Slavery and Justice

report of the

Brown University

Steering Committee on

Slavery and Justice

Contents

Introduction 3

Slavery, the Slave Trade,

and Brown University

Confronting Historical Injustice:

Comparative Perspectives

Confronting Slavery’s Legacy:

The Reparations Question

Slavery and Justice:

Concluding Thoughts

Recommendations 83

Endnotes 88

Image Credits 106

Acknowledgments 106

Brenda A. Allen

Associate Provost and

Dir

ector of Institutional

Diversity

Paul Armstrong

Professor of English

Farid Azfar ’03 A.M.

Doctoral Candidate,

Department of History

Omer Bartov

John P. Birkelund

Distinguished Professor

of European Histor

B. Anthony Bogues

Professor and Chair

of Africana Studies

James Campbell (Chair)

Associate Professor of

American Civilization,

Africana Studies, and

History

Ross E. Cheit

Associate Professor

of Political Science and

Public Policy

Steven R. Cornish ’70 A.M.

Associate Dean of the College

Neta C. Crawford

’

Adjunct Professor

, W

atson

Institute for Inter

national

Studies

Evelyn Hu-DeHart

Professor of Histor

Dir

ector, Center for the

Study of Race and Ethnicity

in America

Vanessa Huang ’06

A.B., Ethnic Studies

Arlene R. Keizer

Associate Professor

of English and American

Civilization

Seth Magaziner ’06

A.B., Histor

Marion Orr

Fred Lippitt Professor

of Public Policy and

Professor of Political Science

and Urban Studies

Kerry Smith

Associate Professor of History

and East Asian Studies

William Tucker ’04

A.B., Africana Studies

and Public Policy

Michael Vorenberg

Associate Professor of History

University Steering Committee

on Slavery and Justice

Let us begin with a clock.

In 2003, Brown University President Ruth J.

Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on

Slavery and Justice to investigate and issue a public

report on the University’s historical relationship to

slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Since that

time, the committee, which includes faculty, stu-

dents, and administrators, has met periodically in

an ofﬁce on the second ﬂoor of Uni-

versity Hall, the oldest building on the

Brown campus. In the corner of

the ofﬁce stands an antique clock. A

silver plaque on the cabinet identiﬁes

it as “The Family Clock of Admiral

Esek Hopkins.” Built in the

1750s by

a local craftsman, Samuel Rockwell,

the clock was donated to Brown in

the

1850s by Hopkins’s granddaughter.

Such artifacts and heirlooms abound

on the campus, and it took several

months for committee members to

notice the clock or to recognize its

signiﬁcance.

Though less celebrated than

his older brother Stephen, a colonial governor and

signer of the Declaration of Independence, Esek

Hopkins is a well-known ﬁgure in Rhode Island

history. A Providence ship captain, he served as

the ﬁrst commander-in-chief of the United States

Navy during the American Revolution. After the

war, he was elected to the state legislature. Like his

brother, he was a strong supporter of Brown, then

known as the College of Rhode Island, serving

as a member of the Board of Trustees from

1782 to

1802. His memory is enshrined today in several

public sites in Providence, including the Esek

Hopkins Middle School, Esek Hopkins Park (which

includes a statue of him in naval uniform), and

Admiral Street, where his old house still stands.

There is another aspect of Esek Hopkins’s

story, unmentioned on any of the existing memori-

als. In

1764, the year that the College of Rhode

Island was founded, Hopkins sailed to West Africa

in command of a slave ship, a one-hundred-ton

brigantine called the

Sally. The Sally was owned by

Nicholas Brown and Company, a partnership of

four brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses

Brown. Prominent Providence merchants, the

Browns were also important benefactors of the col-

lege, playing a leading role in relocating the school

from its original home in Warren, Rhode Island,

to its current location in Providence. (In

1804,

the College of Rhode Island changed its name

to Brown University, in recognition of a gift from

Nicholas’s son, Nicholas Jr.) There was nothing

unusual about a slave ship departing from Rhode

Island. Rhode Islanders dominated the North

American share of the African slave trade, mount-

ing over a thousand slaving voyages in the century

before the abolition of the trade in

1807 (and

scores more illegal voyages thereafter). The

Sally’s

voyage was deadlier than most. At least

109 of the

196 Africans that Hopkins purchased on behalf of

the Browns perished, some in a failed insurrection,

the balance through disease, suicide, and starvation.

The records of the venture, from the ﬁtting out

of the ship in August

1764 to the sale of surviving

3 introduction

Introduction

captives on the West Indian island of Antigua

ﬁfteen months later, are housed in a library on the

Brown campus, though few have troubled to look

at them, at least until recently.

We shall return to the voyage of the

Sally, an

episode of considerable signiﬁcance in the lives

of the Brown brothers, three of whom seem never

again to have invested directly in transatlantic

slaving voyages. But let us return ﬁrst to the clock.

What should the University do with it, now that

we know more about its origins? Is it appropriate

to display it? Should we remove the plaque honor-

ing Esek Hopkins? Attach another plaque? We are

obviously speaking metaphorically here, but the

underlying questions could not be more direct. How

are we, as members of the Brown community, as

Rhode Islanders, and as citizens and residents of the

United States, to make sense of our complex his-

tory? How do we reconcile those elements of our

past that are gracious and honorable with those

that provoke grief and horror? What responsibilities,

if any, rest upon us in the present as inheritors of

this mixed legacy? The Brown University Steering

Committee on Slavery and Justice represents one

institution’s confrontation with these questions.

the committee’s charge

The president’s charge to the steering committee

had two dimensions. Our primary task was to

examine the University’s historical entanglement

with slavery and the slave trade and to report our

ﬁndings openly and truthfully. But we were also

asked to reﬂect on the meaning of this history in

the present, on the complex historical, political,

legal, and moral questions posed by any present-

day confrontation with past injustice. In particular,

the president asked the committee “to organize

academic events and activities that might help the

nation and the Brown community think deeply,

seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised”

by the national debate over reparations for slavery.

Reparations, she noted, was a highly controversial

subject, presenting “problems about which men

and women of good will may ultimately disagree,”

but it was also a subject on which Brown, in light

of its own history, had “a special obligation and a

special opportunity to provide thoughtful inquiry.”

In her letter of charge and in a public statement

following the announcement of the committee’s

appointment, the president stressed that the com-

mittee would not determine whether or how

Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor did

she expect it to forge a consensus on the repara-

tions question. Its object, rather, was “to provide

factual information and critical perspectives to

deepen understanding” and enrich debate on an

issue that had aroused great public passion but lit-

tle constructive public dialogue.

overview of activities

The steering committee has endeavored to fulﬁll

this charge. Members of the committee, assisted by

other Brown faculty as well as by undergraduate

and graduate student researchers, gathered infor-

mation about Brown’s past, drawing on both pub-

lished sources and various historical archives. The

committee also sponsored more than thirty public

programs, including scholarly lectures, panel dis-

cussions, forums, ﬁlm screenings, and two inter-

national conferences exploring the experience of

other societies and institutions that have grappled

with legacies of historical injustice. In all, we enter-

tained more than a hundred distinguished speak-

ers, ranging from Professor John Hope Franklin,

who discussed his tenure as chairman of One

America, President Clinton’s short-lived national

commission on race, to Beatrice Fernando, a slavery

survivor from Sri Lanka, who spoke on the prob-

lem of human trafﬁcking today. The committee is

currently preparing a selection of these presenta-

tions for publication in a scholarly anthology.

The steering committee also organized pro-

grams and activities beyond the University’s gates.

Committee members addressed community

groups and participated in workshops for local

teachers and students. A museum exhibition about

the

Sally, mounted by undergraduate research stu-

4 introduction

dents working with the committee, is currently

touring public libraries across the state. The exhi-

bition, “Navigating the Past: The Voyage of the

Slave Ship

Sally, 1764-1765,” has also been exhib-

ited at the John Brown House, the historic home

of one of the ship’s owners, and at the Museum

of Antigua and Barbuda in St. John’s, Antigua, the

ﬁnal destination of surviving captives from the

ship. Members of the committee also collaborated

with the Choices Program, a curricular develop-

ment group afﬁliated with Brown’s Watson Insti-

tute for International Studies, to write and publish

a high school curriculum, “A Forgotten History:

The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England.”

With the support of the ofﬁce of President Sim-

mons, the committee was able to donate copies of

the curriculum to every high school history and

social studies classroom in Rhode Island.

structure of the report

The report that follows represents the culmination

of the committee’s work. It contains three sections,

reﬂecting the different elements of the president’s

charge. The ﬁrst focuses on history, exploring

different aspects of the University’s relationship to

slavery. This section reveals the complicity of

many of the University’s founders and benefactors

in slavery and the slave trade, and outlines some

of the direct beneﬁts that accrued to the University.

Yet it also seeks to do more. Brown’s formative

decades coincided with many of the signal events

in America’s tortuous racial history: the peak of the

transatlantic slave trade and the appearance of a pop-

ular

movement decrying the trade as criminal; the

birth of a new nation, dedicated to the proposition

that all people were created equal and endowed

with certain inalienable rights, and the emergence

of racist ideologies insisting that people were not

equally created or endowed; the gradual abolition of

slavery in the northern states and the rapid expan-

sion of the institution in the South. Brown Uni-

versity was shaped by all of these developments,

and members of the campus community, including

students, vigorously debated their meaning and

signiﬁcance. We are not the ﬁrst members of the

Brown community to confront our University’s

historical complicity in slavery and the slave trade or

to debate our own responsibilities in light of it.

The second section looks beyond Brown to the

problem of retrospective justice around the world.

How have other institutions and societies dealt

with the legacies of gross injustice – not only of

slavery, but also of genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” and

other crimes against humanity? One of the signa-

ture developments of the last sixty years, and of the

last twenty years in particular, has been the emer-

gence of an international consensus on the impor-

tance of confronting traumatic histories, as well

as the development of a variety of mechanisms

for doing so, including international tribunals, truth

commissions, national apologies, the erection of

public memorials, and a wide array of monetary

and non-monetary reparations programs. While

this history has spawned a voluminous scholarly

literature, it has had relatively little bearing on the

slavery reparations debate in the United States,

which has, at least in recent years, focused narrowly

on the issue of monetary reparations. Our object

in this section of the report is to bring this com-

parative, global experience to bear on the American

case, and on the predicament of our University

in particular. What is a crime against humanity?

5 introduction

This is an effort designed to involve the campus

community in a discovery of the meaning of our

past....Understanding our history and suggest-

ing how the full truth of that history can be

incorporated into our common traditions will not

be easy. But, then, it doesn’t have to be.

Ruth Simmons, on her decision to establish Brown’s Steer-

ing Committee on Slavery and Justice,

Boston Globe, April

28, 2004

Where does the concept come from, and what

does it entail? What legacies do such crimes leave,

and what mechanisms exist to redress them? Do all

historical injuries merit remedy? When does it

become too late to redress an injustice? The sec-

tion includes extensive notes for individuals inter-

ested in pursuing particular issues and questions in

greater detail.

In the ﬁnal section, we turn to the slavery

reparations debate in the United States, examining

the contours of the current controversy as well as

the issue’s deeper histori-

cal roots. In keeping with

the president’s charge,

our object is not to resolve

the reparations debate but

rather to illuminate ques-

tions and contexts that are

often overlooked in public

discussion today. What

actually happened when

slavery was abolished, ﬁrst

in northern states like

Rhode Island, and later in

the South? What legacies

did slavery bequeath

to the nation, and what

attempts were made to redress those legacies, both

in the immediate aftermath of abolition and sub-

sequently? What forms has the movement for slave

redress taken at different historical moments,

with what results? In short, where did the current

reparations movement come from? This section

too contains extensive notes, elaborating particular

issues and offering suggestions for further reading.

As should by now be clear, the steering com-

mittee does not intend this report as the last word

on the subject, but rather as the ﬁrst words in a

dialogue that we hope will continue on our cam-

pus and in our nation. Yet in the course of our

research, we also reached certain conclusions. We

share these at the end of the report, accompanied

by a series of recommendations directed speciﬁ-

cally at Brown University.

a summons

One of the committee’s ﬁrst actions was to invite

anyone interested in our efforts to submit ques-

tions, comments, and criticisms. Hundreds of indi-

viduals availed themselves of the opportunity,

some of them members of the Brown community,

most of them not. The temper of the letters varied

widely, but one question arose again and again.

Why would Brown launch such an undertaking?

Why risk opening chapters of the past that are,

inevitably, controversial and painful? We hope that

the committee’s work – the programs we organized

and the report that follows – will sufﬁce as an

answer. But there is an even simpler answer:

Brown is a university. Universities are dedicated to

the discovery and dissemination of knowledge.

They are conservators of humanity’s past. They

cherish their own pasts, honoring forbears with

statues and portraits and in the names of buildings.

To study or teach at a place like Brown is to be a

member of a community that exists across time, a

participant in a procession that began centuries

ago and that will continue long after we are gone.

If an institution professing these principles cannot

squarely face its own history, it is hard to imagine

how any other institution, let alone our nation,

might do so.

As it happens, one of the most eloquent expo-

sitions of the idea of the university came from a

Brown president, Rev. William Faunce, in a

1914

sermon celebrating the University’s sesquicenten-

nial. “Are we wrong, are we merely superstitious, if

we hold that those early leaders, passing through

our American colleges, have left a portion of

themselves behind?” Faunce asked. “It is not only

ivy that clings to ancient walls – it is memories,

echoes, inspirations. The very stones cry out a

summons....” He continued: “Have we entered so

new a world that we have no further connection

with the generation in which these colleges were

born? To think so would be to show ourselves

without the sense of either historic continuity or

moral obligation.” It is in that spirit, and with a

deep sense of historic continuity and moral obliga-

tion, that we offer this report.

6 introduction

“Are we wrong, are we merely

superstitious, if we hold that those

early leaders, passing through our

American colleges, have left a portion

of themselves behind?” President

Faunce asked. “It is not only ivy

that clings to ancient walls – it is

memories, echoes, inspirations. The

very stones cry out a summons...”

Americans in the nineteenth century

referred to slavery as “the peculiar institution,” but

historically it is not peculiar at all. On the contrary,

it is a virtually universal feature of human history.

The oldest surviving system of written laws, the

Code of Hammurabi, includes regulations about

slavery, as does the Old Testament. Slavery was

ubiquitous in the classical world; about a third of

the inhabitants of ancient Athens were slaves,

roughly the same proportion as in the antebellum

American South. Slavery existed in the Muslim

world (usually as a status reserved for non-Muslims)

and in Meso-America, in Africa and Asia, and in

western and eastern Europe. (The English word

“slave” derives from “Slav.”) Nor is slavery simply

a matter of the past. Though slavery and slave

trading are universally prohibited in national and

international law, they remain endemic in the

world today. While estimates vary, at least eight-

hundred thousand and perhaps as many as three

million people are trafﬁcked annually, most of

them women and children.

slavery in historical perspective

Slavery was the cornerstone of the colonization of

the Americas. Of the ten million or so people who

crossed the Atlantic before

1800, about eight and

a half million – roughly six of every seven people –

were enslaved Africans. By the time the trans-

atlantic trade was ﬁnally suppressed in the

1860s, a

total of ten million to twelve million Africans had

been carried into New World slavery, while an esti-

mated two million more had died in the passage.

The vast majority was imported into the sugar

colonies of the Caribbean and South America,

where massive mortality of enslaved workers

necessitated a constant infusion of laborers. (The

average life expectancy of a slave on a Caribbean

sugar plantation was less than seven years.) Brazil

alone imported at least four million enslaved

Africans over the centuries of the trade. Between

ﬁve-hundred thousand and six-hundred thousand

enslaved Africans were imported into mainland

North America, what is today the United States.

Different societies in history developed their

own understandings of slavery, as well as their own

laws and customs for regulating it. But whatever

the local variations, there were certain commonal-

ities that marked slavery as a distinct condition.

Slaves everywhere were subject to physical and sex-

ual abuse. They typically served for life and often

passed that status on to their children. Perhaps

most important, slaves were outsiders, not only in

the literal sense of coming from outside the soci-

eties in which they were held but also in the sense

of being excluded from the basic recognition

and rights enjoyed by those who were free. In the

United States, for example, the free-born could

contract marriages, buy and sell property, testify in

court, and make basic decisions about the welfare

of their children. Slaves could do none of these

things. In the words of scholar Orlando Patterson,

slavery was a form of “social death.”

slavery and race

The dishonor and degradation associated with

enslavement inevitably gave rise to contempt for

the people who were enslaved. Though the partic-

ulars differ, slaves throughout history have been

7 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University

stigmatized as inferior, uncivilized, bestial. Few

if any societies in history carried this logic further

than the United States, where people of African

descent came to be regarded as a distinct “race” of

persons, fashioned by nature for hard labor. This

process took time. Initially, American colonists

justiﬁed the enslavement of Africans chieﬂy in

terms of religion and culture; Africans were

described as “heathenish” and “savage.” But by the

era of the American Revo-

lution such rationaliza-

tions had been supplanted

by an explicit theory of

race, in which black peo-

ple’s inferiority was

assumed to be innate and

ineradicable, a product not

of their circumstances or

condition but of their

physical nature. An early

anti-slavery treatise, pub-

lished in the

Providence Gazette in 1773, explained

the process succinctly. “Slave keeping,” the anony-

mous author wrote, was a “custom that casts the

most indelible odium on a whole people, causing

some...to infer that they are a different race

formed by the Creator for brutal service, to drudge

for us with their brethren of the stalls.”

This process of dehumanization was abetted

by developments in American law. In contrast to

the plantation colonies of Spain and Portugal,

which inherited legal deﬁnitions of slavery through

the Catholic Church and the tradition of Roman-

Dutch law, settlers in mainland North America

were left to fashion their own slave codes. And the

laws they fashioned, beginning in Virginia in the

1620s and continuing through the Civil War,

were historically unprecedented in their complete

denial of the legal personality of the enslaved.

Slaves in North America were chattel, no different

in law from horses, handlooms, or other pieces of

disposable property. The North American colonies

were also highly unusual in tracing slave descent

through the maternal rather than paternal line, a

system that ensured, in practice, that most chil-

dren of “mixed” ancestry would be themselves

enslaved. This descent rule, ﬁrst enacted by colo-

nial legislatures in Virginia and Maryland in the

1660s, would have an enduring effect on American

culture, laying the foundations of our distinctive

binary system of racial classiﬁcation, in which even

partial African ancestry – one drop of blood, in the

terms of the notorious Virginia Racial Integrity

Act of

1924 – renders an individual categorically

black.

If American slavery has any claims to being

historically “peculiar,” its peculiarity lay in its rig-

orous racialism, the systematic way in which racial

ideas were used to demean and deny the humanity

of people of even partial African descent. This

historical legacy would make the process of incor-

porating the formerly enslaved as citizens far more

problematic in the United States than in other

New World slave societies.

forgotten history:

new england and slavery

Most Americans today think of slavery as a south-

ern institution. New Englanders, in particular,

have contrived to erase the institution’s presence

from their collective memory. But slavery existed

in all thirteen colonies and, for a time, in all thir-

teen original states. In New England, the ﬁrst

slaves were Native Americans, captured in the esca-

lating conﬂict between settlers and the indigenous

population. New Englanders began to import

Africans in

1638, initially by exchanging Native

Americans captured in the Pequot War for black

slaves from the West Indies. This commerce was

revived, on a far greater scale, in the aftermath

of King Philip’s War in the

1670s, and it continued

intermittently through the early eighteenth cen-

tury. One of the programs sponsored by the steer-

ing committee brought together descendants of

Native American captives transported from Rhode

Island to Bermuda more than three hundred years

ago with representatives of more than a dozen

native nations in the eastern United States and

Canada.

8 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Slavery, the author declared, “casts

the most indelible odium on a whole

people, causing some...to infer that

they are a different race formed

by the Creator for brutal service, to

drudge for us with their brethren

of the stalls.”

