Courage at Brown University
excerpts from “Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade” By Pam Belluck, March 13, 2004, NYTimes
Dr. Ruth Simmons became the president of Brown University nearly three years ago and is the first African-American president of an Ivy League university. But the university she was chosen to lead had early links to slavery, with major benefactors and officers of it having owned and traded slaves.
Now, Dr. Simmons, whose office is in a building constructed by laborers who included slaves, has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.
Dr. Simmons has appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice, which will spend two years investigating Brown’s historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.
“How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies,'’ she said, “so that society learns from it, acknowledges what has taken place and then moves on. What I’m trying to do, you see, in a country that wants to move on, I’m trying to understand as a descendant of slaves how to feel good about moving on.'’
March 28th, 2004 at 8:28 am
I think it’s good that they are even taking a step to try to understand, rather than just thinking (as is common) that black concerns are not as important as white concerns..
March 28th, 2004 at 8:29 am
I think it’s good that they are even taking a step to try to understand, rather than just thinking (as is common) that black concerns are not as important as white concerns..
April 8th, 2004 at 4:06 am
I think this is good… in an effort to correct the evil of people from whom I do not even descend, we are going to take food out of my children’s mouths.
April 9th, 2004 at 7:45 pm
You sir are a racist. It doesn’t matter from whom you decend, the fact is your white, which means those crimes were commited in your name, which means you are responsible for it. Anyone who disagrees with that in any way is, quite simply, racist.
April 15th, 2004 at 1:33 am
Brown also produced John Hay, who served under the greatest domestic terrorist this continent has ever known: Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln murdered hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen, and Hay helped him out. Plus, there were many other Brunonians who served as trigger-men.
Brown, in spite of itself, gave me a superb education. I’m a charitable fellow, so we’ll call it even. No thanks, Ruth.
May 26th, 2004 at 12:00 pm
The debt produced by the slave trade and American slavery is one that continues to compound. The privilages afforded to the generations who blindly ignore how firmly racial injustice is rooted in our collective institutional mindset must be too great for them to even consider the petty “good foot forward” that efforts such as the one at Brown can make.