Brown grapples with its ties to the slave trade Although most people prefer to ignore the past, the university’s self-examination could spread discomfort far and wide BY BRIAN C. JONES
	Bitter legacy   The remnants of the slave trade are sometimes closer than you’d think AN ANCIENT GRANDFATHER clock — which chimes every 15 minutes in a second-floor conference room at University Hall, Brown University’s oldest building — symbolizes the dilemma faced by the committee trying to sort out the university’s ties to slave trading. The clock once belonged to Esek Hopkins, and according to a plaque on the timepiece, his granddaughter donated it to the university in 1855. Hopkins is a Revolutionary War hero, the first commander-in-chief of the Navy. But Admiral Hopkins’s seagoing story also has a less savory chapter: "In 1765, Esek Hopkins was the captain of a slave ship, the brig Sally, which was chartered by the four Brown brothers, four of the leading merchants of Providence — John, Nicholas, Moses and Joseph — on a slave voyage to West Africa," according to Brown professor James T. Campbell. Campbell heads the university Committee on Slavery and Justice, which is trying to sort out how Brown should react to the fact that the family for which it is named was involved with slavery. The Sally’s voyage showcased many of the horrors of the slave trade. At the outset, Nicholas Brown ordered Captain Hopkins to sail to the West Indies and "dispose of your cargo of slaves if you can obtain a good price for them," according to an account in the Brown Alumni Monthly. Brown also told Hopkins: "You are to bring four likely Young Slaves Home for Owners about 15 Years old." Campbell says about 170 slaves were taken on board in Africa, but as the ship sailed to America, smallpox broke out. Survivors revolted, but were "violently" subdued by Hopkins and his crew. Only 24 were sold when the ship arrived in the West Indies. As it turns out, the Hopkins’s clock is in the room where Campbell’s committee meets, and it raises, in miniature, the larger issues of trying to reconcile Brown’s past with its present. "What do we make of that clock?" Campbell asks. "Do we now have to throw this clock out, now that we realize this? Should we add another plaque? Should we take the plaque that’s on there off? "What we are facing is a deep human truth in the life of nations, in the lives of institutions, and the lives of individuals — that things are mixed," Campbell says. "We have in our histories things that are beautiful and gracious; and we also have things that are horrifying and shameful." - Brian C. Jones

IN ITS HOME STATE, Brown University has long been the subject of backstage snickering, based on how it’s named for a Rhode Island family linked to the slave trade. Now, in an unusual move, the university itself has formed a committee to confront this history during a two-year exercise of scholarship, discussion, and research that may recommend how Brown can atone for its founders’ sins.

The effort has drawn national news coverage because it was launched not by some campus gadfly, but the university’s own president, Ruth J. Simmons. Simmons has a unique perspective on the subject: she’s the great-granddaughter of slaves and the first African-American to head an Ivy League university.

It’s also a high-risk undertaking. Not only are big institutions potential targets of reparations lawsuits, but Brown is trying to raise millions from alumni and other potential donors for new buildings and expanded academic programs. Thus, it’s possible that Brown’s own research could provide grist for legal claims, while would-be contributors might be skittish about donating money they fear might be turned into payments for reparations.

Members of the campus’s Committee on Slavery and Justice insist that cash reparations are only one of many — and not necessarily the most likely — possible solutions, and that further, Simmons has placed no preconditions on the outcome. Another significant outcome of the study is the impact it might have not for the university itself, but for others away from the Providence campus. First, by voluntarily launching its own exploration of an uncomfortable past, Brown may be setting an example impossible to ignore by others, including such Ivy League rivals as Yale and Harvard University, which have similar histories — and far deeper financial pockets.

Further, the state of Rhode Island could itself end up in the spotlight, because the committee has already suggested the context of its research: that the Brown family members were players in a much-larger Rhode Island economy that was up to its hip boots in slavery. In what will come as a surprise to many present day Rhode Islanders — who probably view their state in terms of its abolitionist history — Rhode Island was responsible for about half of all the slave-trading voyages launched from America. Slave labor, in fact, was common in early Rhode Island. For example, a quarter of Newport’s population was slaves, and some of the current landmarks in the seacoast city — the Old Colony state house, Brick Market, and the Redwood Library — are said to have been built with slave labor.

Thus, when the Brown committee hands in its report in the fall of 2005, it’s possible that among those receiving failing grades will be the state, and by implication, its institutions and businesses. As Clifford R. Montiero, president of the Providence branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), puts it, "I think it’s going to affect a lot of people, and I would imagine there are a lot of people that would rather keep the blanket over slavery than to take it off and see what the real meat and potatoes are of slavery."

THERE’S NO DOUBT about the Brown family’s involvement in slavery, and it doesn’t take much sleuthing to track it down, since the university readily shares its own authoritative reports on the subject

Four brothers — John, Moses, Nicholas, and Joseph — were merchants, industrialists, and bankers, and in 1765, the family firm, Nicholas Brown & Company, financed a slave voyage. Afterwards, three brothers withdrew from the trade, but John Brown remained active, and during his business life, invested in as many as 10 slaving voyages. John Brown, in fact, persisted in slave trading after it was outlawed by both Rhode Island and Congress, and he was tried for violating the Federal Slave Trade Act of 1794. Acquitted, he later voted against attempts to strengthen the act as a member of the US House of Representatives.