Initially, New Englanders drew a moral dis-

tinction between purchasing enslaved Africans from

the West Indies (who were assumed to have been

captured in war and thus legitimately held) and

the actual business of enslaving Africans. Thus the

arrival of the ﬁrst shipload of West Indian slaves

1638 occasioned no scruples, but when a Massa-

chusetts ship returned from West Africa seven

years later with a cargo of new captives it provoked

a scandal. The captain and crew were arraigned

by the General Court for the “haynos and crying

sinn of man stealing” and the captives were returned

to Africa at colony expense. This distinction was

soon lost, however, and Massachusetts ships began

to embark for West Africa.

slavery and abolition

in rhode island

The ﬁrst enslaved Africans entered Rhode Island

sometime after

1638. Though their numbers were

initially very small, they were conspicuous enough

to attract the attention of the Rhode Island Gen-

eral Court, which in

1652 passed a law abolishing

African slavery. According to the statute, which

was evidently never enforced, “no black mankinde”

could be forced to serve a master for “longer than

ten years,” after which they would be “free, as the

manner is with English servants.” In

1659, the

legislature acted again, banning the further impor-

tation of African captives. But this statute too went

unenforced, and the enslaved population contin-

ued to grow, as did the gulf between white servants

and black (and Native American) slaves. By the

middle of the eighteenth century, about ten percent

of Rhode Islanders were enslaved. The greatest

concentrations of slaves lived in Newport, the

colony’s premier port, and in South County, which

was home to a thriving plantation economy.

Slavery endured in Rhode Island for nearly

two hundred years. As in Pennsylvania, New York,

and most other northern states, the institution

ended gradually. In

1784, the Rhode Island legisla-

ture enacted a Gradual Abolition Act, which

speciﬁed that every person born in the state after

March

1 of that year would be free. While repre-

senting a signiﬁcant victory for the state’s embryonic

anti-slavery movement, the law also showed con-

siderable deference to slaveowners. It did nothing

to alter the status of those born before the speci-

ﬁed date, who continued to serve their owners for

life. Nor did it immediately alter the circumstances

of freeborn children, who were compelled to serve

their mothers’ owners for twenty-one years before

assuming their promised status. But the law did

put the institution on the road to extinction in the

state. The ﬁnal few slaves in Rhode Island disap-

peared, either through death, manumission, or sale

out of state, in the early

1830s.

9 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

This seems an effort fraught with potential for

conﬂict, embarrassment, and discord. But few

issues in U.S. society are so important, and you

deserve great credit for taking on this important

work. And your efforts – if they are rigorous

and critical and comprehensive – could serve as a

model for a broader discussion throughout our

society of the residue of slavery.

Letter to the Steering Committee, April 2004

You disgust me, as you disgust many other

Americans. Slavery was wrong, but at that time

it was a legal enterprise. It ended, case closed.

You cite slavery’s effects as being the reason

that black people are so far behind, but that just

illustrates your ignorance. Black people, here

and now, are behind because some can’t keep their

hands off drugs, or guns, or can’t move forward,

can’t get off welfare, can’t do the simple things to

improve their life. . . . They don’t deserve money,

they deserve a boot in the backside over and over

until they can ﬁnd their own way. . . . Can your

ignorant research, and can Ruth Simmons, too.

Letter to the Steering Committee, April 2004

the rhode island slave trade

Rhode Island’s distinction lay not in slavery but in

the leading role that the colony and state played in

the transatlantic slave trade. Though Rhode

Islanders lagged behind their Massachusetts neigh-

bors in entering the trade, they soon made up for

their slow start. The ﬁrst recorded transatlantic

slaving voyages from the colony embarked in the

early years of the eighteenth century. By the close

of the trade, more than a century later, Rhode

Islanders had mounted at least a thousand voyages,

carrying over one-hundred thousand Africans into

New World slavery.

While such totals are far

smaller than those

amassed by the Por-

tuguese, British, Span-

ish, and French, they are

extraordinarily high in

the American context. In

all, about sixty percent of

slave trading voyages

launched from North

America – in some years

more than ninety per-

cent – issued from tiny

Rhode Island. As we shall see, nearly half of the

Africans transported by Rhode Islanders were traf-

ﬁcked illegally, by ships operating in deﬁance of a

1787 state law prohibiting residents of the state

from trading in slaves, federal statutes of

1794 and

1800 barring Americans from carrying slaves to

ports outside the United States, and the

1807

Congressional act abolishing the transatlantic slave

trade.

Some of those carried on Rhode Island ships

were brought back to Rhode Island; the streets of

Newport were literally paved by revenues gener-

ated from a duty on slave imports. The vast major-

ity, however, ended up farther south, in the sugar-

producing colonies of the Caribbean and later in

the southern states. In the colonial period, Rhode

Island was one corner of what contemporaries

called the “triangle trade,” in which slave-

produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean

were carried to Rhode Island and distilled into

rum, which was then carried to West Africa and

exchanged for captives, to produce more sugar,

more rum, and more slaves. In

1764, the year of

Brown University’s founding, Rhode Island

boasted some thirty rum distilleries, including

twenty-two in Newport alone.

A few Rhode Island families made substantial

fortunes in the trade. William and Samuel Vernon,

Newport merchants who would later earn a place

in American history for their role in ﬁnancing the

creation of the United States Navy, sponsored

more than thirty African slaving ventures. The

D’Wolfs of Bristol were the largest slave trading

family in all of North America, mounting more

than eighty transatlantic voyages, the vast majority

of them in deﬁance of state and federal law. (The

primary destination for captives on D’Wolf ships

was Cuba, where the family owned its own sugar

plantation.) But the real story of the Rhode Island

slave trade is not of a few great fortunes but of

extremely broad patterns of participation and

proﬁt. Even with the inevitable gaps in the docu-

mentary record it is possible to identify by name

some seven hundred Rhode Islanders who owned

or captained slave ships. The roster includes virtu-

ally every substantial merchant, as well as many

ordinary shopkeepers and tradesmen, many of

whom purchased shares in slaving voyages, much

as Americans today buy shares in corporations.

Even those who did not invest directly in the

trade often depended on it for their livelihoods.

Boatwrights built ships, and blacksmiths and block-

makers ﬁtted them out. Sail lofts and ropewalks

prepared canvas and rigging. Caulkers scraped and

sealed hulls. Carpenters built shelving below decks

to hold the ships’ human cargo. Distilleries

churned out rum, sealed in barrels fashioned by

coopers from local pine, oak, and iron. Factories

and foundries produced whale oil candles, cloth,

and iron bars, all important trade goods on the

West African coast. Farmers supplied beef, ﬂour,

tobacco, and onions. In the words of historian

Rachel Chernos Lin, one of the speakers spon-

10 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

While the vast majority of enslaved

Africans carried on Rhode Island

ships were transported to the sugar

colonies of the Caribbean, some were

brought back to Rhode Island. The

streets of Newport were literally

paved with revenues generated from

a duty on slave imports.

sored by the steering committee, the Rhode Island

slave trade was literally the business of “the

butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.”

the west indian provisioning trade

Even this litany does not capture slavery’s impor-

tance to the Rhode Island economy. As important

as the triangle trade was, it was dwarfed by the

bilateral trade between Rhode Island and the slave

colonies of the Caribbean. So proﬁtable was sugar

in the eighteenth century that most Caribbean

colonies produced little else, relying on imports

for everything from food to furniture. Rhode

Island dominated this trade, operating, in essence,

as the commissary of the Atlantic plantation com-

plex. Rhode Island ships cleared for the Caribbean

on an almost daily basis, their holds laden with a

cornucopia of local products – beef and butter, hay

and horses (Narragansett pacers were much prized

by Caribbean planters), candles, shoes, iron, barrel

hoops and staves, timber, tar, tobacco, and vast

quantities of salt cod, the staple protein source of

West Indian slaves. (Rhode Islanders sometimes

referred to cod as “Jamaica ﬁsh,” reﬂecting a clear

understanding of the commodity’s destination.)

Between the transatlantic slave trade and the West

Indian provisioning trade, it is hard to imagine any

eighteenth century Rhode Islander whose liveli-

hood was not entangled, directly or indirectly, with

slavery.

slavery and the coming of

the american revolution

Rhode Island’s dependence on slavery was vividly

revealed in

1764, the year that saw the founding of

the College of Rhode Island and the onset of the

imperial crisis between Britain and its thirteen

mainland colonies. The Seven Years War between

Britain and France had just ended, and the British

Parliament, facing a large deﬁcit, announced its

intention to begin collecting a duty, previously

unenforced, on imported sugar and molasses. The

result, as every American schoolchild learns, was a

wave of protests against “taxation without repre-

sentation,” culminating in the colonies’ declaration

of independence in

1776. Rhode Islanders stood in

the van of the struggle, drafting the ﬁrst formal

protest to the new duties, a “Remonstrance” that

was personally carried to London by Stephen

Hopkins, the colony’s governor and chancellor of

the new college. The Rhode Island Remonstrance

is rightly remembered as a watershed in the com-

ing of the American Revolution, yet the document

itself spoke less of liberty than of slavery. The pro-

posed tax, the authors warned, would cripple the

Rhode Island economy, destroying not only the

Caribbean provisioning trade but also the burgeon-

ing African slave trade. “[W]ithout this trade, it

would have been and will always be, utterly impos-

sible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist

themselves, or to pay for any considerable quantity

of British goods,” the document concluded.

11 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Governor Stephen Hopkins, signer of the Declaration

of Independence and ﬁrst Chancellor of the College of

Rhode Island, with the College Ediﬁce in the background.

Portrait by John Philip Hagen.

The Rhode Island Remonstrance encapsulated

the great paradox of American history, avowing

principles of liberty and self-government while

simultaneously defending Americans’ right to proﬁt

from slavery and the slave trade. The paradox was

even more pointed in Stephen Hopkins’s

The

Rights of Colonies Examined

, one of the most inﬂu-

ential pamphlets of the revolutionary era, published

a few months later. Sounding a note that would

be endlessly repeated over the next twelve years,

Hopkins denounced the new tax not simply as an

assault on colonists’ rights but as an attempt to

reduce them to slavery. “Liberty is the greatest

blessing that men enjoy, and slavery is the heaviest

curse that human nature is capable of,” he wrote,

adding that “those who are governed at the will of

another, and whose property may be taken from

them...without their consent...are in the miserable

condition of slaves.” Hopkins, who was a slave-

owner at the time, evidently saw no irony in advanc-

ing this argument. Nor did the Brown brothers,

who forwarded a copy of the pamphlet – “for your

amusement” – to the governor’s brother, Esek,

who was then on the coast of Africa aboard the

slave ship

Sally.

the founding of brown university

This was the world into which Brown University

was born. The nation’s seventh oldest university,

Brown was formally chartered in

1764 as the

College of Rhode Island. Its initial mission was to

train Baptist clergymen, though it was open to stu-

dents of all religious persuasions, in keeping with

Rhode Island’s tradition of religious liberty. The

school’s founding documents contain no references

to slavery, which most at the time regarded simply

as a fact of life, irrelevant to the University’s

mission. If any contemporaries were surprised or

troubled when the school’s ﬁrst president, Rev.

James Manning, arrived in Rhode Island accompa-

nied by a personal slave, they seem never to have

said so publicly. (Manning manumitted the man in

1770, shortly before the college moved to its cur-

rent site in Providence.) And while the religious

composition of the college’s governing Corporation

generated controversy – Baptists were eventually

guaranteed a majority of seats on both the Board

of Fellows and the Board of Trustees, with smaller

allocations for Congregationalists, Anglicans, and

Quakers – the presence of slave traders among the

group occasioned no discussion. While no precise

accounting is possible, the steering committee was

able to identify approximately thirty members of

the Brown Corporation who owned or captained

slave ships, many of whom were involved in the trade

during their years of service to the University.

Slavery’s role in Brown’s early history is

revealed more palpably in the College Ediﬁce,

what we today call University Hall, the oldest

building on campus. As University curator Robert

Emlen explained in a presentation sponsored by

the steering committee, the construction of the

building was ﬁnanced through a public subscrip-

tion campaign. With hard money in short supply,

many donors paid their pledges in kind. Wood for

the building, for example, appears to have been

donated by Lopez and Rivera, one of the largest

slave trading ﬁrms in Newport. A few donors hon-

ored pledges by providing the labor of their slaves

for a set number of days. Emlen has found evi-

dence of four enslaved men who labored on the

building, including “Pero,” the bondsman of

12 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

“Liberty is the greatest blessing that men enjoy, and slavery

is the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of,”

Governor Hopkins wrote, adding that “those who are

governed at the will of another, and whose property may

be taken from them...without their consent...are in the

miserable condition of slaves.” The Brown brothers

forwarded a copy of the pamphlet to the governor’s brother,

Esek, who was then on the coast of Africa aboard the

Sally.

Henry Paget, “Mary Young’s Negro Man,”

“Earle’s Negro,” and “Abraham,” apparently the

slave of Martha Smith. Pero Paget, who was

years old at the time, is buried in Providence’s

North Burial Ground; the circumstances and fate

of the others remain unclear. A facsimile print of

the construction records, including references to

enslaved workers, has hung for years on the ﬁrst

ﬂoor of University Hall, more or less unnoticed. It

is an apt metaphor for a history that has long hid-

den in plain sight.

endowing the university

Determining what percentage of the money that

founded Brown is traceable to slavery is impossi-

ble; part of the point of the preceding discussion is

that slavery was not a distinct enterprise but rather

an institution that permeated every aspect of social

and economic life in Rhode Island, the Americas,

and indeed the Atlantic World. But there is no

question that many of the assets that underwrote

the University’s creation and growth derived,

directly and indirectly, from slavery and the slave

trade. Links with slavery are particularly apparent

in the University’s ﬁrst endowment campaign,

which the governing Corporation launched in the

late

1760s. The task of raising an endowment was

assigned to Morgan Edwards and Hezekiah Smith,

both Baptist ministers and members of the Corpo-

ration. Edwards sailed to Britain, where,

despite

the escalating imperial conﬂict, he succeeded

in rais-

ing nearly nine hundred British pounds sterling,

the equivalent of more than $

150,000 in today’s

money. Smith sailed to Charleston, South Carolina,

where over the course of several months he secured

pledges for more than £

3,700 Carolina pounds,

the equivalent of about $

50,000 today.

In the present context, Smith’s destination is

the pertinent one, for South Carolina was the

heartland not only of the Baptist religion but also

of American slavery. Even a cursory glance at

Smith’s subscription book, which is deposited in the

archives of the Rhode Island Historical Society,

leaves little doubt of the origins of the money that

he raised. There are literally hundreds of exam-

ples, but let us mention only a few. Lieutenant

13 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Stephen Hopkins’s The Rights of Colonies Examined,

a germinal text in the struggle for American independence.

Governor William Bull, the ﬁrst name on the list,

owned a three-thousand-acre rice and indigo plan-

tation on St. Helena Island. He donated £

50.

Gabriel Manigault, a mer-

chant and planter who owned

more than forty-thousand

acres and nearly ﬁve hundred

slaves, donated £

100. Man-

igault was well known to

Rhode Island’s mercantile

elite, having handled the sale

of the ﬁrst enslaved Africans

brought to South Carolina

on Rhode Island ships. Henry

Laurens, a planter and polit-

ical leader who would later

succeed John Hancock as

president of the Continental

Congress, ran the largest

slave trading house in North America. In the

1750s

alone, his ﬁrm, Austin and Laurens, handled the

sales of more than eight thousand Africans. Laurens

donated £

50 to the College of Rhode Island.

the brown family and slavery

In its research, the committee paid particular

attention to the University’s namesake family, the

Browns of Providence. There is an obvious risk

of distortion in focusing on a single family, espe-

cially when discussing an institution as pervasive as

slavery,

but the history of the University

is so

densely interwoven with the life of this extraordinary

family that it is impossible to discuss one without

the other. At the time of the College of Rhode

Island’s founding, there were four Brown brothers,

Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses, all of whom

were enthusiastic supporters of the school. Nicholas

was one of the college’s original incorporators,

while Moses led the campaign to move the campus

to Providence. Joseph, an amateur architect,

designed the College Ediﬁce and later served on

the faculty as professor of natural philosophy. John

laid the cornerstone of the College Ediﬁce and

served as treasurer of the Corporation from

1775

until 1796, when he was succeeded by his nephew,

Nicholas Jr., who retained the ofﬁce until

1825.

A member of the Class of

1786, Nicholas Jr., was

unquestionably Brown’s most generous benefactor,

providing the money for several of the buildings

that still line the University’s main green. In

1804,

Nicholas Jr., donated $

5,000 to endow a professor-

ship in rhetoric, in acknowledgement of which the

name of the school was changed from the College

of Rhode Island to Brown University. This tradi-

tion of service was carried into future generations

by such people as John Brown Francis, Moses

Brown Ives, and John Carter Brown, all of whom

gave generously to the University of their time and

fortunes.

There are at least two other reasons to focus on

the family. First, the Browns kept the most metic-

ulous records of any mercantile ﬁrm in colonial

America, virtually all of which are preserved in the

John Carter Brown Library on the University

campus. These records, more than a quarter mil-

lion manuscript pages, make it possible to trace the

family’s activities, including its involvement with

slavery and slave trading, with rare precision. Sec-

ond and more important, the Brown family pub-

licly split over the question of slavery in the late

eighteenth century, with two brothers, Moses and

John, conducting a vigorous debate over the moral-

ity of the institution, and of the transatlantic trade

in particular. Examining this debate, which engulfed

the campus and ultimately the nation, provides an

ideal vantage on the emergence and evolution of

the American anti-slavery movement, as well as on

the arguments of those who defended the institu-

tion and trade.

Like other members of their class, the Browns

were slaveowners. There are records of Captain

James Brown, the brothers’ father, purchasing

slaves as early as

1728, and he left four slaves in his

estate upon his death in

1739. By the early 1770s,

the brothers owned at least fourteen slaves, several

of them in common. Moses, who in

1773 became

the ﬁrst of the brothers to renounce slaveholding,

seems to have held the largest number, owning six

slaves outright, as well as a quarter interest in several

others. Most of the men and women owned by the

14 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Henry Laurens, who would later

succeed John Hancock as president

of the Continental Congress,

ran the largest slave trading house

in North America. In the

1750s

alone, his Charleston ﬁrm oversaw

the sale of more than

8,000

enslaved Africans. He donated

50 to the endowment campaign.

brothers worked as domestic and agricultural

laborers, though they were also periodically

deployed in other Brown enterprises, including the

family’s whale oil candle works, a seasonal business

in which labor demands rose and fell quickly.

Moses’s decision to manumit his slaves disrupted

this arrangement, but the brothers eventually

negotiated an agreement in which he supplied his

quota of laborers to the chandlery in free workers.

the browns and the slave trade

By the standards of Rhode Island’s mercantile

elite, the Browns were not major slave traders, but

they were not strangers to the business either. In

1736, James Brown sent a ship, the Mary, to Africa.

The ﬁrst slave ship to sail from Providence, the

Mary carried a cargo of enslaved Africans to the West

Indies, returning to Rhode Island with several slaves

for the family’s own use. James’s younger brother,

Obadiah, who became the four brothers’ guardian

after James’s early death, served as supercargo on

the voyage, the ofﬁcer in charge of buying and sell-

ing captives. For reasons that remain unexplained,

the Browns waited more than twenty years before

mounting another African voyage. In the interim,

the family was involved in small-scale slave trading

– purchasing or selling captives individually or in

small lots, usually in the context of provisioning

voyages. In

1758, for example, the sloop Speedwell

sailed to the French port of New Orleans with a

cargo of candles, wine, and ten slaves, along with a

single French prisoner. (Prisoner exchanges under

“ﬂags of truce” were a ruse used by Rhode Islanders

to evade British restrictions on trading with the

enemy.) According to records from the voyage,

seven of the slaves were sold at auction, while two

were given as “presents” to local ofﬁcials. The fate

of the tenth captive is unclear.

In 1759, the family returned to the African

trade, when Obadiah, Nicholas, and John, along with

a handful of smaller investors, dispatched a rum-

laden schooner, the

Wheel of Fortune, to Africa.

