For this week’s blog entry I will write about a document the interns have been reading the past couple of weeks. Known to us as “The Brown Report,” this document tackles head on the lingering effects of slavery and injustice in our country’s history. It is an incredible document, something I highly recommend reading, and demonstrates the depth of introspection we should all strive for.
In 2003, Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice consisting of faculty members, members of the administration and both undergraduate and graduate students. The purpose: investigate and evaluate the University’s historical ties to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Additionally, the Committee was expected to propose a plan for recognizing and confronting those ties in order to establish some form of commemoration and foster future reconciliation. Three years later, after much deliberation and campus-wide involvement, the Committee presented its report to President Simmons in October 2006. Four months later, on February 24, 2007, the Brown Corporation released a set of initiatives in response to that report.
Link to the Steering Committee’s website:
Link to the report:
Before delving into Brown’s intimate relationship with the institution of slavery and the legacy of such a past, I feel the need to introduce the importance of such an endeavor. President Simmons’ decision to commission the Committee is courageous, intellectually responsible, and overdue. A failure to honestly consider a history, whether personal or collective, perpetuates the past failures and prevents any possible reconciliation. It is only through the discovery and recognition of the truth that progress, and healing, can occur. To those who say these events and their participants are dead and buried, I say that their influence continues to define our lives and our country. Through academic responsibility we all stand to benefit and only through that will we move forward, together. The lives of anyone currently living in the United States are influenced by the past exploitation and annihilation of Africans, Native Americans, and many others. Those of us here today may not have been directly complicit, but we are associates of such injustice nonetheless. Brown University, given its past, is particularly in need of introspection.
Brown’s connection to and profit from slavery began immediately. Founded by Roger Williams as a haven for religious tolerance, Rhode Island was the leading American colony involved in the transatlantic slave trade by the time the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University) was founded in 1764. That same year, the slave ship Sally, commanded by Admiral Esek Hopkins, set sail from Rhode Island for West Africa. The Sally happened to be owned by Nicholas Brown and Company, leading benefactors of the college who would provide the monetary muscle in 1804 to enable the college’s relocation from Warren, Rhode Island to Providence, Rhode Island, thus becoming the school’s namesake. However, they were not the only ones who turned a profit chartering slave ships or employing slave labor. The Committee identified approximately thirty individuals who served as part of the Brown Corporation who had been directly involved in the operation of slave ships. Additionally, slaves were used to construct university buildings and many of the early benefactors made their fortunes selling rum or textiles, the markets for which depended entirely upon the institution of slavery. Therefore, Brown appears to have benefitted from slavery as much as any institution at that time, a remarkable truth considering that the University’s official history had not previously mentioned such associations. This finding left the Committee with a difficult question: what now?
Within the Report, the Committee produced a set of recommendations for acknowledging the past, telling the truth, and making amends. Among those recommendations and reparations included the public release of the Report, continued arenas for discussion on campus, a physical memorial, a revised history of the University, funding for scholarship related to slavery and justice, consideration of the ethical merit of donations, and expanded educational opportunities for disadvantaged individuals. These recommendations are certainly well-intentioned but I feel they are woefully insufficient. First, as was discussed by the interns, hiding behind a need-blind/need-based admissions process to avoid any significant changes in affording opportunities to disadvantaged students indicates an unwillingness to fully commit to the Report’s purpose.
Second, I disagree entirely with the scope of the Report. In her April 30, 2003 letter to the Committee members, President Simmons challenges them to engage the history of slavery in an effort to improve the nation, not just the University. That goal seems to become conveniently forgotten throughout the Report. This is undoubtedly a tremendous document but its true firepower has yet to be seen. The Report should have extended beyond slavery or been followed by a second document confronting historical injustices in their entirety. Making amends for slavery is honorable and long overdue, but not enough and by that I mean others deserve an apology too. The Report itself acknowledges that two demographics consistently do not receive the reparations or reconciliation that they deserve: African Americans and Native Americans, and once again, Native Americans are shown the door. Their suffering and annihilation was also critical in the founding and growth of Brown. It was their exploitation and suffering too that enabled the Brown Corporation to place their school upon that hill. Is the suffering of the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes somehow less legitimate? Have their descendants not felt the effects of cultural decimation and political ostracization? I find this omission hypocritical, for the Committee’s endeavor was motivated by the withholding of reparations and lack of honest historical thought, both of which they appear guilty.
My third and final criticism, in a similar vein, is the Report’s lack of critical evaluation of past and current efforts to recognize and reconcile crimes against humanity. In discussing other, possibly similar, attempts to memorialize and long history of global injustice, the Report withholds judgment too often. Granted, my aspirations for this document in danger of becoming too all-encompassing and unreasonably burdensome, but if not here then where? For example, the Report mentions the Armenian Holocaust. I wish they had also mentioned that, because it would have been politically inconvenient due to our ties with Turkey, the United States refused to publicly acknowledge its occurrence for eighty years. That is a long time to ignore the murder of half a million people. However, it is for this reason that I appreciate the decision to create a “center for continuing research on slavery and justice.” For that center will likely do exactly what I wish this document had done: hold us all accountable.
In the end, the Committee and Brown University deserve a great deal of credit for having the courage to be so self-critical and transparent. They were the first but maybe this document will also ensure that they are not the last. Amherst College, for instance, could follow their lead. After all, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was one of the eighteenth century’s premier biological terrorists. There is no doubt that President Simmons accomplished many of her goals and despite any possible shortcomings, the University, and the country, are clearly better off thanks to her admirable convictions.
