New York Times: An 1814 advertisement for a slave, placed by a future Columbia University president.
Credit
via Columbia University
In 1755 a New York City newspaper carried an account of the swearing-in of the governors of the newly founded King’s College, which later grew into Columbia University.
At the bottom of the page ran an advertisement for a rather different
occasion: the sale of “TWO likely Negro Boys, and a Girl.”
The
ad would have raised few eyebrows at King’s, where many of the
college’s early presidents, trustees, donors and students owned slaves.
But now it’s the opening example in a new report detailing Columbia’s
historical ties to slavery.
The report, to be released by the university on Tuesday as part of a new website, offers no dramatic revelations akin to that of the sale of 272 slaves in 1838 that helped keep Georgetown University afloat and that has raised a contentious debate
about reparations today. But it illuminates the many ways that the
institution of human bondage seeped into the financial, intellectual and
social life of the university, and of the North as a whole.
“People
still associate slavery with the South, but it was also a Northern
phenomenon,” Eric Foner, the Columbia historian who wrote the report,
said in an interview. “This is a very, very neglected piece of our own
institution’s history, and of New York City’s history, that deserves to
be better known.”
Lee
Bollinger, the president of Columbia, said that while there were as yet
no plans to act on the report, grappling with the university’s
“complicity” with slavery was necessary to address current injustice.
“Every
institution should know its history, the bad and the good,” he said.
“It’s hard to grasp just how profoundly our contemporary society is
still affected by what has happened over the past two or three
centuries.”
Awareness
of the ties between slavery and Northern universities has waxed and
waned over time. The issue first came to the fore in 2001, when scholars
associated with a unionization campaign at Yale issued a report challenging what they considered the university’s one-sided celebration of its abolitionist past.
In
2002 Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown, drew headlines with her call
for an investigation of that university’s connections at a moment when a
major reparations lawsuit against banks and insurance companies was making its way (ultimately unsuccessfully) through federal courts.
The
political charge surrounding the issue then receded, only to come
roaring back in recent years, thanks to student activism and the broader
Black Lives Matter movement. Harvard, which installed a plaque last
spring honoring four enslaved people who worked on campus in the 1700s,
plans to hold a conference on universities and slavery in March. Princeton has commissioned seven plays based on its research into its ties with slavery, which will be released in the fall.
“This has become almost a national movement,” said Sven Beckert, a historian at Harvard who led an undergraduate research seminar on Harvard and slavery
in 2007. “There is now more of a realization that these issues are in
some ways still with us, and that to move forward we need to come to
terms with our past.”
The Columbia report had its origins in 2013, when Mr. Bollinger read about Craig Steven Wilder’s book “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.”
He
and Mr. Foner invited Mr. Wilder to speak on campus and began
discussing the possibility of an undergraduate research seminar to
investigate Columbia’s ties further. The report draws on research from
that seminar, taught by Mr. Foner in 2015 and, last year, by Thai Jones, a curator in Columbia’s rare-book-and-manuscript library.
While
the story the report tells is complex, the bottom line is blunt. “From
the outset,” it declares, “slavery was intertwined with the life of the
college.”
The
university, while it does not itself appear to have owned slaves, both
benefited from slavery-related fortunes and actively helped increase
them.
No comments:
Post a Comment