With war raging between Britain and France, it was

a risky venture and it ended in failure. The ship

arrived safely on the African coast, but it was sub-

sequently captured by a French privateer. While

Obadiah had taken the precaution of insuring the

voyage, the loss of the ship still represented a sub-

stantial ﬁnancial setback for the family. For the

enslaved Africans on board, the capture of the ship

likely made no difference, as they would simply

have been carried to the French West Indies and

sold there.

15 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

The economy of colonial Rhode

Island depended on the provisioning

trade with the plantation colonies of

the Caribbean. In

1765, the Brown

brothers contracted Isaac Tripp,

a local merchant, to acquire forty

horses “ﬁtt for the Suranam

Markett” on their behalf, for a sum

not exceeding £

180. With money

in short supply, the brothers paid for

the horses in goods, including rum,

sugar, molasses and “one Negrow

Garl.”

With the restoration of peace in 1763, the

Browns decided to return to the African trade. (Oba-

diah had died the year before, leaving the family

business in the hands of the four brothers, trading

under the name Nicholas Brown and Company.)

The North American economy was in the dol-

drums, and the brothers needed capital to buy sup-

plies for their candle works, as well as for their

newest venture, an iron furnace. With slave labor

in high demand throughout the Americas, an

African voyage promised a quick and substantial

proﬁt. The brothers initially planned a joint ven-

ture with Carter Braxton, a Virginia merchant and

later signer of the Declaration of Independence,

but in the end they elected to proceed by them-

selves. The result was the voyage of the

Sally.

the slave ship sally, 1764-65

The Sally sailed from Providence in 1764, the year

of Brown’s founding. The ship carried the standard

African cargo, including spermaceti candles, tobacco,

onions, and 17,274 gallons of New England rum.

It also carried an assortment of chains, shackles,

swivel guns, and small arms to control the human

cargo to come. In their letter of instructions, the

Brown brothers ordered the ship’s master, Esek

Hopkins, to make his passage to the Windward Coast

of Africa, to exchange his goods for slaves, and to

sell those slaves to best advantage in the West

Indies. They also asked him to bring “four likely

young slaves,” boys of ﬁfteen years or younger,

back to Providence for the family’s own use.

The voyage was a disaster in every conceivable

sense. Many other merchants had the same idea

as the Browns, and Hopkins found the West African

coast crowded with slavers, including more than

two-dozen ships from Rhode Island. The market for

rum was glutted and captives were scarce and

expensive. Hopkins eventually acquired a cargo of

196 Africans, but it took him more than nine

months to do so, an exceptionally long time for a

slave ship to remain on the African coast, especially

for those conﬁned below decks. By the time the

Sally set sail for the West Indies, nineteen Africans

had already died, including several children and

one woman who “hanged her Self between Decks.”

A twentieth captive, also a woman, was left for dead

on the day the ship sailed.

The toll continued to mount on the return

journey. Four more Africans – one woman and

three children – died in the ﬁrst week at sea. On

the eighth day out, the captives rose in rebellion, a

fact noted in a terse entry in the ship’s account

book: “Slaves Rose on us was obliged ﬁre on them

and Destroyed Eight and Several more wounded

badly

1 Thye and ones Ribs broke.” In the weeks

that followed, death was an almost daily occurrence;

according to Hopkins, the captives became “so

Despireted” after the failed insurrection “that Some

Drowned themselves Some Starved and others

Sickened & Dyed.” In all, sixty-eight Africans per-

ished during the crossing, each loss carefully recorded

in the account book. Another twenty Africans died

in the days after the ship reached the West Indies,

bringing the total death toll to

108. (A 109th cap-

tive, one of the four “likely lads” requested by the

Brown brothers, died en route to Providence.)

The survivors, auctioned in Antigua, were so sickly

and emaciated that they commanded prices as low

as £

5 apiece, scarcely one-tenth of the prevailing

price for a “prime” slave. The poor returns on the

voyage prompted an apologetic letter from the

merchant who handled some of the sales. “I am truly

Sorry for the Bad Voyage you [had],” he wrote.

“[H]ad the negroes been young + Healthy I should

have been able to sell them pretty well. I make

no doubt if you was to try this market again with

Good Slaves I Should be able to give you

Satisfaction.”

16 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

The merchant apologized for the low prices realized at the

auction, which he attributed to the captives’ “very Indifferent”

quality. “[H]ad the negroes been young + Healthy I should

have been able to sell them pretty well,” he wrote. “I make no

doubt if you was to try this market again with Good Slaves

I Should be able to give you Satisfaction.”

aftermath of the sally

The Browns did not avail themselves of the offer.

In the wake of the

Sally debacle, three of the four

brothers – Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses – with-

drew from direct participation in the transatlantic

slave trade. Their action appears to have been

motivated more by economic than moral qualms:

After two failed voyages, they had good reason to

believe that slave trading was too risky an invest-

ment. There was little evidence of remorse in the

letter they sent to Esek Hopkins after learning of

the disaster: “[W]e need not mention how Dis-

agreeable the Nuse of your Lusing

3 of yr. Hand

and

88 Slaves is to us + all your Friends, but your

Self Continuing in Helth is so grate Satisfaction to

us, that we Remain Cheerful under the Heavey Loss

of our Int[erest]s.” Nor did the experience deter

the three brothers from continuing to trade in slave-

produced goods, from building a state-of-the-art

rum distillery, or from supplying other Rhode

Island merchants mounting African voyages.

One such merchant was their brother John.

1769, John and two partners dispatched a slave

ship, the

Sutton, to Africa. John’s determination

to continue slaving unnerved his more cautious

brothers, and contributed to their decision to dis-

solve their partnership. “[W]hoever plays any Game

...[and] plays the last for the value of the whole

gain of the preceding many, will sooner or later lose

the whole at one throw,” Moses warned in a

1770

letter to Nicholas and Joseph. While the brothers

continued to collaborate on various ventures, most

of John’s subsequent trading activities were con-

ducted independently or in partnership with his son-

in-law, John Francis. Over the next quarter century,

John would sponsor at least three more African

slaving voyages.

the rise of the anti-slavery

movement

While the Brown brothers’ apparent failure to

reﬂect deeply about the

Sally disaster seems sur-

prising today, it was characteristic of their era and

social class. For most Rhode Island merchants in

the

1760s, buying and selling Africans was simply a

business – just another species of commerce,

though one entailing unusually large risks and

rewards. Yet these years also saw the beginnings of

a movement to abolish the slave trade, a swelling

chorus of voices decrying the transatlantic trafﬁc

not simply as cruel and impolitic but as criminal, a

violation of the fundamental laws of man and God.

The inﬂuence of this movement would be felt all

across the Atlantic World, nowhere more dramati-

cally than in Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island, as in much of the Anglo-

American world, political opposition to slavery was

initially synonymous with the Society of Friends,

or Quakers. Founded in England in the seven-

teenth century, Quakerism was a radically egalitar-

ian creed, which preached that every individual

could experience the indwelling presence of God,

regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth.

Such convictions led many in the Society to ques-

tion the morality of slavery and slave trading. In

1760, the Yearly Meeting in Newport adopted one

of the ﬁrst anti-slave trade resolutions in American

history, calling on members “to avoid being in any

way concerned in reaping the unrighteous proﬁts

of that unrighteous practice of dealing in Negroes

and other slaves – in direct violation of the gospel

rule which teaches every one to do as he would be

done by.” Initially, Rhode Island Quakers stopped

short of renouncing slavery itself, merely enjoining

members to treat their bondsmen “with tender-

ness,” including the provision of education and

religious instruction for the young. But in

1773,

they took this additional step, enjoining all Friends

to manumit their slaves or face expulsion from

the Society.

By the time the Quakers ﬁnally acted, their

once lonely crusade showed signs of becoming a

substantial movement. As historian David B. Davis

has written, “By the eve of the American Revolu-

tion there was a remarkable convergence of cultural

and intellectual developments which at once under-

cut traditional rationalizations for slavery and

offered new modes of sensibility for identifying with

its victims.” The process clearly had something to

do with capitalism: As free labor became more

17 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

common, other labor relations – indentured servi-

tude, debt bondage, slavery – came increasingly to

appear antiquated and anomalous. Enlightenment

ideas about human equality and shared human

nature also played an important part in this

process, as did the rapid growth of evangelical

Christianity. The Revolution itself was an impor-

tant catalyst to anti-slavery thought. With Ameri-

can colonists declaring their beliefs in “liberty”

and “natural rights” and denouncing a British plot

to “enslave” them, it is not surprising that some

were moved to question the plight of those whom

the colonists themselves enslaved.

The result, on both sides of the Atlantic, was

an outpouring of petitions, pamphlets, and trea-

tises denouncing slavery and the transatlantic trade

on both secular and sacred grounds. Some of the

most moving statements were written by black

people, who knew ﬁrsthand the horrors of slavery

and the slave trade. In

1773, for example, ofﬁcials

in Massachusetts entertained a petition from four

slaves requesting facilities to purchase their freedom,

after which they proposed to resettle in Africa.

“The efforts by the legislature of this province in

their last session to free themselves from slavery,

gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high

degree of satisfaction,” the men wrote, with more

than a hint of sarcasm. “We expect great things

from men who have made such a noble stand against

the designs of their

fellow-men to enslave them.” In

the years that followed, similar petitions emanated

from black organizations all along the eastern

seaboard, including Newport’s Free African Union

Society, the nation’s ﬁrst black mutual aid associa-

tion, and its sister body, the Providence African

Society.

18 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Inventory of stores loaded onto the Sally, September,

1764. The list includes implements needed to control the

anticipated cargo, including seven swivel guns, various

small arms, gunpowder, chains, and “

40 hand Cuffs

& 40 Shackels.”

Perhaps the most inﬂuential of these early

anti-slavery essays was

Thoughts upon Slavery, pub-

lished in

1774 by John Wesley, the founder of

Methodism. First printed in London, the pam-

phlet was immediately reprinted in Philadelphia

and widely circulated in American periodicals,

including the

Providence Gazette. For Wesley, the

transatlantic slave trade was not merely an affront

to Christian principles and “the plain law of nature

and reason,” but also what future generations

would call a crime against humanity – an offense

so grievous that it diminished all humankind, not

merely its immediate victims and perpetrators. “If

this trade admits of a moral or a rational justiﬁca-

tion,” Wesley wrote, “every crime, even the most

atrocious, may be justiﬁed.”

the conversion of moses brown

The appearance of Wesley’s Thoughts Upon Slavery

and other anti-slavery essays in the Providence

press was almost certainly the work of Moses

Brown. In

1773, Moses experienced a severe emo-

tional and spiritual crisis, brought on by the death

of his wife, Anna. He withdrew from the family

business and deepened his involvement with the

Quakers, with whom he had begun to worship

during Anna’s illness. (He was formally accepted

into Quaker meeting in

1774.) He also renounced

slavery. “I saw my slaves with my spiritual eyes as

plainly as I see you now,” he recalled near the end

of his life, “and it was given to me as clearly to

understand that the sacriﬁce that was called for of

my hand was to give them liberty.” On November

10, 1773, Brown gathered family and friends

together and read a formal deed of manumission:

“Whereas I am clearly convinced that the buying

and selling of men of what color soever is contrary

to the Divine Mind manifest in the conscience of

all men however some may smother and neglect its

reprovings, and being also made sensible that the

holding of negroes in slavery however kindly treated

has a tendency to encourage the iniquitous practice

of importing them from their native country and is

contrary to that justice, mercy, and humanity

enjoined as the duty of every christian, I do there-

fore by these presents for myself, my heirs etc.

manumit and set free the following negroes being

all I am possessed of or any ways interested in.”

In the years that followed, Moses Brown threw

himself into the anti-slavery movement, exhibiting

the same energy and entrepreneurial imagination

he had exhibited as a businessman. He exchanged

letters with a network of anti-slavery correspondents

in Britain and the Americas, circulating the latest

anti-slavery essays and pamphlets, many of which he

paid to have published. He intervened in court cases

involving black people held illegally in bondage,

and lobbied friends and neighbors to divest them-

selves of slavery and the “unrighteous trafﬁc” that

sustained it. As a contemporary remarked, the

memory of the

Sally weighed “heavy on his con-

science.” In a

1783 letter to John Clark and Joseph

Nightingale, Providence merchants who were

rumored to be contemplating sending a ship to

Africa, Brown recounted his experience and urged

his friends not to repeat his mistake. Had the

Sally

never sailed, he wrote, “I should have been pre-

served from an Evil, which has given me the most

uneasiness, and has left the greatest impression and

19 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Esek Hopkins,

master of the slave

ship

Sally and later

the ﬁrst commander-

in-chief of the

United States Navy.

Portrait by Martin

Johnson Heade.

stain upon my own mind of any, if not all my other

Conduct in life....” Clark and Nightingale, both

members of the Corporation of the College of

Rhode Island, chose not to heed the advice, dis-

patching a ship, the

Prudence, to Africa in 1784.

anti-slavery legislation and

its limitations

Brown also lobbied for anti-slavery legislation. His

efforts met with mixed success. In

1774, the Rhode

Island Assembly passed a bill that he had helped

to draft prohibiting the direct importation of slaves

from Africa into the colony, though only after

weakening it with various loopholes and exceptions.

1775 bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in

the colony was defeated. In

1784, with the Revolu-

tionary War over and the transatlantic trade stir-

ring back to life, anti-slavery activists returned to

the Assembly, presenting a bill to abolish slavery in

the state and to end Rhode Island’s participation in

the transatlantic slave trade. The second proposal

proved the more controversial. After a bruising

battle, the Assembly enacted Rhode Island’s

1784

Gradual Abolition Act, but it refused to act against

the slave trade. “[T]he inﬂuence of the Mercantile

interest in the House was greatly Exerted,” Brown

lamented, “and the Justice of the Subject thereby

Overbourn....” In

1787, following state elections

and a turnover in the composition of the legislature,

the prohibition against slave trading was ﬁnally

adopted. The victory buoyed Brown, but it soon

became apparent that little had changed. While the

statute prescribed severe penalties for Rhode

Islanders who continued to trade in slaves, state ofﬁ-

cials had neither the will nor the resources to pros-

ecute offenders. After a brief decline in the trafﬁc,

the procession of ships to Africa resumed.

Recognizing the limitations of the state law,

Moses Brown and his anti-slavery allies also

pressed for federal legislation. While the recently

adopted federal Constitution forbad Congress

from interfering with the slave trade into U.S.

ports for twenty years – that is, until

1807 – it did

not preclude legislation prohibiting Americans

from trafﬁcking slaves to foreign ports, a fact that

Brown conﬁrmed in a personal interview with the

Constitution’s chief author, James Madison. The

result was a pair of federal anti-slave trade acts, the

ﬁrst in

1794, the second in 1800, which forbad

American citizens from owning, outﬁtting, invest-

ing in, or serving aboard ships carrying slaves to

ports outside the United States. But these laws

were also ignored by slave traders, nowhere more

ﬂagrantly than in Rhode Island.

debating the trade

Moses Brown’s campaign against the slave trade

brought him into conﬂict with many of his friends

and former business associates. His chief antago-

nist was his older brother, John, who emerged as

the slave trade’s most vocal defender even as Moses

became its most vocal critic. The battle between

the brothers ﬁrst emerged publicly in

1784, when

John, representing Providence in the state legisla-

ture, led the opposition to the anti-slave trade bill

promoted by Moses. The dispute intensiﬁed the

following year, when John mounted an African slav-

ing voyage, his ﬁrst since before the Revolution. In

an extraordinary series of private letters, the brothers

debated the morality of the trade, with Moses

urging John to search his conscience and John assur-

ing him that he had done so and found no cause

for concern. If Moses’s pleas illuminate the convic-

tions of the emerging abolitionist movement,

John’s replies offer a catalogue of contemporary

justiﬁcations of slavery and slave trading: that black

people were an inferior race, incapable of surviving

as free people; that slaves were “positively better

of[f]” in America, where they were exposed to

Christianity and civilization, than they had previ-

ously been in Africa; that the slave trade was the

most lucrative commerce in the world, the proﬁts

of which should ﬂow into American rather than

British coffers. This trade “has beene permitted by

the Supreeme Governour of all things for time

Immemorial, and whenever I am Convinced as you

are, that its Rong in the Sight of God, I will Imme-

diately Dessist,” John wrote in November

1786,

“but while its not only allowd by the Supreeme

20 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Governour of all States but by all the Nations of

Europe...I cannot thinke this State ought to

Decline the trade.” A few days later, he dispatched

another ship, the brig

Providence, to the Gold Coast,

where it acquired

88 Africans, 72 of whom sur-

vived to be sold in Hispaniola.

The conﬂict between the brothers escalated

1789, following the establishment by Moses and

other anti-slavery activists of a new organization,

the Providence Society for Promoting the Aboli-

tion of Slavery, for the relief of Persons unlawfully

held in Bondage, and for Improving the Conditions

of the African Race.

As its lengthy title

suggests, the new

society had several

purposes, but its pri-

mary object was to

bring prosecutions

against violators of

the state’s recent

anti-slave trade law.

The announcement

of the society’s exis-

tence ignited one of

the most vituperative

political debates in

Rhode Island history.

John Brown, writing

under the pen name

“A Citizen,” launched

a furious counter-

attack in the local

press, denouncing the

society’s founders as religious fanatics and thieves,

schem

ing to impose their personal morality and

to “deprive

their fellow citizens of their lawful prop-

erty.” For the next three months, the columns of

the

Providence Gazette and the United States Chroni-

cle

resounded with increasingly personal and abu-

sive exchanges between Brown and leaders of the

Abolition Society, with Moses, who signed himself

“A Friend,” seeking to mediate. Both sides invoked

the authority of the American Revolution, with

abolitionists citing the Declaration of Indepen-

dence’s promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness and John Brown emphasizing the sanctity

of property rights. Trafﬁcking Negroes was “right,

just and lawful,” John insisted, adding: “[I]n my

opinion there is no more crime in bringing off a

cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of

jackasses.”

the college corporation

and the slave trade

The struggle to abolish the slave trade was not

simply a battle between brothers. The dispute

divided the entire state, including the fellows and

trustees of the College of Rhode Island. Many of

the founders of the Providence Abolition Society

were members of the college’s governing Corpora-

tion. David Howell, the society’s president, had

been afﬁliated with the college since its establish-

ment, serving as tutor, professor, and fellow. (In

the early

1790s, he would serve brieﬂy as the

school’s interim president.) Thomas Arnold, secre-

tary of the society, also had close ties to the col-

lege, having served as secretary of the Corporation.

At the same time, the college’s governors included

several practitioners and defenders of the slave

trade, led by the vocal John Brown, the school’s

treasurer. The very ﬁrst prosecution launched by

the Providence Abolition Society in

1789 pitted

members of the Corporation against one another –

Howell, who read the charge on behalf of the pros-

ecution, and William Bradford, one of the attorneys

for the defense. Bradford, a former deputy gover-

nor and future U.S. Senator, had a personal interest

in the outcome, being the father-in-law of two of

the state’s largest slave traders, James D’Wolf and

Charles Collins.

The conﬂict within the college’s governing

Corporation erupted anew following passage of the

1794 federal law prohibiting the carrying of slaves

to foreign ports. In

1796, the Providence Abolition

Society brought a case against Cyprian Sterry, a

member of the College of Rhode Island’s Board of

Trustees and Providence’s premier slave trader. In

21 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Slave trading “has beene permitted by

the Supreeme Governour of all things

for time Immemorial,” John reminded

his brother, adding: “[W]henever I am

Convinced as you are, that its Rong

in the Sight of God, I will Immediately

Dessist, but while its not only allowd

by the Supreeme Governour of all States

but by all the Nations of Europe... I

cannot thinke this State ought to Decline

the trade.” A few days later, he dispatched

another ship, the brig Providence, to

the Gold Coast.

the preceding two years alone, Sterry had spon-

sored some twenty African voyages. Many of the

Africans carried on these ships were sold in the

Caribbean, in clear violation of the recent federal

statute. Facing a potentially ruinous ﬁne, Sterry

settled the case out of court, pledging to leave the

trade in exchange for the society withdrawing the

prosecution. He remained a member of the Board

of Trustees for another seventeen years.

the trial of john brown

Things did not go so smoothly with John Brown,

the College of Rhode Island’s treasurer and one

of its chief benefactors. In

1795, Brown returned

to the African trade, dispatching a ship, the

Hope,

to the Gold Coast. The voyage proved a proﬁtable

one: Of the

229 Africans loaded onto the ship,

198 survived to be sold in Cuba. The Providence

Abolition Society responded by bringing a prose-

cution. A distraught Moses Brown urged his

brother to settle the case, but John, “puffed up” by

the slave-trading interests of Newport, refused.

