighbors in Connecticut: "Though Brown’s ties to slavery run deeper than other Ivy League schools, according to a reparations activist and a historian, another major Ivy League recipient of slave money was Yale University." I'm not sure that the first statement is correct. (The article seems to conflate slavery with the slave trade--so that it relied on Harvard's relatively small connections to the slave trade to minimize its connections to slavery. It does acknowledge some of Harvard's connections and quotes Derrick Bell on the need for further investigation.)
In any list with Brown, Harvard, and Yale, Princeton cannot be far behind. When Brown first began publicly discussing its committee, in March 2004, the Daily Princetonian ran a story about Princeton's connections to slavery, entitled "No Plans to Follow Brown's Inquiry." A number of people they quoted--somewhat surprisingly to me--thought Princeton had little to investigate. For example, the article reported:
"The issue for Brown was that slave labor was used to build some of the structures on campus and that one of the founders of Brown derived his wealth from the unpaid labor of those who were enslaved," Noliwe Rooks, associate director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies, said in an email. "I don't know that the same can be said for Princeton and, therefore, don't know that you have the same issues at work."
Nevertheless, several said it is precisely because Princeton lacked blatant ties to the slave trade that the University should undergo self-investigation. . . .
"Though Princeton's past isn't as blatantly tied to slavery as Brown's, it couldn't hurt and it would be nice to know that our University cares," Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06, president of the Black Student Union, said in an email.
Now I think there are two southern schools that are likely to undertake self-studies as well. Students at the University of Virginia began talking about its connections to slavery and the prospects of an apology last spring. I suspect this will continue; there is much to talk about at UVA. One area that gets relatively less coverage is the intellectual connections that institutions have to slavery: what were faculty teaching and writing? Two UVA faculty were leading proslavery writers in the years leading into Civil War: Albert T. Bledsoe wrote Liberty and Slavery, a leading proslavery tract. George Frederick Holmes wrote a series of proslavery essays, including an attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
And now I'll mention one school where there has been, so far as I can tell, no discussion yet about investigating its connections to slavery: William and Mary College. Because there has been no discussion yet, it's a longer shot than the other four schools. But William and Mary has a lot to talk about. Before the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson was educated there. So W&M can claim some connections to the Enlightenment's anti-slavery impulse. However, Professor Thomas Roderick Dew (later president of W&M) wrote what is probably the single most important proslavery tract in the years leading into Civil War--"Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1831-32." It argues against the gradual abolition plan that the Virginia legislature contemplated in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion. Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese give Dew a lot of attention in their important book, The Mind of the Master Class. Dew wrote a legal history of western civilization (really they were his lecture notes, published posthumously in the 1850s). Want a direct line into the mind of antebellum southern intellectuals? Read through his Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations.
So those are my predictions of several schools likely to follow Brown's lead, along with a little bit about why.
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Don't forget St. George Tucker who was the law faculty at W.& M. in the late 18th Century, and was perhaps one of the South's most vocal abolisionist thinkers. His tract on what to do with the Louisiana territory weaves in his perspectives on slavery and describes Louisiana as a possible settlement.
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