The Brown family used African-American slaves in its other businesses, a Providence candle factory, for example, and an iron works in Scituate. And the brothers owned slaves that labored in their households. Meanwhile, the Browns played a role in the university’s founding. When it was established as "Rhode Island College" in 1764, John and Moses Brown were charter signers. Later, John Brown served as the university treasurer, and he laid the cornerstone to its oldest building, University Hall.

There was, of course, another side to the Brown family. Moses Brown renounced slavery and founded the abolitionist movement, which, in turn, urged the unsuccessful prosecution of John Brown for violating anti-slavery laws. Moses and John’s brother, Nicholas, also became abolitionists, as did Nicholas Jr., and it is the younger Nicholas for whom the university is actually named. Nicholas Brown Jr. was a major benefactor, and a university treasurer.

The university has other links to slavery. James Manning, its first president, owned a personal slave (later freed). University Hall was built at least partially with the labor of four slaves. And historian Joanne Melish, according to local experts, has found records of early Southern donors who likely were involved in slavery.

Despite this history, Brown University has not so far been the target of slavery reparations lawsuits. However, at least two suits have named Fleet bank, on the basis that a predecessor institution, Providence Bank, was founded by John Brown, who was its first president. One of the cases was dismissed in federal court in New York in January, but another has recently been filed in New York against FleetBoston, the Lloyd’s of London insurance company, and the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, alleging that their slave-related business contributed to "genocide" against blacks. The litigation seeks $1 billion for the descendants of slaves.

It was against this jagged historical and legal landscape that Simmons quietly established a University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in April, naming 16 students, teachers, and administrators as members.

Simmons outlined a wide-ranging process, harnessing the university’s powerful intellectual and research resources. She directed the panel not only to further probe the university’s history, but to look at examples of what has been done to rectify such other historical injustices as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and apartheid in South Africa. She told the committee to bring experts to the Brown campus, organize scholarly conferences, and sponsor lectures, special courses, and research projects. Simmons, thus, is playing to the university’s unique intellectual strengths, which could lay the foundation for a definitive and credible study that will be hard for those on campus and beyond to ignore.

James T. Campbell, the Brown history professor who heads the committee, says Simmons has not spelled out any final goals, although he assumes that critics will accuse her of doing that. "There are going to be some who are going to try to spin this to suggest that somehow this is just an African-American women bringing her own pro-reparations agenda and imposing it on a university," Campbell says. "I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. I truly have not a clue what Ruth Simmons’s thinking about the issue of reparations is." Campbell describes Simmons as "an exceptionally principled women, a person who is exceptionally tough-minded," who recognized that since questions about slavery keep recurring, they should be dealt with forthrightly.

One indication of the touchiness of the issue is how Brown waited almost a year to formally announce the study. Although mentioned of it was made in the Brown Alumni Magazine last July, the Providence Journal brought the story to public attention in March, with Brown declining comment. A week later, the New York Times quoted Simmons directly: "If the committee comes back and says, ‘Oh, it’s been lovely and we’ve learned a lot,’ but there’s nothing in particular that they think Brown can do or should do, I will be very disappointed."

Campbell and others on the committee insist that cash reparations are only one of many options for redress.

"We are not going to duck the question of monetary reparations," he says. "But I think it’s very important that we don’t become obsessed with that one question, which is a hot button issue in American politics, and instead begin to think, what are some of the other ways in which it might be possible for an institution to make amends for parts of its history of which, I think, it is rightly ashamed."

But a student member of the committee, Seth Magaziner, acknowledges the publicity may have spooked some alumni. "There has been some concern — because we are in the midst of a capital campaign here at the school — that there may be some alumni who are upset about what we are doing," Magaziner says. "But I think that once the word gets out about what exactly the committee is, that we are not just together to be a check-writing committee, that we are actually trying to have a much larger and more open discussion with multiple viewpoints, I don’t think it will hurt the university."

Not that this means a whitewash, says Magaziner, whose father, Ira Magaziner, was a student activist when he was a Brown student and is credited with helping to shape Brown’s current curriculum. Ira Magaziner later served as an aide to President Bill Clinton, directing, with now-US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former administration’s failed health insurance reform effort. "Brown as an institution — it’s not an institution that pays taxes — it’s an institution, I think, that owes some sort of debt to the community," Seth Magaziner says. "And one of the ways to perhaps repay that debt is to ask serious questions about its past and about how it can . . . best right some of the wrongs that have been committed in the past."

But if not cash, what other remedies are there?

"Let me give you one example," Campbell says. "If, in the course of our investigation we find that — as I think is clear — that Africans were brought to this state by people, including some of the benefactors of this university, as slaves, perhaps one of the things we might want to think about is whether we should be bringing Africans to this place as students."

Campbell also suggests that given the lack of general knowledge about slavery among Rhode Islanders, the state’s school curriculum needs upgrading. "One of the first and vital steps is simply making that kind of information about our history available, both to our own students here on the campus, and, I hope, more broadly [to] public schools in the state as a whole."

The most obvious reason to avoid specific payments to individuals is the enormous difficulty of spelling out the specific harm Brown’s slavery links had on individuals, and then finding present-day people related to that. Another reason is that Brown isn’t rich, at least in Ivy League terms. Its $1.5 billion dollar endowment is the smallest of the eight Ivy institutions. By comparison, Harvard’s endowment is $18.9 billion.