Thus did John Brown become the ﬁrst Rhode

Islander, and apparently the ﬁrst American, prose-

cuted in federal court for illegal slave trading – a

prosecution brought, in part, by his own brother.

The case ended in a devastating defeat for

anti-slavery forces. Though the offending ship was

impounded, John Brown triumphed in the ensuing

jury trial, emerging with an acquittal and a judg-

ment for costs against the Providence Abolition

Society. Because the transcript of the trial has not

survived, it is difﬁcult to say precisely what hap-

pened, but Moses Brown attributed the verdict to

the “

Peculiar Turn” of the Newport jury, as well

as to other kinds of favoritism “which I forbear to

describe.” It should be noted that the presiding

judge, Benjamin Bourn, and the federal prosecutor,

Ray Greene, were both longtime allies of John

Brown, with whom they had served on the Corpo-

ration of the College of Rhode Island. While

neither appears to have been personally involved

in the slave trade, both had close family ties to the

trading community; Bourn would later have the

rare pleasure of dismissing a case against his brother,

a leading Newport trader. Whatever the exact cir-

cumstances, the trial had a devastating effect on

the Providence Abolition Society, which went into

a rapid decline.

high tide of the rhode island

slave trade

The decade between John Brown’s acquittal and the

1807 Congressional act abolishing the transatlantic

slave trade marked the peak of the Rhode Island

slave trade, with as many as ﬁfty ships per year clear-

ing for Africa. The handful of cases brought to trial

almost invariably ended in acquittal. Courts occa-

sionally ordered the forfeiture and auctioning of

slave ships, but trafﬁckers observed a gentlemen’s

agreement not to bid on one another’s vessels,

enabling original owners to repurchase them for as

little as $

10. In 1799, an embarrassed federal gov-

ernment tried to close this loophole by dispatching

22 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those

of Newport, have had by far the greatest share of

this trafﬁc of all these United States. This trade in

the human species has been the ﬁrst wheel

of commerce in Newport, on which every other

movement in business has chieﬂy depended. That

town has been built up, and ﬂourished in times

past, at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and

the happiness of the poor Africans; and the inhabi-

tants have lived on this, and by it have gotten

most of their wealth and riches.

Rev. Samuel Hopkins, Providence Gazette, 1787

Clearly, the North outstripped the South

economically because its economy was based on

freedom and innovation, not slavery.

“The Reparations Scam,” Providence Journal, August 21,

2002

an ofﬁcial to bid on a conﬁscated ship in an auc-

tion in Bristol. On the evening before the auction,

the ofﬁcial was visited by the ship’s former owners,

James and Charles D’Wolf, accompanied by John

Brown, who at the time was one of Rhode Island’s

representatives in the

U.S. Congress. The

three tried to intimidate

the ofﬁcial into aban-

doning his charge. The

next morning, the ofﬁ-

cial, who had refused to

step aside, was abducted

by a group of men and

bundled on to a waiting

ship. (The assailants

dressed as Native Amer-

icans, a costume pre-

sumably intended to re-

call the garb of the Sons

of Liberty during the

Boston Tea Party.)

The terriﬁed ofﬁcial was

eventually released unharmed, but only after the

auction, at which a representative of the D’Wolfs

repurchased the ship for a nominal sum. No one was

ever prosecuted for the kidnapping, which became

something of a local joke.

Kidnapping a federal ofﬁcial was only the

most brazen of the slave traders’ offenses. A newly

appointed U.S. District Attorney, considered

overzealous in enforcing the ban on slave trading,

was assaulted on the steps of the local courthouse.

A Bostonian who had the temerity to bring a pros-

ecution against a Bristol trader – and the courage

to come to the city to testify – had his ear sliced off

in a local inn. Always a bloody business, the Rhode

Island slave trade had devolved by the end of the

eighteenth century into a system of violent organ-

ized crime, conducted in deﬁance of state and

federal laws, as well as of the era’s own professed

beliefs about the fundamental rights of human

beings.

Like organized crime in our own time, Rhode

Island slave traders depended on public ofﬁcials

turning a blind eye. When the U.S. customs inspec-

tor in Newport began to show signs of enforcing

federal anti-slave trade laws, John Brown success-

fully steered a bill through the U.S. Congress

declaring Bristol a separate customs district, free-

ing local slave traders of any obligation to put in at

Newport for inspection. After further maneuver-

ing, the post of customs inspector in Bristol was

awarded to Charles Collins, one of the city’s most

ﬂagrant illegal traders. Like his brother-in-law,

James D’Wolf, Collins routinely trafﬁcked slaves to

Cuba, where he reportedly owned a sugar planta-

tion. The creation of the separate customs district,

and Collins’s appointment as inspector, repre-

sented the ﬁnal triumph of the Rhode Island slave

traders. William Ellery Jr., representing Rhode

Island in the U.S. Senate, hailed the outcome in a

letter to James D’Wolf. “There is now, dear Sir,

nothing more to be done for Bristol – everything

which she asked is given.” Under Collins, prosecu-

tions stopped and the trade out of Bristol ﬂour-

ished, continuing even after the

1807 Congres-

sional act abolishing the transatlantic trade. How

many vessels sailed after

1807 is impossible to say,

but there is evidence of slave ships being outﬁtted

in Rhode Island as late as

1819.

the slave trade and student life:

an abortive essay contest

Brown University grew up in the shadow of the

transatlantic slave trade and of the embryonic move-

ment to end it. What effect these circumstances

had on the life of students at the college is difﬁcult

to say, but there is some suggestive evidence. In

1786, Moses Brown proposed a prize for the best

student essay on the slave trade. The suggestion

was clearly inspired by a similar contest staged

a year before at Cambridge University in England,

which had attracted more than two hundred

entrants. The winning essay, Thomas Clarkson’s

Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human

Species, Particularly the African

, was immediately

republished in English (original entries had been

written in Latin) and became the bible of the

23 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Kidnapping a federal ofﬁcial was

only the most brazen of the Rhode

Island slave traders’ offenses. A newly

appointed U.S. District Attorney,

considered overzealous in enforcing

the law against slave trading, was

assaulted. A Bostonian who had the

temerity to bring a prosecution against

a Bristol trader – and the courage to

come to the city to testify – had his ear

sliced off in a local inn.

British anti-slavery movement. Moses Brown obvi-

ously did not yet know just how inﬂuential Clark-

son’s essay would become, but he recognized the

potential value of such a contest in shaping Ameri-

can public opinion. He also recognized the likeli-

hood of opposition to the proposal. “How much to

the Honour of Rhode Island College would it be if

Similar Measures as far as its Infant State would

admit were pursued,” he wrote in a letter to Presi-

dent Manning, “but I am aware that the Corpora-

tion has a few members who would be against the

Subject receiving the sanction of the College....”

Precisely what transpired is not clear, but the con-

test was never held. Stymied at home, Moses pro-

posed endowing essay prizes at Harvard, Yale, and

the College of New Jersey (Princeton). Whether

his offer was communicated to ofﬁcials at the three

schools is uncertain, but in any case the contests

never occurred.

a student commencement oration

Despite such setbacks, some students imbibed the

ideas of the anti-slavery movement. Indeed, one of

the most compelling anti-slavery speeches in Amer-

ican history was delivered by a College of Rhode

Island senior, James Tallmadge, at the

1790 com-

mencement ceremony. For Tallmadge, who would

later earn renown as one of the leading opponents

of slavery in the U.S. House of Representatives,

the transatlantic trade was not only “repugnant to

the laws of God” but also a patent violation of the

principles of the Declaration of Independence,

which explicitly stated “that all men were blessed

with equal right and privilege and that

liberty was the

birth right, the Palladium of every individual.” In

his address, Tallmadge systematically rebutted the

arguments advanced by the trade’s defenders, some

of whom were doubtless sitting in the audience:

claims that Africans were “captives of lawful wars”;

that they were happier in the United States than

in their homes; that the trade was essential to the

state’s and nation’s prosperity, an argument, he noted,

that might “with equal propriety” be offered by a

thief explaining why “he could not live in afﬂuence

without his neighbor’s wealth.” That Americans

at the time could seriously entertain such notions,

he added, was a matter “for future generations

to investigate.”

In his oration, Tallmadge took particular aim

at the idea of black racial inferiority, which had

already emerged as the primary intellectual justiﬁ-

cation for slavery. Of all the “specious reasons for

importing and holding in bondage the native

African,” he declared, none was more absurd than

the idea “that one who was formed with a dark

complexion is inferior to him, who possesses a

complexion more light.” “Should a thing like this

be admitted as general,” he continued, “mankind

would be at once resolved into an unusual monarchy

with some weak puny white-faced creature for

the sovereign, and those whose color was furtherest

removed from white, though a Newton or...

a Washington would be reduced to the most abject

slavery.” Such claims, he concluded, could “never

be admitted by any except those who are prompted

by avarice to encroach upon the

sacred rights of

their

fellow men, and are vainly endeavoring to

appease a corroding conscience.”

southern students at brown

Tallmadge’s oration suggests that students at the

college grappled with the great political issues

swirling around them. It also reminds us that

Brown students’ penchant for speaking plainly to

their elders is nothing new. Yet it is also clear that

24 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

In 1786, Brown proposed a prize for the best student essay on

the slave trade, an idea clearly inspired by a similar contest

staged the year before at Cambridge University in England.

“How much to the Honour of Rhode Island College would it be

if Similar Measures as far as its Infant State would admit

were pursued,” he wrote in a letter to President Manning,

“but I am aware that the Corporation has a few members who

would be against the Subject receiving the sanction of the

College....” The contest was never held.

many students at the college lived quite comfort-

ably with the institution of slavery. As the nation’s

ﬁrst Baptist college, the school attracted a large

number of southern students, many of them from

prominent slaveholding families, and there is little

evidence to suggest that their years on campus

unsettled their beliefs. Probably the most curious

examples are John and George Carter, sons of

Robert Carter, the wealthiest planter in Virginia.

Though to the manor born, Robert Carter had

always felt great uneasiness about slavery, feelings

that escalated after his conversion to the Baptist

faith in the late

1770s. In 1787, he dispatched

his young sons to the College of Rhode Island, with

orders that they not return to Virginia until after

their twenty-ﬁrst birthdays. His object, as he

explained in letters to President James Manning,

was to shield the boys from the corrupting inﬂuence

of slaveholding society until their characters and

consciences were more fully formed. Four years

later, Carter answered his own conscience, embark-

ing on the largest private manumission in American

history. The process, undertaken gradually to

minimize opposition from white neighbors, even-

tually included some ﬁve hundred slaves, the major-

ity of whom attained freedom

after Carter’s death in

1804. But if

Carter realized his plans for his

slaves, his hopes for his sons were unavailed. Both

boys returned to Virginia, reclaimed their role as

slaveowners, and set about trying to reclaim their

inheritance. John Carter was particularly deter-

mined to “overturn and frustrate” his father’s will,

often selling individuals immediately before (and

in a few cases after) they became free.

More striking than the presence of southern

students on the campus was the procession of

New England-born students who headed south

after graduation, to earn their fortunes as mer-

chants, lawyers, planters, teachers, and clergymen.

The southward migration was facilitated by busi-

ness links between Rhode Island and the South, as

well as by a dense web of family and society ties,

particularly with the gentry of South Carolina,

many of whose members summered in Newport.

Richard James Arnold, who graduated from Brown

1814, provides a striking example. Arnold was

a member of one of Providence’s leading anti-

slavery families; his uncle, Thomas, was a Quaker

and founding secretary of the Providence Abolition

Society. But this did not stop him from marrying

a southern woman or settling in the South. As his

biographers note, Richard Arnold lived a double

life, spending half the year in Providence, where

he was a respected businessman, and the other half

on his plantation in Bryant Country, Georgia, where

25 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Building records for the College

Ediﬁce, now known as University Hall,

built by public subscription in

1770.

A few donors to the project honored

their pledges by offering the labor of

their slaves, including Pero, a sixty-

two-year-old African owned by Henry

Paget. The construction crew also

included Job, a Native American, and

Mingow, apparently a free African.

his large retinue of slaves cultivated rice and cot-

ton. He was also one of the longest-serving trustees

in Brown University history, with a tenure that

stretched from

1826 to 1873.

the rise of the rhode island

textile industry

The commercial ties between Rhode Island and

the South that Arnold embodied highlight one last

strand in the University’s long and tangled rela-

tionship with American slavery. One of the tactics

that Moses Brown hit upon in his ﬁght against the

slave trade was to encourage local manufacturing,

in the hope that creating new investment opportu-

nities would wean Rhode Island merchants from

the slave trade. Manufacturing success, he suggested,

would inﬂuence “money’d men of Newport and

especially the Guiney traders who disgracefully

Continue in the Beaten Track of that inhuman

Trafﬁck.” In

1789, the same year he founded the

Providence Abolition Society, Brown launched a

textile manufacturing ﬁrm in partnership with his

son-in-law, William Almy. A year later, the ﬁrm

hired Samuel Slater, an English mechanic, who

proceeded to build the nation’s ﬁrst water-powered

spinning mill on the Blackstone River. The Ameri-

can Industrial Revolution began within a few miles

of the Brown campus, and its chief sponsor was

Moses Brown.

Some of Brown’s allies were skeptical of his

idea that manufacturing might displace the slave

trade. “An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin

as a Newport merchant could be induced to change

so lucrative a trade...for the slow proﬁts of any

manufactory,” one warned. But there was an even

bigger problem. Textile mills spun and wove cotton,

a commodity produced almost exclusively by

enslaved labor, initially in the West Indies and later

in the American South. In effect, Moses Brown,

in seeking to disentangle Rhode Islanders from

one aspect of slavery, ensured their more thorough

entanglement in another. John Brown, who had

long felt the sting of his brother’s disapproval,

appreciated the irony. “I hope the abolition society

will promote our own manufactories; especially

the cotton manufactory, for which great experience

has accrued and is accruing,” he wrote during his

1789 newspaper war with the Providence Abolition

Society. “This is most certainly a laudable under-

taking, and ought to be encouraged by all; but

pause a moment – will it do to import the cotton?

It is all raised from the labour of our own blood;

the slaves do the work. I can recollect no one place

at present from whence the cotton can come, but

from the labour of the slaves.”

Moses never responded to John’s taunt, which

seems, in retrospect, to highlight an obvious con-

tradiction. Probably the best that can be said is that

he believed, as did most early abolitionists, that

slavery was “consequent” upon the trade – that is,

that the institution depended on the continued

importation of Africans and would naturally wither

away once the trade had been stemmed. That

belief may have had some validity for the sugar

colonies of the Caribbean, where massive mortal-

ity required the constant infusion of fresh labor,

but it was not true in the United States. With the

invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in

1793,

American slavery gained a spectacular new lease on

life. Over the next generation, cotton cultivation

spread across the lower Mississippi Valley and as far

west as Texas, sustained by an interstate slave trade

that could be as inhumane and disruptive of family

bonds as the transatlantic trade had been. By the

1850s, cotton was the lifeblood of the American

economy, supplying more than sixty percent of the

nation’s exports and the lion’s share of federal gov-

ernment revenues. The total market value of the

slaves who produced that cotton exceeded the value

of all American banks, railroads, and factories

combined.

26 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,

the dark ships move, the dark ships move,

their bright ironical names

like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth . . .

Robert Hayden, Middle Passage

The rise of the Cotton Kingdom had a dra-

matic effect on the New England economy. Nearly

three hundred textile ﬁrms opened in Rhode Island

in the years between

1790 and 1860, ranging from

small, short-lived “manufactories” to massive,

state-of-the-art mills, with thousands of spindles.

Hundreds more mills were built in neighboring

Massachusetts and Connecticut. A host of ancillary

enterprises grew up in the industry’s wake, including

machine shops and railroads, banks and insurance

companies. Just as the wealth of eighteenth-century

New England had ﬂowed from slave-produced

sugar, so did the region’s vastly enlarged wealth in

the nineteenth century ﬂow from slave-produced

cotton.

rhode island and

the “negro cloth” industry

Nowhere was New England’s continuing eco-

nomic dependence on slavery more dramatic than

in Rhode Island, which came to rely on the planta-

tion South not only as a source of raw materials

but also as a primary market for its goods. Facing

mounting competition from larger, more modern

mills in Massachusetts, Rhode Island textile manu-

facturers carved out a niche in the production of

“Negro cloth,” the cheap cloth sold to southern

planters as clothing for slaves. A coarse cotton-wool

blend, “Negro cloth” was designed to degrade its

wearers – to create (in the words of a South Car-

olina grand jury) a visible “distinction...between

the whites and the negroes, calculated to make the

latter feel the superiority of the former.” But the

market was huge, as were the potential proﬁts, and

Rhode Islanders seized the opportunity.

The role of northern factories in clothing

southern slaves was noted by observers at the time.

“[A]s to the clothing of the slaves on the planta-

tions,” wrote Frederick Law Olmsted in his famous

1853 travel narrative of the South, “they are said

to be furnished by their owners or masters, every

year, each with a coat and trousers, of a coarse

woolen or woolen and cotton stuff (mostly made,

especially for this purpose, in Providence, R.I.).”

27 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

In 1758, a group of Rhode Island ship captains found themselves simultaneously

in the Dutch Caribbean colony of Surinam and decided to commemorate the

occasion by commissioning a portrait. The result was John Greenwood’s “Sea

Captains Carousing in Surinam,” which depicts the men disporting themselves

in a tavern amidst ill-clothed African slaves. Of the ten men in the painting

who have been identiﬁed, six were future trustees of the College of Rhode Island,

what is today Brown University. Two became governors of Rhode Island.

Had Olmsted probed further, he might have noted

that Rhode Island manufacturers had also cornered

the market for slave blankets, bagging (the sacks

used for harvesting cotton), and brogans, the cheap,

ill-ﬁtting shoes produced for southern slaves. He

might also have noted that the owners of the ﬁrms

dominating the southern trade included not only

old slave-trading families but also several families

who had been leading members of the Providence

Abolition Society a generation before. Peace Dale

Manufacturing Company, for example, the ﬁrm

that pioneered the Negro cloth trade, was owned

by the Hazards, a Quaker family long noted for its

opposition to slavery. Like many of Rhode Island’s

textile manufacturers, the Hazards were major

donors to Brown University.

abolitionism and anti-abolitionism

Understanding the links between southern slavery

and northern manufacturing helps to explain Rhode

Islanders’ response to the establishment of the

American Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in

1833

by William Lloyd Garrison, the society was far

more radical than earlier abolitionist movements,

insisting not only on the complete abolition of

slavery but also on African Americans’ right to full

American citizenship. The society ﬁrst came to

national prominence in

1835, when it distributed

more than a million anti-slavery appeals through the

U.S. postal system. The campaign provoked a

furious backlash, with northerners and southerners

alike denouncing the abolitionists as irresponsible

fanatics bent on racial amalgamation. While Con-

gress responded with a law prohibiting the cir-

culation of abolitionist literature through the mails,

mobs burned anti-slavery publications and assaulted

abolitionist speakers. One historian has counted

more than two hundred anti-abolition mobs in the

antebellum period, with

1835 marking the peak of

activity.

The rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society

provoked intense opposition among business

leaders in Rhode Island, who saw the society as a

threat not only to social order but also to their

livelihoods, which revolved around slave-produced

cotton. The appearance of an agent of the society

in the state in

1835 prompted a series of public

meetings, where state leaders left little doubt about

where they stood on the matter of racial equality.

Black people were “a race whom nature herself has

distinguished by indelible marks, and whom the

most zealous asserters of equality admit to be – if

not a distinct species – at least a variety of the human

species,” participants at an anti-abolition meeting

in Newport declared. “Great, therefore, as was

the original error of introducing slaves into the

country, it would be a far greater error and evil ever

to resort to the experiment of converting them

into freemen....”

A short time later, local newspapers published

the resolutions adopted at the inaugural meeting

of the newly-created Providence Anti-Abolition

Society. “We, the People of Providence,” the

resolutions began, in an obvious evocation of the

American Constitution, before proceeding to

demand federal suppression of the abolitionist move-

ment

on the grounds that it threatened “sacred

rights of property” as well as “the existing relations

of friendship and of business between different

sections of our country.” The ofﬁcers of the society

included many of Rhode Island’s premier political

and business leaders, several of whom were members

of the Brown Corporation. The resolutions were

drafted by a committee chaired by William G.

28 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

“I hope the abolition society will promote our own

manufactories; especially the cotton manufactory, for which

great experience has accrued and is accruing,” John Brown

wrote mockingly. “This is most certainly a laudable

undertaking, and ought to be encouraged by all; but pause

a moment – will it do to import the cotton? It is all raised

from the labour of our own blood; the slaves do the work.

I can recollect no one place at present from whence the cotton

can come, but from the labour of the slaves.”

Goddard, a Brown professor of moral philosophy

and later a member of both the Board of Trustees

and the Board of Fellows. Among the vice presidents

of the Providence Anti-Abolition Society was

Nicholas Brown Jr., the University’s namesake and

a member, forty years before, of the Providence

Abolition Society.

lxvi

All these events were watched with interest by

Nicholas’s uncle, Moses. Ninety-seven years old,

Moses had outlived his brothers, his son, and most

of his nieces and nephews. In

1835, as the contro-

versy over abolition raged, he summoned his attor-

ney and added a codicil to his will, leaving $

500 to

the local branch of the American Anti-Slavery

Society, “to publish such pamphlets as the society

might judge useful for abolishing slavery.” He died

the following year.

slavery and abolition

on college campuses

Like the battle over the slave trade in the eigh-

teenth century – and like the slavery reparations

controversy of our own time – the abolition debate

spilled onto college campuses, compelling institu-

tions to reﬂect on the nature of slavery and, more

broadly, on the responsibility of universities when

faced with issues arousing great public passion.

Different schools responded in different ways. A

few cast their lot with the anti-slavery movement,

providing forums for abolitionist speakers and

admitting black students. African Americans grad-

uated from Amherst and Bowdoin as early as

1826.

Wesleyan enrolled a black student in the early

1830s, but it appears that fellow students hounded

him from the school. Oberlin College went fur-

thest, admitting both black men and black women

on a regular basis beginning in

1835. Of the

roughly four hundred African American students

to earn degrees at white colleges in the nineteenth

century, nearly a third of them studied at Oberlin.

During the antebellum years, the campus also

served as an important stop on the Underground

Railroad.

Most colleges took a more conservative

approach. Harvard and Yale, institutions with sub-

stantial numbers of southern students and large

contingents of textile manufacturers among their

trustees and donors, did not admit African Ameri-

can students into their undergraduate colleges

until the

1870s. (Princeton, the most southern of

northern universities, did not admit black students

until World War II.) At Harvard, the abolition

question was considered so inﬂammatory that

President Josiah Quincy sought to prevent students

and faculty from even discussing it. At least one

faculty member was dismissed for expressing anti-

29 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

“We leave for future

generations to investigate...”

Excerpt from James

Tallmadge’s

1790 student

commencement oration on

the evils of the slave trade.

slavery sentiments, and others received formal

warnings. “I...distinctly stated to you that...I held

it an incumbent duty of every ofﬁcer of the Insti-

tution to abstain from any act tending to bring

within its walls discussions upon questions on which

the passions and interests of the community are

divided, and warmly engaged,” Quincy reminded

one junior instructor. Quincy’s concerns were

seemingly borne out in the early

1850s, when a

trio of African American students were brieﬂy

admitted to Harvard’s medical program. The

experiment appears to have been launched by the

local chapter of the American Colonization Soci-

ety, which planned to transport the three men to

Africa after they had completed their studies, but it

was cut short after protests from other students,

who complained that “the admission of blacks to

the medical Lectures” undermined the “reputation”

of Harvard and lessened “the value of a degree

from it.”

slavery as a problem of moral

philosophy: the presidency

of francis wayland

Brown charted its own idiosyncratic course. Like

most of its peer institutions, Brown did not admit

black students during the antebellum years – the

ﬁrst African Americans enrolled only in the

1870s

– and it certainly did not render any formal sup-

port to the abolitionist movement. But the college

also made no effort to suppress discussion of the

issue. On the contrary, students were actively

encouraged to grapple with the moral and political

issues raised by the controversy. The architect of

this unusual policy was Rev. Francis Wayland, who

served as Brown’s president from

1827 to 1855.

America’s premier moral philosopher – his text-

book,

The Elements of Moral Science, sold more than

two-hundred thousand copies in the nineteenth

century – Wayland was a staunch opponent of slav-

ery, which he regarded as both an offense against

God and a patent violation of the nation’s founding

principles. But he was also extremely hostile to

the new abolitionists, whom he saw as irresponsible

agitators. “Slavery in this country will yet cease,

for it is wrong,” he wrote a correspondent in

1837.

“But it will never be made to cease by the present

efforts. They have on them, in my opinion, every

mask of failure, for they are not made in the fear of

God or with love to man. They may destroy the

union, plunge this country into a civil war, break

us up into a half dozen different confederacies, but

abolish slavery as they are now attempting to do it

– they never will. You may note my words

, they

never will

.”

Wayland had pragmatic reasons for seeking a

middle ground in the escalating conﬂict over slav-

ery and abolition. Not only was he the president of

a university in a state dominated by textile inter-

ests, but he was also president of the national con-

vention of the Baptist Church, which was bitterly

divided on the slavery question. (The church ﬁnally

split into southern and northern wings in

1845.)

Yet his approach also reﬂected his philosophical

precepts. For Wayland, moral progress came not

through conﬂict and name-calling, but through a

gradual process of enlightenment, nurtured by

respectful, reasoned dialogue. He sought to model

this approach in both his teaching and his writing,

most notably in

Domestic Slavery Considered as a

Scriptural Institution

, a published debate with a pro-

slavery clergyman from South Carolina. Slave-

holders, Wayland believed, could be brought to see

the evil of slavery, but not in the overheated atmos-

phere created by abolitionism. He elaborated this

position in

The Limitations of Human Responsibility,

published in

1838. In the book, Wayland argued

that people had a right, indeed an obligation, to try

to persuade slaveholders of the error of their ways,

30 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

Dubbing themselves the Providence Anti-Abolition Society,

the gentlemen demanded federal suppression of the abolitionist

movement on the grounds that it threatened “sacred rights

of property” as well as “the existing relations of friendship and

of business between different sections of our country.” Among

the vice presidents of the Anti-Abolition Society was Nicholas

Brown Jr., the University’s namesake and a member, forty

years before, of the Providence Abolition Society.

but beyond that their rights and obligations did not

go. Responsibility for acting or not acting on the

advice lay with each individual slaveholder. “I have

no right, for the sake of carrying a measure, or stir-

ring up excitement, or swaying the popular opin-

ion, to urge, as a matter of universal obligation,

what God has left as a matter to be decided by every

man’s conscience,” he wrote. The problem, of

course, was that very few southern slaveholders

were open to persuasion, a fact that even Wayland

eventually came to acknowledge. The deeper prob-

lem, from a philosophical point of view, lay in the

portrayal of moral responsibility as a transaction

solely between white men. There was little sugges-

tion in Wayland’s argument that people might also

bear responsibilities toward those who were

unjustly enslaved.

brown students debate abolition

Whatever the limitations of Wayland’s approach,

it created wide latitude for Brown students to dis-

cuss the issues swirling about them. And discuss

them they did, not only in classrooms but also in

commencement orations, Phi Beta Kappa lectures,

and formal debates staged by a half dozen campus

societies. Were black and white people endowed

with equal capacities to reason? Would it be politic

for America to emancipate its slaves? Was the “exis-

tence of slavery in a nation prejudicial to its morals?”

Did southern planters have a right, “under the

present circumstances,” to hold slaves? Could slavery

be justiﬁed in terms of scripture or “the Principles

of Political Economy”? Wayland himself dedicated

several weeks of his senior seminar to the problems

of slavery and abolition. “He permitted the largest

liberty of questioning and discussion,” one of his

students later recalled, insisting only “that the stu-

dent should state his point with precision.”

Determining the exact proportion of Brown

students who supported or opposed slavery in the

antebellum years is not possible. Clearly many stu-

dents, southerners and northerners alike, were

pro-slavery, or at least anti-abolition. Most formal

debates for

which a result is recorded seem to have

been resolved

against abolition. When abolitionist

Wendell Phillips came to speak at a Providence

church in

1845, he was heckled and abused by

a large contingent of Brown students. (Phillips, no

stranger to heckling, reportedly told the students

that “they might be silly as geese or venomous

as serpents, he would speak if they stayed until

midnight.” They did, and he did.) Other students,

however, joined the ranks of the abolitionist move-

ment. The founding members of the Providence

branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society included

eleven Brown students. At least one Brown gradu-

ate, named Dresser, became an agent for the soci-

ety. He was later arrested in Nashville and publicly

whipped for distributing abolitionist literature.

In the end, slavery was abolished in the United

States not by reasoned debate or by the progress

of moral enlightenment but by force of arms. At

least twenty-one Brown University students died

in the service of the Union Army. A plaque in

Manning Chapel, on the University’s main green,

honors their sacriﬁce. At least thirteen Brown stu-

dents died in the uniform of the Confederacy.

Their service, like so much else about the Univer-

sity’s tangled relationship with slavery, would soon

be forgotten.

31 slavery, the slave trade, and brown university

In her letter appointing the steering com-

mittee, President Simmons charged us not only

to examine Brown’s history, but also to reﬂect on

the meaning and signiﬁcance of this history in the

present. She particularly asked the committee to

examine “comparative and historical contexts” that

might illuminate Brown’s situation, as well as the

broader problem of “retrospective justice.” How

have other institutions and societies around the world

dealt with historical injustice and its legacies, and

what might we learn from their experience? A sub-

stantial majority of the committee’s public programs

pertained to this aspect of our charge, to which

we now turn.

humanity in an age of mass atrocity

Human history is characterized not only by slavery

but also by genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” forced

labor, starvation through siege, mistreatment of

prisoners of war, torture, forced religious conver-

sion, mass rape, kidnapping of children, and any

number of other forms of gross injustice. Different

civilizations at different historical moments have

developed their own understandings of such prac-

tices, specifying the conditions under which they

were allowed or forbidden and against whom they

might legitimately be directed. Jews, Christians,

and Muslims all devised rules for slavery, the con-

duct of war, and the treatment of prisoners and

civilian populations. Our era is hardly the ﬁrst to

grapple with humanity’s capacity for evil.

The idea that certain actions were inherently

illegitimate and should be universally prohibited,

no matter the circumstances or the particular

target group, emerged in the eighteenth century.

At the root of this belief was the idea of shared

humanity, the belief that all human beings partook

of a common nature and were thus entitled to share

certain basic rights and protections. This convic-

tion, which animated the early movement to abolish

the slave trade, received its classic expression

in the preamble to the American Declaration of

Independence, with its invocation of “self-evident”

truths about equality and inalienable rights to “life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Obviously

these rights have not been extended to all people

at all times. As we have already seen, the idea of

race, also a product of the eighteenth century, has

played a particularly important role in blunting the

claims of certain groups to full equality. Yet there

is no question of the historical importance of the

idea of shared humanity, which undergirds the whole

ediﬁce of international humanitarian law.

In bequeathing us the ideas of shared human-

ity and fundamental human rights, the eighteenth

century also left us with a series of practical and

philosophical problems. How are human rights to

be enforced and defended? Do nation states have

the right to treat their own citizens as they please,

or are there occasions when the demands of

humanity trump national sovereignty? How are

perpetrators of human rights abuse to be held to

account? Such questions are obviously most

pointed in the midst or immediate aftermath of

atrocities, but they have longer-term implications

as well, for great crimes inevitably leave great lega-

cies. Are those who suffered grievous violations of

their rights entitled to some form of redress, and,

32 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Confronting Historical Injustice:

Comparative Perspectives

if so, from what quarter? Do such claims die with

the original victims, or are there occasions when

descendants might also deserve consideration?

How do societies move forward in the aftermath

of great crimes?

These are not merely academic questions.

On the contrary, the global effort to deﬁne, deter,

and alleviate the effects of gross historical injustice

represents one of the most pressing challenges of

our time. The modern era will go down in history

as the age of atrocity, an age in which the funda-

mental human rights that most societies profess to

cherish have been violated on a previously unimag-

inable scale. No single factor accounts for this

grim reality. The birth of modern nation states, with

sophisticated bureaucracies and unprecedented

industrial might; the creation of colonial empires;

innovations in military technology; the rise of “total

war,” involving the mass mobilization of civilian

populations and the deliberate targeting of non-

combatants; the growth of totalitarian ideologies;

the emergence of ever more virulent forms of

racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry; the rise of

mass media, and the use of those media to foment

hatred and fear: All these developments and more

have radically enhanced humanity’s propensity and

capacity for annihilation. Viewed in this context,

the attempt to uphold basic principles of justice

and humanity may seem a little like trying to hold

back the tide, but few can doubt its urgency.

defining crimes against humanity

Broadly speaking, the history of efforts to restrain

and redress the effects of gross human injustice has

proceeded in two phases, both of which are of

potential relevance to the current debate over slav-

ery reparations in the United States. The ﬁrst phase,

stretching from the late eighteenth century to the

aftermath of the Second World War, revolved

around efforts to deﬁne and enforce international

norms of humanitarian conduct in regard to three

scourges: slavery and the slave trade; offenses com-

mitted during times of war; and genocide. These

efforts reached a climax of sorts at Nuremberg, where

an international military tribunal prosecuted leaders

of Nazi Germany, a regime that combined all the

worst attributes of slavery, war crimes, and geno-

cide. The second phase, beginning at Nuremberg

and continuing to our own time, has focused less

on prevention or prosecution than on redress –

on repairing the injuries that great crimes leave. At

the most obvious level, this entails making provi-

sion for the victims of atrocities and their survivors,

but it also involves broader processes of social

rehabilitation, aimed at rebuilding political com-

munities that have been shattered.

In both guises, retrospective justice rests on

the belief that some crimes are so atrocious that

the damage they do extends beyond immediate

victims and perpetrators to encompass entire soci-

eties. The most common label for such offenses is

“crimes against humanity,” a term meant to convey

not only their great scope and severity but also

their distinctive logic. Crimes against humanity are

not simply random acts of carnage. Rather, they

are directed at particular groups of people, who

have been so degraded and dehumanized that they

no longer appear to be fully human or to merit the

basic respect and concern that other humans com-

mand. The classic example is the Holocaust,

the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews and other

“subhuman” races, but the same logic can be seen

in a host of other episodes, from the slaughter of

more than a million Armenians by Turkish author-

ities during World War I to the systematic rape

of more than twenty thousand Muslim women by

Serbian soldiers in Bosnia in the

1990s. While obvi-

ously directed against speciﬁc targets, such crimes

attack the very idea of humanity – the conviction

that all human beings partake of a common nature

and possess an irreducible moral value. By implica-

tion, all human beings have a right, indeed an

obligation, to respond – to try to prevent such

horrors from occurring and to redress their effects

when they do occur. At the most obvious level,

this means trying to prevent further bloodshed, to

33 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

break the “cycles of atrocity” that crimes against

humanity all too often spawn. But it also means con-

fronting the legacies of bitterness, contempt, sor-

row, and shame that great crimes often leave behind

– legacies that can divide and debilitate societies

long after the original victims and perpetrators have

passed away.

slavery and the slave trade

in international law

The ﬁrst international humanitarian crusade was

the campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave

trade, which stands historically and conceptually as

the prototypical crime against humanity. As we

have seen, Rhode Island played a conspicuous, if

contradictory, part in the campaign, becoming the

ﬁrst state in the United States to legislate against

the slave trade even as local merchants continued

to play a leading role in the trafﬁc. The move-

ment’s crowning achievement came in

1807, when

the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress both

voted to abolish the transatlantic trade. While the

United States made only a token effort to enforce

the ban, Great Britain launched a major suppres-

sion effort, dispatching a naval squadron to the

African coast and negotiating a series of bilateral

treaties with other nations, permitting the board-

ing and inspection of vessels suspected of carrying

slaves. Offenders were tried in special “Courts of

Mixed Commission” scattered around the Atlantic

World, an early example of the use of international

judicial bodies to enforce humanitarian law.

Africans redeemed from captured ships were taken

to Freetown, in the West African colony of Sierra

Leone, where they were settled in “recaptive” vil-

lages, each with its own school.

It is difﬁcult to appreciate, in retrospect, how

remarkable this development was. In the course of

a single generation, a commerce that had scarcely

rufﬂed the world’s conscience for two and a half

centuries was recast as a singular moral outrage.

That the suppression campaign was led by Britain,

the nation controlling the largest share of the

transatlantic trade at the time, makes it more

remarkable still. Yet the victory was less than com-

plete. While the British Anti-Slavery Squadron

apprehended hundreds of ships and liberated tens

of thousands of people, it did not end the trade.

Over the next half century, another two million to

three million Africans were carried to the Ameri-

cas, chieﬂy to Cuba and Brazil. Equally important,

the growing consensus on the criminality of the

slave trade did not immediately extend to the insti-

tution of slavery itself, which continued to exist,

and to enjoy wide acceptance, long after the trade

had been banned. Britain abolished slavery in its

colonies only in the

1830s, and it took another

generation and a civil war to end the institution in

the United States. In Brazil and Cuba, the last

American nations to enact abolition, slavery sur-

vived until the

1880s.

The decade of the

1880s also saw the ﬁrst

multilateral anti-slavery treaties. At the Berlin

Conference of

1885 and again at the Brussels Con-

ference of

1889, delegates from fourteen nations –

all the major European powers, plus the United

States – solemnly pledged to use their ofﬁces to

halt the trafﬁcking of enslaved Africans, whether

over land or water, anywhere in the world. But the

rhetoric was deceptive, indeed rankly cynical. Alle-

viating the plight of enslaved Africans served as the

34 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Crimes against humanity are not simply random acts of

carnage. Rather, they are directed at particular groups

of people, who have been so degraded and dehumanized that

they no longer appear to be fully human or to merit the basic

respect and concern that other humans command. Such

crimes attack the very idea of humanity – the conviction that

all human beings partake of a common nature and possess

an irreducible moral value. By implication, all human

beings have a right, indeed an obligation, to respond – to try

to prevent such horrors from occurring and to redress their

effects when they do occur.

chief rationalization for partitioning Africa into

formal European colonies. While Britain and

France came away with the greatest number of

colonies, the single largest territory – the Congo

Free State, an area equivalent in size to all of west-

ern Europe – was given as a protectorate to one

man, King Leopold of Belgium. Over the next

twenty years, Belgian ofﬁcials in the Congo would

oversee one of the most notorious forced labor

regimes in human history in their relentless drive

to produce more ivory and rubber. By the time

Leopold was ﬁnally compelled to relinquish control

of the territory in

1907, an estimated ten million

people – about half of the population of the Congo

– had died. It would take another two decades after

that, until the

1926 League of Nations Slavery

Convention, for the nations of the world to com-

mit themselves formally to “the complete abolition

of slavery in all its forms.”

war crimes

The year of the last documented transatlantic slav-

ing voyage,

1864, also witnessed the ﬁrst interna-

tional treaty regulating the conduct of war, the

Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the

Condition of the Wounded in Armies of the Field.

Signers of the convention pledged not only to pro-

vide medical attention to enemy combatants, but

also to refrain from ﬁring upon hospitals, ambu-

lances, and other medical facilities, provided that

they were clearly marked – hence the treaty’s com-

mon name, the “Red Cross” agreement. Amended

1906 and 1929, the convention was dramatically

expanded after the Second World War to guaran-

tee proper treatment of prisoners of war as well as

the protection of civilians during times of war.

(The terms of the

1949 agreements have recently

come in for renewed debate, with American ofﬁ-

cials disputing their applicability to prisoners

apprehended in the ongoing war on terror.) New

protocols were added in

1977, extending protec-

tion to civilian victims of armed conﬂicts, includ-

ing those waged within the borders of a single

country.

The Hague Convention concerning the Laws

and Customs of War on Land, signed in

1899 and

extended in

1907, was more ambitious in scope but

less effective in practice. The aim of the conven-

tion was to establish basic rules of warfare, by pro-

hibiting such tactics as the use of chemical

weapons (chieﬂy poison gas) and aerial bombing.

The

1907 convention also created a permanent

court of arbitration, designed to resolve interna-

tional disputes before they could escalate into war.

The convention obviously did not achieve its

objectives. It did not prevent the outbreak of

World War I in

1914, nor did it deter belligerents

from employing precisely the tactics they had

renounced. While poison gas retained the odor of

criminality, aerial bombardment soon lost it, and

the practice was freely indulged by all sides in the

Second World War, which ended with the deliber-

ate incineration of civilian population centers. At

the end of World War I, the victorious Allies made

an effort to prosecute leaders of Imperial Ger-

many, bringing indictments against some eight

hundred military and civilian ofﬁcials for what

were described as “war crimes” and “crimes

against humanity.” But the postwar German gov-

ernment refused to hand them over, citing its pre-

carious political position, and the Allies did not

press the point. A small number of the accused

were later prosecuted in German courts, but the

few who were convicted escaped with light sen-

tences, on the grounds that they had merely fol-

lowed orders.

35 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

We can no longer afford to take that which was

good in the past and simply call it our heritage,

to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead

load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.

The subterranean stream of Western history has

ﬁnally come to the surface and usurped the dig-

nity of our tradition. This is the reality in which

we live.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

genocide

The aftermath of World War I also saw the ﬁrst

international confrontation with genocide, the sys-

tematic attempt to eradicate an entire group of

people on national, ethnic, racial or religious

grounds. While the term is of recent vintage – it

was coined in

1944 by jurist Raphael Lemkin from

the Greek word for race and the Latin word for

killing – the process it describes reaches back to

Biblical times and beyond. The colonization of the

Americas offers a host of examples, from the exter-

mination of the Tainos, the Caribbean islanders

who greeted Columbus, to the destruction of the

Pequots in New England in the

1630s. The onset

of European colonialism in Africa was also a geno-

cidal business, as the exigencies of conquest inter-

sected with racist ideology and imperial greed to

produce murder on a mass scale. While the horror

of the Congo Free State generated the greatest

number of fatalities, the

1904-07 Herero genocide

in German South West Africa was in some

respects more ominous, given German command-

ers’ expressed determination to bring about the

“complete extermination” of people described as

“nonhumans.” No one was ever prosecuted for the

Herero genocide, which is today the subject of

growing scholarly interest and a budding repara-

tions movement.

If colonialism represents one of the historical

seedbeds of genocide, then total war represents

another. In

1915, shortly after the outbreak of

World War I, Turkish authorities launched a cam-

paign to eliminate the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian

minority. Over the next two years, an estimated

one million Armenians were killed, while thousands

of others were lost to their communities through

deportation and forced religious conversion. These

events were widely noted at the time, including

by leaders of the Allied powers, who issued a joint

declaration in May

1915 condemning the Turkish

campaign and pledging to prosecute all responsible

for these “crimes.. .against humanity and civiliza-

tion.” Little ultimately came of the threat. In the

1920s, Turkish courts convicted several perpetra-

tors, in abstentia, for their role in the “deportation

and massacre” of Armenians, but the effort col-

lapsed in the face of international indifference and

resurgent Turkish nationalism. By the end of the

1920s, the ofﬁcial Turkish position on the matter

was that the Armenian genocide had never occurred,

a position upon which the Turkish government

still insists today. The lesson was certainly not lost

on future genocidaires, including Adolph Hitler.

“Who after all speaks today of the extermination

of the Armenians?” he is reputed to have asked on

the eve of the invasion of Poland.

nuremberg and its legacy

Ultimately it took the horrors of World War II to

compel the international community to face

squarely the problem of crimes against humanity.

1945, the Allied powers created a special tribu-

nal to prosecute some of the men responsible for

the horrors of Nazism. In a powerful symbolic

gesture, the tribunal was convened in Nuremberg,

the city in which the Nazis had ﬁrst promulgated

the “race laws” that stripped Jews of citizenship. In

1946, a second court, the International Military

Tribunal for the Far East, or Tokyo Tribunal, was

convened to prosecute leaders of imperial Japan.

36 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

In the 1920s, Turkish courts convicted

several perpetrators, in abstentia, for their

role in the “deportation and massacre”

of Armenians, but the effort collapsed in

the face of international indifference

and resurgent Turkish nationalism. By

the end of the

1920s, the ofﬁcial Turkish

position on the matter was that the

Armenian genocide had never occurred,

a position upon which the government

still insists today.

Prosecutors and judges at Nuremberg and Tokyo

were acutely aware of the unprecedented nature

of the proceedings, which posed a variety of legal

problems, not least deciding the speciﬁc charges on

which perpetrators would be tried. They also appre-

ciated the importance of their work in creating

procedures and precedents for future generations

facing the challenge of mass atrocity. Probably the

most important accomplishment of the tribunals,

and of Nuremberg in particular, was to establish

that those who committed crimes against humanity

could be held to account even when their actions

were “not in violation of the domestic law of the

country where perpetrated” – in short, that people

were responsible for their conduct even when they

acted “legally” or “under orders.”

The primary institutional outcome of the

postwar tribunals was the Convention on the Pre-

vention and Punishment of the Crime of Geno-

cide, formally adopted by the United Nations

General Assembly in

1948. The convention not

only clariﬁed and codiﬁed the still novel concept

of “genocide,” but also committed signatories to

taking concrete action to prevent and punish it,

whenever and wherever it occurred. While prompted

by the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews, the

convention revealed the continuing importance

of slavery and the slave trade as the quintessential

crimes against humanity. The list of offenses

deﬁned as constituting “genocide” included not only

“enslavement,” but also forcible transfer of popu-

lation, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, perse-

cution on racial grounds, inhumane acts causing

serious physical and mental harm, deprivation of

liberty, and forced separation of children and parents.

As one of the speakers hosted by the steering

committee noted, had the Genocide Convention

been in effect during the transatlantic slave trade

or American slavery, signatories would have been

obliged, at least in theory, to take action against

them.

37 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Bill of lading for

the

Sally on its

departure for Africa,

September,

1764.

The ship’s cargo

included thirty boxes

of spermaceti candles,

1,800 bunches of

onions, and

17,274

gallons of New

England rum.

international humanitarian law,

national sovereignty, and the

united states

The tribunals created after World War II and the

international conventions and protocols to which

they gave rise represent watersheds in the history

of international humanitarian law. Yet the tribunals

have not fully realized the hopes of their archi-

tects, either in terms of deterring future atrocities

or of prosecuting perpetrators. The rapid onset of

the Cold War was a severe blow, making it all but

impossible for the international community to

mount any united response to murderous regimes,

a weakness vividly displayed in the late

1970s, as

genocidaires in Cambodia, Guatemala, and East

Timor slaughtered millions with virtual impunity.

At the same time, the growing emphasis on inter-

national responsibility under the auspices of the

United Nations collided with still powerful ideas

about the sovereignty of individual nation states.

This problem became apparent immediately after

the signing of the Genocide Convention, when the

U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty. Though

the intellectual and political foundations of the

convention were chieﬂy laid by Americans, Senate

opponents still balked at the prospect of U.S. citi-

zens being tried before international tribunals

rather than in American courts, where they were

guaranteed certain constitutional protections.

(The Senate ﬁnally ratiﬁed the treaty, with reser-

vations, in

1988, forty years after its drafting.)

Prospects for collective action have improved

somewhat since the end of the Cold War. While

the international community was fatally slow to

acknowledge and respond to the outbreak of geno-

cide in Rwanda and Bosnia in the early

1990s, the

appointment of international criminal tribunals for

both cases revives hopes that at least some mur-

derers will be punished for their crimes. More

recently, special “hybrid” tribunals, blending ele-

ments of national and international judicial sys-

tems, have been appointed to prosecute surviving

perpetrators of the Cambodian and East Timorese

genocides, as well as those responsible for more

recent atrocities in Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

Maintaining a multiplicity of courts, each with its

own personnel and procedures, has inevitably pro-

duced complications and delays, but together these

tribunals bespeak a new international determina-

tion to hold perpetrators of gross human rights abuse

to account. In 1998, delegates from 140 nations

signed the Rome Statute establishing a permanent

International Criminal Court dedicated to investi-

gating and prosecuting genocide, war crimes, and

crimes against humanity, but the court’s stature and

effectiveness remain unclear. In

2002, the United

States formally withdrew its signature from the

accord, again citing the issue of national sovereignty,

as well as concerns that the court might be used to

arraign American civilian and military personnel.

At this writing, the primary challenge to the

international humanitarian regime lay in Darfur,

a region in western Sudan that is the site of an on-

going genocide. Whether the international com-

munity has the capacity and will to stop the killing

or to bring those responsible to justice remains

to be seen.

the limitations of

retributive justice

The tradition begun at Nuremberg and continuing

in the various international tribunals operating

today represents a form of what is known as retribu-

tive justice. Justice, in this view, centers on punish-

ing evildoers. Historically, this is the most common

form of justice and it is generally uncontroversial.

But it has limitations. It is time bound. While

crimes against humanity are generally excluded from

statutes of limitation, prosecution is obviously only

possible while perpetrators live. It also raises ques-

tions about selectivity. In a world rife with injus-

tice, how do we determine which offenses are suf-

ﬁciently grievous to require prosecution? And how

do we determine whom speciﬁcally to prosecute?

In the Nazi Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of

people, virtually an entire society, became impli-

cated in genocide, yet the original Nuremberg trials

featured only two dozen defendants.

38 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

These problems point to others. Crimes

against humanity typically involve not only large

numbers of perpetrators but also vast numbers of

victims, with a range of different injuries, some

of which persist for generations. While seeing per-

petrators in the dock may bring some satisfaction

to victims or their descendants, it does little in

itself to rehabilitate them, to heal their injuries or

compensate them for their losses. More broadly

still, approaches focused solely on prosecution do

little to rehabilitate societies, to repair the social

divisions that great crimes inevitably leave. In other

words, crimes against humanity raise issues not

only of retributive but also of reparative justice.

reparative justice and its critics

As in the case of retributive justice, the history of

reparative justice efforts is closely associated with

the Holocaust. In the late

1940s and early 1950s,

the government of West Germany, spurred in part

by pressure from the United States, launched a

series of programs intended to repair at least some

of the damage wrought by Nazi atrocities. The

West German effort, which included a formal

acknowledgement of responsibility by the prime

minister on behalf of the German people, as well

as the payment of substantial reparations to vic-

tims, remained a more or less isolated example

during the decades of the Cold War; but in the

years since the

1980s, the world has seen a prolif-

eration of reparative justice initiatives, stretching

from Argentina to Australia, South Africa to

Canada. While it is too early to assess the long-

term effects of many of these programs, the idea

that victims of crimes against humanity are enti-

tled to some form of redress is today a more or less

settled principle in international law and ethics.

This status was conﬁrmed with the publication in

2003 of the United Nations’ “Draft Basic Princi-

ples and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and

Reparation for Victims of Violations of Interna-

tional Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.”

Not everyone has welcomed these develop-

ments. In every society, there are many people

who dismiss the whole reparative justice project as

divisive, foolish, or futile. In the United States,

such criticisms have emanated from both ends of

the political spectrum. For some on the right, the

quest for historical redress, and for monetary repa-

rations in particular, is just one more symptom of

the “culture of complaint,” of the elevation of vic-

timhood and group grievance over self-reliance

and common nationality. For some on the left, the

preoccupation with past injustice is a distraction

from the challenge of present injustice, a reﬂection

of the “decline of a more explicitly future-oriented

politics” brought about by the collapse of socialist

and social-democratic movements around the

world. Advocates of reparative justice offer several

rebuttals to these criticisms. Far from fomenting

division, they argue, confronting traumatic histo-

ries offers a means to promote dialogue and heal-

ing in societies that are already deeply divided.

This process, in turn, can generate new awareness

of the nature and sources of present inequalities,

creating new possibilities for political action. Viewed

in this light, reparative justice is not an invitation

to “wallow in the past” but a way for societies

to come to terms with painful histories and move

forward.

While recent discussions of slavery repara-

tions in the United States have chieﬂy focused on

monetary payments, the history of reparative jus-

tice initiatives around the world suggests a wide

variety of potential modes of redress. Broadly

speaking, these approaches can be grouped under

three rubrics: apologies (formal expressions of

contrition for acts of injustice, usually delivered by

leaders of nations or responsible institutions);

truth commissions (public tribunals to investigate

past crimes and to create a clear, undeniable his-

torical record of them); and reparations (the grant-

ing of material beneﬁts to victims or their descen-

dants, including not only money but also

nonmonetary resources such as land, mental health

services, and education). Conceptually distinct,

these approaches often overlap in practice. The

1988 U.S. Civil Liberties Act, for example, com-

39 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

40 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Articles for the slave ship Sally, 1764, listing the names, duties, and

wages of each crewman. Esek Hopkins, the brig’s master, was promised

50 per month, plus a “privilege” – a commission – of ten barrels

of rum and ten enslaved Africans to sell on his own account. The crew

included one “Negro boy,” Edward Abbie, Hopkins’s slave.

bined all three modes in addressing the internment

of Japanese Americans during World War II,

including a national commission to study the mat-

ter and collect public testimony, modest monetary

reparations ($

20,000 to each surviving internee),

and a formal apology, tendered by the President on

behalf of the nation.

apology

One of the most elementary ways to repair an injury,

though often one of the most difﬁcult in practice,

is to apologize for it. In

1951, West German

Chancellor Konrad Adenaur issued a formal state-

ment acknowledging the responsibility of the

German people for the crimes of the Holocaust.

The statement, produced after long and rancorous

negotiations, was something less than an unqual-

iﬁed apology. “The overwhelming majority of the

German people abhorred the crimes committed

against the Jews and were not involved in them,”

Adenaur insisted, adding that many had risked their

lives “to help their Jewish fellow citizens.” “How-

ever,” he continued, “unspeakable crimes were

committed in the name of the German people,

which create a duty of moral and material repara-

tions.” While tentative, Adenaur’s acknowledge-

ment of responsibility, together with his govern-

ment’s agreement to pay substantial reparations to

victims of Nazi persecution, represented a crucial

step in Germany reclaiming its status within the

community of nations. It also sharply distinguished

the West German government from its counter-

part in communist East Germany, which disclaimed

any connection to or responsibility for the crimes

of the Nazi regime.

In 1951, the idea of a representative leader of

a nation or institution formally taking responsibil-

ity for the offenses of predecessors was a novelty.

Today, examples abound. In

1995, Queen Eliza-

beth II became the ﬁrst British monarch to issue a

formal apology to her subjects, directed to the

Maori of New Zealand, for “loss of lives [and] the

destruction of property and social life” occasioned

by British colonization. In

2000, Pope John Paul II

used the occasion of the ﬁrst Sunday of Lent to

apologize and “implore forgiveness” on behalf of

the Catholic Church for a long catalogue of sins,

including the violence of the Crusades and Inqui-

sition, the humiliation and marginalization of

women, and centuries of persecution of Jews. In

2005, ninety-two U.S. Senators endorsed a resolu-

tion formally apologizing for the Senate’s role in

abetting the lynching of African Americans by

refusing to enact a federal anti-lynching statute.

The list goes on.

Several speakers hosted by the steering

committee discussed the recent proliferation of

national and institutional apologies, offering

sharply different analyses. Some were critical, dis-

missing the wave of recent apologies as a vogue,

“contrition chic,” the triumph of the therapeutic

and symbolic over the political and substantive.

What can an apology possibly mean, one asked,

when the people offering it neither enacted nor

feel directly responsible for the offense for which

they are apologizing, and when the people accept-

ing the apology did not directly experience the

offense? Others defended apology as an essential

aspect of historical redress, particularly when

accompanied by some material demonstration of

seriousness and sincerity. Far from just “cheap

talk,” they argued, apologies offer an opportunity

41 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

The notion of reparative justice has attracted criticism from

both ends of the political spectrum. For some on the right,

the quest for historical redress is just one more symptom of the

“culture of complaint,” of the elevation of victimhood and

group grievance over self-reliance and common nationality.

For some on the left, the preoccupation with past injustice is a

distraction from the challenge of present injustice, a reflection

of progressive paralysis following the collapse of socialist and

social-democratic movements around the world.

to facilitate dialogue, nurture accountability, and

enrich political citizenship. As one speaker noted,

most atrocious crimes in history begin with the

denial of the equal humanity of a certain class of

people; thus any project of social repair must begin

with some acknowledgement of the dignity of that

group and of the seriousness of what they suffered.

Apologies are one vehicle to accomplish this.

the politics of apology:

australia’s “stolen children” and

korean “comfort women”

As several speakers noted, apologizing can be a

complicated business. As in relations between indi-

viduals, apologies between groups and institutions

involve subtle assessments of sincerity and motive,

timing and tone, all of which are inevitably com-

plicated by the variety of actors and the passage of

time. The case of abducted Australian Aboriginal

children, the subject of one of the programs spon-

sored by the steering committee, offers a dramatic

example. Between

1900 and the early 1970s, the

Australian government, working with Christian

missions, removed an estimated one-hundred

thousand Aborigine children from their families

and consigned them to boarding schools and white

foster families as part of a forced racial assimilation

policy. (The policy focused on light-skinned, or

“half-breed,” children; full-blood Aborigines were

presumed to be unassimilable and destined for

extinction.) In the

1980s and ’90s, the fate of the

“stolen children” became an important political

issue in Australia, culminating in the appointment

of a government commission of inquiry; the com-

mission, which issued its report in

1997, recom-

mended a formal government apology to affected

families.

The commission’s recommendation was

rejected by the newly elected conservative govern-

ment of John Howard, who insisted that current

Australians bore no responsibility for the sins of

their forbears and should not “embroil themselves

in an exercise of shame and guilt.” The prime min-

ister also expressed fears that an ofﬁcial apology

would lead to massive compensation claims against

the Australian government. Howard’s position

prompted an immediate outcry, leading to the pas-

sage of apology resolutions in several state parlia-

ments and the organizing by community groups of

an annual “National Sorry Day.” The groundswell

prompted Howard to amend his position, and

1999 he introduced a resolution that expressed

“deep and sincere regret” for the forced assimilation

policy, but also stopped short of apologizing or

accepting responsibility for it. The controversy con-

tinues today.

The politics of apology have been even more

contentious in East Asia, where the conduct of the

Japanese Imperial Army during World War II –

and the refusal of subsequent Japanese governments

to accept full responsibility for that conduct – con-

tinues to shadow relations between Japan, China,

and North and South Korea. Over the last ﬁfteen

years, Japanese leaders, including the current

emperor and the prime minister, have issued numer-

ous statements expressing regret and contrition for

wartime atrocities, but the belatedness of the state-

42 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

.. . [C]ivilization discovered (or rediscovered) in

1945 that men are not the means, the instru-

ments, or the representatives of a superior sub-

ject – humanity – that is fulﬁlled through them,

but that humanity is their responsibility, that

they are its guardians. Since this responsibility is

revocable, since this tie can be broken, humanity

found itself suddenly stripped of the divine privi-

lege that had been conferred on it by the various

theories of progress. Exposed and vulnerable,

humanity itself can die. It is at the mercy of men,

and most especially of those who consider them-

selves as its emissaries or as the executors of its

great designs. The notion of crimes against

humanity is the legal evidence of this realization.

Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain:

The Klaus Barbie Trial & Crimes Against Humanity

ments and their emphasis on personal remorse

rather than collective responsibility have left many

victims groups distinctly unsatisﬁed. The contro-

versy has come to focus on the predicament of

so-called “comfort women” – women and children

from Korea, China, and other occupied territories

who were abducted from their homes and forced

to work as sex slaves in military brothels. In

2001,

after more than half a century of denial, the Japan-

ese government acknowledged “military involve-

ment” in the system and offered survivors up to

20,000 in “atonement” money from a privately-

funded “Asian Women’s Fund.” But a group of sur-

viving comfort women, mostly from Korea, rejected

the money, insisting that any funds should come

directly from the Japanese government, accompa-

nied by an unequivocal acceptance of responsibility

and a formal apology.

The comfort women controversy is doubly

relevant here, because the case has become a polit-

ical issue in the United States. Outrage over the

treatment of the women was the main inspiration

for the Lipinski Resolution, a joint U.S. Congres-

sional resolution introduced in

1997 which called

upon the government of Japan to “formally issue a

clear and unambiguous apology for the atrocious

war crimes committed by the Japanese military

during World War II; and immediately pay repara-

tions to the victims of those crimes.” The resolu-

tion attracted dozens of congressional sponsors but

was eventually scuttled by the State Department,

chieﬂy because of concerns that it would encour-

age other reparations claims. In April

2006,

another joint resolution was introduced into Con-

gress, again calling upon the Japanese government

to “acknowledge and accept responsibility for”

the enslavement of comfort women, and also to take

steps to “educate current and future generations

about this horrible crime against humanity.” The

bill, which is pending, omits any reference to repa-

rations, though it enjoins Japan to “follow the

recommendations of the United Nations and

Amnesty International with respect to the ‘comfort

women’ ” – recommendations that include payment

of monetary reparations.

national apologies in

the united states

Leaving the question of monetary reparations

momentarily aside, there is a distinct irony in

demands for a governmental apology coming from

Americans, who tend to be skeptical of the value of

collective apologies for past wrongs, at least when

their own history is concerned. As innumerable

letters sent to the steering committee made clear,

many American reject, indeed resent, the sugges-

tion that they bear some responsibility for actions

in which they took no part, actions that may have

occurred before they were born. The very notion

collides not only with deeply engrained beliefs

about individual responsibility, but also with quin-

tessentially American ideas about historical tran-

scendence, the capacity and fundamental right of

human beings to shake off the dead hand of the

past and create their lives anew. This skepticism is

reinforced by the nation’s litigious culture. In

America today, there is a widespread sense that to

apologize for or even to acknowledge an offense

exposes one to legal liability and invites claims for

damages.

Despite these constraints, there are several

examples in recent American history of government

apologies. Japanese Americans forcibly interned

during World War II received a presidential apol-

ogy – in fact three: one from Gerald Ford in

1976,

one from Ronald Reagan, when he signed the

1988 Civil Liberties Act, and one from his succes-

43 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

In the American case, skepticism about institutional apologies

reflects not only deeply engrained beliefs about individual

responsibility but also wariness of the nation’s litigious culture.

In the United States today, there is a widespread sense that

to apologize for or even to acknowledge an offense exposes one

to legal liability and invites claims for damages.

sor, George H.W. Bush, when implementing the

act. In

1993, Bill Clinton issued a formal apology to

the indigenous people of Hawaii for the American

government’s role in the destruction of Hawaiian

sovereignty. Four years later, Clinton apologized to

victims of the Tuskegee “Bad Blood” experiment,

in which the U.S. Department of Health deliber-

ately and deceptively withheld treatment from

African Americans infected with syphilis in order

to study the effects of the unchecked disease. The

2005 Senate resolution on lynching represents

the most recent example of a government apology,

though it was offered on behalf of a particular

institution rather than of the nation as a whole.

100

apologies untendered: native

americans and african americans

American leaders have been notably slower to

extend apologies to the two groups who would

seem to have the most obvious claims to them:

Native Americans and African Americans. While

the indigenous people of Hawaii have received a

presidential apology, native peoples on the main-

land have not. In

2000, the Bureau of Indian

Affairs apologized for its role in the “ethnic cleans-

ing” of native lands and the deliberate annihilation

of native culture, but the gesture’s impact was

muted by the fact that it came from an assistant

secretary of the Department of Interior, on behalf

of a government agency, rather than from the

President, on behalf of the nation. (The fact that

the ofﬁcial who issued the apology was himself

Native American further reduced its effect.) In

2004, a trio of senators, led by Ben Nighthorse

Campbell, a Republican from Colorado and mem-

ber of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, introduced a

joint Congressional resolution to “acknowledge a

long history of ofﬁcial depredations and ill-con-

ceived policies by the United States Government

regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all

Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.”

But the bill received a negative recommendation

from the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs

and died without reaching the Senate ﬂoor.

101

The government has been even more reticent

on the subject of slavery. While a growing number

of American churches, corporations, and universi-

ties have acknowledged their complicity in slavery

and the slave trade, the nation as a whole has not.

1997, Congressman Tony P. Hall of Ohio intro-

duced a one-sentence concurrent resolution –

“Resolved by the House of Representatives that

the Congress apologizes to African Americans

whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Con-

stitution and the laws of the United States until

1865” – but the bill languished in committee with-

out ever coming up for debate on the ﬂoor of

Congress. In the meantime, the closest the U.S.

government has come to a formal apology is a pair

of statements by President Clinton in

1998 and

President Bush in

2003, both delivered at the same

spot: the old fortress at Goree Island in Senegal,

West Africa. Both presidents expressed regret for

the slave trade but they also carefully stopped

short of apologizing for it. President Bush gave a

particularly stirring speech, describing the slave

trade as “one of the greatest crimes of history” and

slavery itself as “an evil of colossal magnitude,” the

latter characterization borrowed from his eigh-

teenth-century predecessor, John Adams. Yet he

offered no apology, nor any suggestions about

what Americans in the present might do in light of

this painful history. Whether the bicentennial of

the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in

2007

will provide the occasion for a more forthright

apology remains to be seen.

102

telling the truth

If there is a single common element in all exercises

in retrospective justice it is truth telling. Whether

justice is pursued through prosecution, the tender-

ing of formal apologies, the offering of material

reparations, or some combination of all three, the

ﬁrst task is to create a clear historical record of

events and to inscribe that record in the collective

memory of the relevant institution or nation.

Of course, the truth is not always easy to dis-

cern. Most crimes against humanity are sprawling

events, unfolding over months or years and involv-

ing vast numbers of actors, who often have very

44 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

different perspectives, both at the time and in ret-

rospect. Documentation is often in short supply,

sometimes because records were not kept, some-

times because they were deliberately destroyed.

Even the Holocaust, the most thoroughly organ-

ized and documented genocide in human history,

has proved to be an elusive affair. Historians today

estimate that only about half of those who per-

ished under the Nazis died in death camps, the

balance having been shot, stabbed, beaten, worked,

or marched to death in a myriad of individual acts

of atrocity. Even today, more than sixty years later,

historians continue to uncover details of killings

long forgotten or suppressed, including most

recently a series of murderous pogroms launched

by Poles against their Jewish neighbors, some after

the war was over.

103

As such revelations suggest (and as the contro-

versy they have unleashed abundantly conﬁrms),

not everyone wishes to have the full truth told. As

a general rule, perpetrators and their associates are

particularly anxious to see societies “turn the page”

on the past. But even after perpetrators have left

the scene and the immediate threat of prosecution

or retaliation has receded, the idea of unearthing

the past often confronts signiﬁcant opposition from

people who fear that such inquiries may threaten

their social standing or undermine cherished

national myths. Both of these motives can be seen

in the Turkish government’s continuing insistence

that the Armenian genocide of

1915-1917 never

happened, a claim ﬂatly contradicted by thousands

of eye-witness accounts, newsreel footage, and

an abundant documentary record. (Under current

Turkish law, anyone asserting that the genocide

occurred is liable to prosecution for the crime of

“denigrating Turkishness,” an offense punishable

by up to three years in jail.) This is obviously an

extreme example, but the same impulse to evade,

extenuate, or deﬂect the full burden of the past can

be seen in many other cases, from Konrad Adenaur’s

insistence that the vast majority of Germans had

“abhorred” Nazi crimes and played no part in them

to the time-honored refrain in New England that

slaves in the region were treated kindly.

history and memory

As these examples show, the struggle over retro-

spective justice is waged not only in courts and

legislatures but also on the wider terrain of history

and memory – in battles over textbooks and

museum exhibitions, public memorials and popu-

lar culture. The steering committee organized

many programs around these issues, on topics rang-

ing from the design of Holocaust memorials to

the efforts of some citizens of Philadelphia, Missis-

sippi, to come to terms with the murder of three

civil rights workers in their community in

1964.

Many of these programs focused on the history

and memory of American slavery, the focus of the

committee’s charge. Speakers discussed the erasure

of slavery and the slave trade from New Englanders’

collective memory; the history and mythology of

the Underground Railroad; representations of

slavery in twentieth-century African American art

and literature; the politics of slavery reenactments at

historical sites like Colonial Williamsburg; and

popular reactions to recent DNA tests that appear

to conﬁrm long-standing allegations that Thomas

Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves,

Sally Hemings. While different speakers offered

different conclusions, all agreed that slavery

remains an extremely sore subject for many Amer-

icans, white as well as black. If one of the deﬁning

features of a crime against humanity is the legacy

of bitterness, sensitivity, and defensiveness that it

bequeaths to future generations, then American

slavery surely qualiﬁes.

45 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

In 1997, a Congressman from Ohio introduced a one-sentence

concurrent resolution apologizing for slavery: “Resolved by

the House of Representatives that the Congress apologizes to

African Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the

Constitution and the laws of the United States until

1865.”

The bill died without coming up for debate on the floor of

the House.

commissioning the truth

The steering committee also organized several

programs on truth commissions, which have

emerged in recent years as one of the primary

mechanisms for societies seeking to come to terms

with atrocious pasts. The best-known example is

the South African Truth and Reconciliation Com-

mission, established in

1995 during that country’s

transition from racial apartheid to democratic rule,

but South Africa is far from alone. Since

1982, at

least two-dozen countries have convened truth

commissions of one sort or another. While the

United States government has never formally con-

vened a truth commission, the model has been

used at the national, state, and even municipal

level to examine speciﬁc historical injustices.

Though the particulars differ, truth commis-

sions typically share certain features. Almost by

deﬁnition, they are convened in societies that have

seen massive violations of human rights, usually

perpetrated by the state or its agents, thus creating

a need for some kind of extraordinary body,

beyond the normal system of judges and courts, to

address them. Not surprisingly, they are usually

associated with periods of political transition, as

societies struggle to erect new, legitimate govern-

ments atop the ruins of old, discredited ones. At

the same time, they tend to occur in societies in

which leaders of the old regime continue to exer-

cise substantial power, rendering prosecution

impractical. In some cases, truth commissions have

been part of broader reparative justice campaigns,

including apologies, reparations payment, and

other initiatives designed to promote social repair

and reconciliation. In other cases, they have stood

alone. In a few instances – Sierra Leone, for exam-

ple – truth commissions have proceeded alongside

prosecution efforts, but in most cases they have

been convened in lieu of prosecution. In South

Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

was empowered to award amnesty to perpetrators

who testiﬁed before it as long as they met certain

criteria, including a demonstrable political motive

and full disclosure of their crimes.

104

the politics of truth commissions:

the latin american experience

How well truth commissions succeed depends in

large measure on the political circumstances in

which they are appointed, a fact illustrated by the

experience of Latin America, which has been the site

of no fewer than ten commissions, most convened

amidst transitions from military to civilian govern-

ment. The earliest commissions, appointed to

46 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Account book for the Sally, recording the ship’s

transactions on the African coast. The book is deposited,

along with other records from the voyage, in the John

Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

determine the fate of thousands of political oppo-

nents who “disappeared” during military rule, quickly

ran up against the continuing political inﬂuence of

military authorities and their elite allies. Several

were forced to disband before they ﬁled ﬁnal reports,

including the ﬁrst one, the Bolivian National Com-

mission of Inquiry into Disappearances, appointed

in 1982. Argentina’s National Commission on the

Disappeared, appointed in 1983, fared somewhat

better. The commission’s report included informa-

tion on some nine thousand disappearances, some of

which was used to prosecute ofﬁcers of the old

junta. But growing opposition from the military and

parliament forced the government to suspend the

prosecutions. Under revised guidelines, ofﬁcials in

the military, police, and government were declared

exempt from prosecution so long as they acted in

accordance with the orders of superiors – precisely

the defense rejected by the International Military

Tribunal at Nuremberg four decades before.

105

Some commissions were designed to fail. The

Historical Clariﬁcation Commission of Guatemala

was asked to investigate crimes committed over the

course of a thirty-six-year civil conﬂict, but it was

not given authority to subpoena witnesses or to

name perpetrators in its ﬁnal report. The National

Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in Chile

began in similarly unpromising fashion. Charged

to investigate human rights abuses between the

military coup of

1973 and the restoration of civilian

rule in

1990, the commission was hampered not

only by the blanket amnesty that leaders of the old

regime had given themselves but also by the fact

that the former president, General August Pinochet,

remained commander-in-chief of the Chilean

armed forces. Yet despite these obstacles, the com-

mission succeeded in collecting fresh evidence

about government crimes, which was later used to

overturn the amnesty provision and prosecute some

perpetrators. (Because they had disposed of vic-

tims’ bodies, chieﬂy by dumping them in the ocean,

military ofﬁcials were unable to prove that they

had actually killed the people they kidnapped, mak-

ing it possible to prosecute them for “ongoing

sequestration,” a crime not covered by amnesty

provisions or statutes of limitations.)

106

the south african truth and

reconciliation commission

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commis-

sion is the best known of recent international com-

missions and the one that best illustrates such

institutions’ possibilities and potential limitations.

Over a period of two years, the commission, which

was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, col-

lected more than twenty thousand statements from

victims of gross human rights abuse, as well as

more than seven thousand amnesty applications

from perpetrators detailing their crimes. Several

thousand of these people testiﬁed in public hear-

ings – hearings that were televised nationally and

discussed in innumerable public and private

forums. The commission’s report, along with vol-

umes of supporting material, was widely distrib-

uted and is now an unerasable part of the historical

record of the nation.

107

Yet the South African process was not without

ﬂaws, as several speakers made clear. Many promi-

nent political leaders refused to apply for amnesty

or to testify before the commission, calculating

(correctly) that the new government would not have

the ability or will to prosecute them. The com-

mission also interpreted its mandate in quite nar-

row ways, not only by conﬁning itself to violations

between

1960 and 1993 but also by limiting its

attention to crimes that were “politically motivated”

– crimes undertaken explicitly to defend or over-

throw the apartheid regime. The effect of these

decisions, as one speaker noted, was to focus atten-

47 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

But I feel what has been making me sick all the

time is the fact that I couldn’t tell my story.

But now I – it feels like I got my sight back by

coming here and telling you the story.

Lucas Sikwepere testifying to South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Commission about the police shooting that

left him blind

48 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

An elderly Moses Brown, in

the unadorned coat and broad-

brimmed hat of a Quaker.

Portrait by Martin Johnson

Heade.

Below, excerpt from Brown’s

letter to merchants Clark and

Nightingale, August

1783,

recounting his experience with

the Sally.

tion on the struggle over apartheid and away from

the inherent violence and depravity of the apartheid

system itself. The creation of great wealth and

great poverty; the denial of education; the destruc-

tion of families; the multifarious legacies of a half

century of racially-driven social engineering, com-

ing on the heels of three centuries of colonialism:

All these concerns fell outside the commission’s

purview.

108

truth commissions and

historical repair

Yet as several speakers reminded us, the signiﬁcant

fact is not that truth commissions are imperfect

but that they happen at all, that facts that in previ-

ous generations would likely have been forgotten

or suppressed are today discussed and dissected

in public forums. Obviously commissions cannot by

themselves repair the legacies of trauma and depri-

vation that crimes against humanity leave behind,

but they do create clear, undeniable public records

of what occurred – records that provide an essen-

tial bulwark against the inevitable tendencies to deny,

extenuate, and forget. Perhaps most important,

truth commissions offer the thing that victims of

gross human rights abuse almost universally cite as

their most pressing need: the opportunity to have

their stories heard and their injuries acknowledged.

109

One speaker sought to illustrate the value of

truth commissions by posing a counterfactual

question: What if the United States had convened

a truth and reconciliation commission following

the abolition of slavery in

1865? The question is

both anachronistic and unanswerable, but worth

pondering. Suppose that large numbers of for-

merly enslaved African Americans had been given

a public forum to describe their experiences in

captivity: decades of unremunerated toil; physical

and sexual abuse; loved ones consigned to the auc-

tion block. Suppose that those who participated in

and proﬁted from the institution – a category that

included slaveowners and non-slaveowners, north-

erners and southerners – were likewise asked to

account for their conduct. And suppose also that

these testimonies were broadcast widely, provok-

ing public discussion and becoming enshrined in

the nation’s collective memory – in textbooks and

public memorials, political speeches and Holly-

wood ﬁlms. Would the nation’s subsequent history

have unfolded as it did? Would discussions about

race provoke the misunderstandings and raw feel-

ings that they so often provoke today?

110

truth commissions in

the united states

Though the United States has never formally

convened a truth commission, the model has been

used in more local contexts. The federal commis-

sion appointed to investigate the World War II

internment of Japanese Americans is the obvious

example, but truth commissions have also been

established to examine injustices against African

Americans. In

1993, the House of Representatives

of the State of Florida funded a scholarly commis-

sion to investigate the

1923 Rosewood Massacre, a

murderous assault on an all-black town by a white

mob following (false) reports of the rape of a white

woman by a black man. The legislature responded

to the commission’s report by enacting the Rose-

wood Compensation Act, providing monetary

compensation to families who had lost property in

the attack and creating a small college scholarship

fund for “minority persons with preference given

to direct descendants of the Rosewood families.”

49 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Over a period of two years, South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Commission collected more than twenty

thousand statements from victims of gross human rights

abuse, as well as more than seven thousand amnesty

applications from perpetrators detailing their crimes.

The commission’s report, along with volumes of

supporting material, was widely distributed and is now

an unerasable part of the historical record of the nation.

(The legislature refrained from offering an apol-

ogy.) More recently, two different cities in North

Carolina launched truth and reconciliation initia-

tives: Wilmington, which created a commission to

investigate the city’s

1898 race riot, essentially an

armed coup against one of the last municipal gov-

ernments in the South with substantial black polit-

ical participation; and Greensboro, which

appointed a commission to investigate the

1979

massacre of black union organizers by members of

the Ku Klux Klan.

111

While the North Carolina commissions have

been widely praised for providing information

and facilitating dialogue on painful chapters in the

state’s history, the experience of the Oklahoma

state commission appointed to investigate the

1921

Tulsa race riot was more mixed. The riot, which

destroyed the most prosperous African American

community west of the Mississippi, was one of the

bloodiest in American history: An estimated three

hundred black people were killed and thousands

more were driven from their homes by a white mob

armed and deputized by local authorities. The

commission succeeded in recovering the truth of an

episode that had been completely erased from ofﬁ-

cial histories of the city and state, but its signiﬁ-

cance as a vehicle of reconciliation was attenuated

when the Oklahoma legislature, rejecting one of

the commission’s primary recommendations, refused

to appropriate money to compensate the small num-

ber of surviving victims. Bitter survivors responded

by ﬁling a class-action reparations lawsuit in fed-

eral court. The suit,

Alexander v. Oklahoma, was dis-

missed in

2005 on statute-of-limitations grounds.

112

reparations: theory and practice

As many of these examples reveal, ofﬁcial apologies

and truth commissions have often been accom-

panied by the payment of some kind of compensa-

tion or material reparation. Though “reparations”

are sometimes dismissed by critics today as a recent

innovation, the underlying legal principle is ancient

and well-nigh universal: People who suffer injuries

and losses through the malicious or culpably-

negligent conduct of others have a right to redress

– a right, as far as practicable, to be “made whole.”

This principle, a cornerstone of common law,

has a very long history in cases involving historical

injustice. Family members of men and women

executed during the Salem witchcraft trials of the

1690s, for example, were paid reparations by the

Massachusetts colonial legislature. In recent years,

this principle has been widely applied to cases of

human rights abuse, with literally scores of differ-

ent groups around the world receiving reparations

of various kinds.

But if the basic principle of reparations is

straightforward enough, the application of that prin-

ciple in speciﬁc cases is enormously complex, as

various speakers sponsored by the steering com-

mittee made clear. What form should reparations

take? Who is entitled to receive reparations and

who is responsible to provide them? How is the

value of an injury to be calculated? What happens

to reparations claims with the passage of time?

Beneath these practical matters lay deeper moral

and political questions. What are reparations

intended to accomplish? Are they an end in them-

selves or one aspect of a broader process of repair

and reconciliation? While most of the speakers

50 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

While most of the speakers entertained

by the steering committee acknowledged the

importance of redressing injuries, several

warned of the danger of “commodifying”

suffering, of deﬁning claims to justice

in narrowly material terms. Others spoke

of the “one-time payment trap,” in which

a single check is taken to absolve society

of any further responsibility for injustice.

entertained by the steering committee acknowl-

edged the importance of redressing injuries, sev-

eral warned of the danger of “commodifying” suf-

fering, of deﬁning claims to justice in narrowly

material terms. Others spoke of the “one-time

payment trap,” in which a single check is taken to

absolve society of any further responsibility for the

legacies of historical injustice.

113

determining the medium

of reparation

The easiest reparations claims to understand, if

not always to implement, are simple restitution

claims – returning stolen property, looted artworks,

sacred relics, and other such personal and cultural

property to the rightful owners. Unfortunately,

most cases of gross historical injustice do not

admit of such tidy resolution. How does one make

restitution for a human life or time in a torture

chamber? In such circumstances, reparation must

be made in some other currency. In the American

case, the medium of choice is usually money, but

there are abundant examples, in the United States

and elsewhere, of reparations being paid in other

forms, including land, education, mental health

services, employment opportunities, preferential

access to loan capital, even the creation of dedicated

memorials and museums to ensure that a group’s

experience is not forgotten by future generations.

In the case of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment,

for example, the tendering of a presidential apol-

ogy to the handful of surviving victims was accom-

panied by the commitment of federal funds to

create a research center in bio-medical ethics on the

Tuskegee University campus.

114

What happens when those representing the

interests of victims and perpetrators do not agree on

the appropriate form of reparation? The history of

Native American land claims illustrates the prob-

lem. Native Americans represent something of a

special case in reparations theory, not only because

of the scope of their injuries but also because of

the existence of written treaties to undergird many

of their historical claims. In

1946, the U.S. Con-

gress, facing a raft of potential land disputes, created

an Indian Claims Commission to hear and resolve

all tribal claims against the United States, whether

treaty-based or merely “moral.” The commission,

which operated until

1978, was seen by its creators

as a gesture of liberality, but it quickly became an

adversarial body, enforcing strict eligibility standards

and restricting awards to the minimum possible

amount. The biggest bone of contention was the

commission’s insistence that compensation be paid

in money rather than land; to restore stolen land

to its original owners, the commissioners reasoned,

was both impractical and unfair to the land’s current

owners, most of whom had purchased their prop-

erty legally and in good faith. While many native

nations accepted this logic, some did not, most

notably the Sioux, who insisted on the actual return

of ancestral lands in the Black Hills. With accumu-

lated interest, the compensation awarded by the

commission is today worth hundreds of millions of

dollars, but the Sioux refuse to accept it, arguing

that the Black Hills are sacred space and cannot be

bought or sold.

115

calculating compensation

Even where money is accepted as the medium of

reparation, the question of determining the appro-

priate amount remains. Are such payments literally

compensation, based on a calculation of actual

losses, or are they more symbolic or broadly rehabil-

itative, in which case everyone in a given class

should receive the same sum? The September

Victims Compensation Fund pursued the former

approach. Created by Congress to forestall poten-

tially crippling legislation against airline companies,

51 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Pain can sear the human memory in two

crippling ways: with forgetfulness of the past or

imprisonment in it . . . too horrible to remember,

too horrible to forget: Down either path lies

little health for the human sufferers of great evil.

Theologian Donald Shriver, one of the speakers sponsored

by the Steering Committee

the fund has dispensed some $3 billion, an average

of about $

1 million per family, to survivors of the

men and women killed in the terror attacks of Sep-

tember

11, 2001. Obviously the fund represents

an unusual case in reparations history: The agency

providing compensation, the U.S. government,

was not responsible for the original offense; the

perpetrators, Al Qaeda, have expressed no remorse

for their crime nor any interest in repairing the

resulting injuries. What makes the fund noteworthy

here is both the size of the reparations and Con-

gress’s decision to award different amounts to vic-

tims, based on income and a calculation of likely

future earnings, a decision that ensured, in

essence, that the largest sums went to the wealthi-

est families.

116

Most recent reparations programs have taken

the second, more symbolic approach. Under the

terms of the

1988 Civil Liberties Act, for example,

all surviving victims of the Japanese-American

internment camps received $

20,000, regardless of

their actual losses in property and earnings. The

sum of $

20,000, in fact, has become something of

a touchstone in the international reparations ﬁeld.

The government of Canada, which also interned

citizens of Japanese descent during World War II,

paid reparations in the amount of $

21,000, reﬂect-

ing the greater severity and duration of internment

there. The private “atonement” money offered to

surviving “comfort women” by the Japanese gov-

ernment in

2001 was the equivalent of $20,000, as

was the sum recommended by South Africa’s Truth

and Reconciliation Commission as reparations

for victims of gross human rights abuse who had

testiﬁed before the commission. (The amount

eventually appropriated by the South African gov-

ernment was less than $

4,000 per person.) $20,000

was also the sum recently offered to surviving

Native Canadian children who were taken from

their families and shipped to white mission schools

in the Canadian counterpart to Australia’s forced

racial assimilation policy.

117

reparations and the holocaust

The conceptual and practical problems inherent in

any reparative program are well illustrated by the

sixty-year struggle over Holocaust reparations, a

struggle in which Americans have played a leading

role. In

1947, as the tribunal at Nuremberg com-

pleted its work, U.S. military authorities in occu-

pied West Germany imposed the country’s ﬁrst

Holocaust restitution law, providing for the return

of real estate, factories, and other property stolen

52 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Memorial to Brown University students who died ﬁghting

for the Union during the Civil War. Manning Chapel.

from Jews as part of the Nazi’s “Aryanization” of

the economy. American occupation ofﬁcials also

helped to draft the ﬁrst model law for paying repa-

rations to individual victims of Nazi atrocities, a

step that many U.S. ofﬁcials held out as a precon-

dition for the restoration of German national sov-

ereignty. In the years that followed, the West Ger-

man government enacted a series of reparations

programs, providing monetary grants and pensions

to individual victims and their survivors, with

prescribed payments for loss of life, loss of health,

losses of property and professional advancement,

and other speciﬁed injuries. American ofﬁcials also

helped to facilitate the

1952 treaty between West

Germany and the state of Israel, providing for

the transfer of

3.5 billion DM worth of money,

machinery, and other goods to assist in the resettle-

ment of Jewish refugees.

118

Even with the memory of Nazi atrocities still

fresh, many Germans objected to the idea of pay-

ing reparations. Critics decried reparations as victor’s

justice, an exercise in guilt-mongering, even as

a Jewish conspiracy against the German nation. In

the early days in particular, opponents sought to

undermine the program by imposing tight deadlines

and strict eligibility standards, including, for a time,

a requirement that victims prove that their injuries

ﬂowed from “ofﬁcially approved measures.” Entire

categories of victims were excluded from receiving

reparations, including homosexuals, communists,

and victims of the Nazi’s vast forced labor regime.

Yet even admitting these limitations, the Holocaust

programs represent the most ambitious social repair

project in history. By the time of German reuniﬁ-

cation in

1990, the government of West Germany

had dispensed some

80 billion DM in reparations,

the bulk of it to individual victims and their

survivors.

119

holocaust litigation

in american courts

Half a century after the end of World War II, the

Holocaust reparations issue was reborn in a new

venue: American courts. In

1996, a class-action law-

suit was ﬁled in federal district court in Brooklyn

against the three largest private banks in Switzer-

land, charging them, in essence, with trying to

defraud Holocaust victims and their descendants

by refusing to release assets deposited in them

prior to World War II. (Among other devices, the

banks insisted that heirs produce death certiﬁcates

for deceased account holders, a condition that was

impossible to meet in the circumstances of the

Holocaust.) Facing protracted litigation and a public

relations nightmare, the banks settled the suit for

1.25 billion. In exchange, plaintiffs agreed to drop

all future litigation against the banks, as well as the

Swiss government and other Swiss corporations.

120

Even at the time, there were some who saw the

settlement more as a victory for the banks, which

escaped future litigation for a relatively modest sum,

than for Holocaust victims, the vast majority of

whom received only token $

1,000 payments. But

the precedent had been set, and more than forty

class-action lawsuits followed, all ﬁled in American

courts against private corporations alleged to have

proﬁted from Nazi atrocities. Most of the suits

pertained to the exploitation of forced laborers,

a group excluded from previous Holocaust repara-

tions programs. At least ten million people were

compelled to work in the Nazi war machine during

World War II, including Jews (many of whom

labored in a dedicated “extermination through

work” program) as well as non-Jews. Fifty years

later, more than a million of those people survived,

as did many of the companies for which they had

labored. Some of these ﬁrms had operations in

the United States, making them vulnerable to suit

in American courts.

121

Viewed purely in legal terms, the German

cases were considerably weaker than the Swiss bank

cases. In

1999, courts in New Jersey dismissed

suits against Ford Motor Company (whose German

subsidiary had employed slave labor during World

War II), Siemens, and several other major multi-

53 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

national ﬁrms, citing the expiration of statutes

of limitations as well as terms of the treaties ending

World War II. But the barrage of bad publicity, as

well as mounting pressure from American political

leaders, prompted the companies to offer a settle-

ment. According to the terms of the eventual

agreement, German companies, with the assistance

of the German government, made a one-time pay-

ment of $

7,500 to surviving “slave” laborers, chieﬂy

Jewish survivors of the extermination-through-

work program, with smaller payment to other sur-

viving “forced” laborers, chieﬂy Eastern Europeans.

The entire settlement, including a fund for indi-

gent survivors and a small “Remembrance and Future

Fund” to promote Holocaust education, totaled

about ten billion DM ($

5 billion). In exchange,

German companies and the German government

were guaranteed “legal peace” from any further

litigation in American courts. Appreciating the

value of such an arrangement, the government of

Austria and Austrian corporations immediately

offered a forced-labor settlement of their own, val-

ued at $

500 million, or one-tenth of the value of

the German settlement.

122

limits of litigation

We shall return to the Holocaust reparations liti-

gation, which served as the direct inspiration and

model for a series of class-action lawsuits brought

in the early

2000s by African Americans seeking

reparations from American corporations alleged to

have proﬁted from slavery and the slave trade. In

the present context, the Holocaust example is use-

ful for illuminating the possibilities and pitfalls of

litigation as a vehicle for pursuing reparations

claims. As the Swiss and German suits showed, lit-

igation often generates publicity, raising awareness

of an injustice and increasing public pressure for

action. Being linked to atrocious crimes can also

be embarrassing to corporations, perhaps inducing

them to settle. Should defendants refuse to settle,

however, the impediments to successful repara-

tions litigation are enormous, at least in American

courts. As several of the speakers invited to Brown

by the steering committee noted, reparations law-

suits, whether directed against the federal govern-

ment or private corporations, face a host of proce-

dural hurdles before they can even be heard on the

merits, including the government’s sovereign

immunity from suit, expired statutes of limitations,

problems of establishing standing and a justiciable

case (essentially the need to establish a link

between a speciﬁc injury in the past and a speciﬁc

plaintiff in the present), and the so-called “political

questions” doctrine (the idea, ﬁrst articulated by

John Marshall in the

1820s, that courts have no

business intervening in matters properly belonging

to the legislature). Some of these obstacles might

be overcome: Congress has the authority to waive

sovereign immunity and extend statutes of limita-

tions; courts can be more or less strict in interpret-

ing standing or the meaning of political questions.

But in the present political circumstances, it is very

difﬁcult to imagine lawsuits seeking reparations for

slavery or other historical injustices making any

headway in American courts.

Some of the scholars invited by the steering

committee went further, questioning not just the

practicality but also the wisdom of using litigation as

the medium for confronting questions of historical

injustice and social repair. While acknowledging

54 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Some speakers questioned not only the

practicality but also the wisdom of pursuing

historical redress through litigation.

While acknowledging that reparations

suits are often ﬁled as a last resort, these

speakers suggested that courts of law,

with the inherently adversarial structure,

their focus on past injuries, and their

narrow conceptions of “injury” and “settle-

ment,” are precisely the wrong venue for

promoting reconciliation and a better future.

that reparations suits are often ﬁled as a last resort,

these speakers suggested that courts of law, with

their inherently adversarial structure, their focus

on past injuries, and their narrow conceptions of

“injury” and “settlement,” are precisely the wrong

venue for promoting reconciliation and a better

future. Not only does litigation risk pulling people

into the “one-time payment trap,” but it also cre-

ates no opportunity for dialogue, for the descen-

dants of victims and of perpetrators to exchange

perspectives and to develop shared understandings

of their past experience and present predicament.

Such speakers were certainly not disavowing repa-

rations per se, or the moral and political urgency

of confronting legacies of injustice, but rather

attempting to move a debate currently waged on

narrowly legalistic grounds onto the broader ter-

rain of history, memory, and moral obligation.

123

reparations claims and

the passage of time

Every exercise in retrospective justice is unique, as

are the horrors that prompt it. Yet great historical

crimes have at least one thing in common: All

direct participants, both perpetrators and victims,

eventually die. Their passing raises one ﬁnal, thorny

set of questions. What happens to reparations

claims with the passage of time? Are the descendants

of victims of gross human rights abuse ever enti-

tled to redress (as they would be, say, in the case of

a stolen painting) or do all such claims die with the

original victim? Is the responsibility to make repa-

ration ever handed down, or is that obligation also

expunged after one generation? What about crimes

– such as slavery and the transatlantic slave trade –

that produced great wealth? Are the descendants

of those responsible free to enjoy the fruits of injus-

tice simply because they took no part in the origi-

nal offense? All of these questions have both legal

and ethical dimensions. They also have obvious

relevance to the current American debate over repa-

rations for slavery, an institution that ended in the

United States before all currently living Americans

were born.

If recent public opinion polls are any guide,

a large majority of Americans, or at least of white

Americans, are extremely skeptical of historical

claims, insisting that only those who directly per-

petrated an injustice can be held responsible for it

and that only those who directly experienced the

injustice have a right to reparation. This standard

has the virtue of clarity. As vexed as reparations

claims involving living victims can be, the con-

ceptual and practical problems presented by multi-

generational cases are far greater. Specifying the

nature of the injury; determining the appropriate

form of reparation; establishing the boundaries

of the class of eligible recipients: All these prob-

lems and more escalate as the original offense

becomes more remote in time. But there are also

obvious problems with limiting one’s moral and

political concern to “current” injustices. Not only

does such a standard ignore the profound and

lasting legacies of crimes against humanity – an

issue to which we shall return – but it also invites

societies emerging from atrocious pasts to tempo-

rize, to delay confronting historical injustice until

all victims and perpetrators have passed away, at

which point it becomes “too late” to act. Consider

again those Korean “comfort women,” doggedly

55 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

As vexed as reparations claims involving

living victims can be, the conceptual

and practical problems presented by multi-

generational cases are far greater. But

there are also obvious problems with

limiting one’s moral and political concern

to “current” injustices. Not only does

such a standard ignore the profound and

lasting legacies of crimes against humanity,

but it also invites societies emerging

from atrocious pasts to temporize.

insisting on their rights to an unequivocal apology

and state-funded reparations from the government

of Japan for the horrors they experienced during

World War II. These people are the direct victims

of atrocious crimes. But the people upon whom

their demands fall – the current government and

population of Japan – are not, except in a tiny

number of cases, direct perpetrators. Indeed, the

vast majority of Japanese people were not yet born

when the offenses occurred. Does this fact absolve

them of all moral obligation? Will delaying

another decade or two, until all the women are

dead, absolve them?

time, responsibility, and

the ‘immigrant problem’

Such questions turn not only on the meaning of

time but also on our understanding of the nature

of responsibility. As several speakers noted, one

of the distinctive features of the current slavery

reparations controversy in the United States, par-

ticularly when compared to retrospective justice

debates in other societies, is its narrowly individu-

alistic cast. Is person A responsible to pay repara-

tions? Is person B entitled to receive them? To some

extent, this reﬂects the legalistic terms in which

the debate has recently been waged, but it also

bespeaks a deeply individualistic strain in American

culture. Yet societies, even societies like the United

States, are not merely aggregations of individual

atoms colliding in space. We live in communities,

many of which began before we were born and will

continue after we die. We are members of families,

students and teachers in universities, employees

of corporations, adherents of religious organiza-

tions, members of voluntary associations, and citi-

zens and residents of cities, states, and a nation.

We draw a host of material and nonmaterial bene-

ﬁts from these afﬁliations. To study or teach at

an institution like Brown, to live in a country like

the United States, is to inherit a wealth of resources

and opportunities passed down from previous

generations. Is it so unreasonable to suggest that,

in assuming the beneﬁts of these historical legacies,

we also assume some of the burdens and responsi-

bilities attached to them?

This question also casts light on the “immi-

grant problem,” which is frequently cited in popular

discussions in the United States as an unanswer-

able objection to historical redress claims. As critics

of slavery reparations note, a majority of the peo-

ple living in America today are either immigrants

or descendants of immigrants who entered the

country after the ﬁnal abolition of slavery in

1865.

56 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

Gravestone of “Pero, an African Servant to the late

Henry Paget,” and one of four enslaved Africans to work

on the construction of the College Ediﬁce, what is today

University Hall. North Burial Ground, Providence.

What possible responsibilities can people bear for

an institution that ended before their ancestors

even arrived in the country? Yet as several visiting

speakers argued, the issue is more complicated than

it initially appears. In the ﬁrst place, immigration

and naturalization were not privileges accorded to

all. One of the very ﬁrst laws enacted after the

adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the

1790 Natu-

ralization Act, speciﬁed that only immigrants who

were “free and white” could become American

citizens. This linking of race and citizenship was a

direct outgrowth of slavery, and it persisted, for

most practical purposes, until the

1950s and ’60s.

In the second place, immigrants came to the United

States chieﬂy because of the wealth and opportu-

nity it offered – wealth and opportunity piled up by

the labors of previous generations of Americans,

including the unpaid labor of slaves. To be sure,

newly arrived immigrants endured discrimination

and hardship, but they also drew immediate and

substantial beneﬁts from these accumulated assets.

They drank from municipal water systems, walked

city streets, and sent their children to public schools,

all of which had been built by the labor and taxes

of previous generations. In accepting these beneﬁts,

they also accepted certain responsibilities. Immi-

grants were (and are) required to pay taxes on the

national debt, for example, even though that debt

was accumulated before they entered the country.

The underlying principle – that one who assumes

the beneﬁts of a legacy also assumes any attendant

liabilities – is the same whether one is an immi-

grant or a native-born American.

Whether slavery constitutes some kind of his-

torical burden or liability on the current generation

of Americans is, of course, a question on which

different people have sharply different opinions. It

is also one of the central questions in the slavery

reparations debate, to which we now turn.

57 confronting historical injustice: commparative perspectives

As we have seen, the quest for retro-

spective justice is a global phenomenon, with a host

of different groups proffering claims for some

form of acknowledgement or material consideration

for historical injuries. In the United States alone,

legislatures and courts have entertained reparations

claims from Japanese Americans interned during

World War II; indigenous Hawaiians seeking com-

pensation for lost land and sovereignty; Native

Americans seeking the return of ancestral land and

sacred relics; Korean “comfort women”; American

veterans subjected to severe abuse in Japanese pris-

oner-of-war camps during World War II; descen-

dants of victims of the Armenian genocide pursuing

unpaid insurance claims from American corpora-

tions; Jews and non-Jews compelled to work as

slave laborers by the Nazis; families of Holocaust

victims seeking the return of art work, bank deposits,

and other assets stolen during World War II; and

the families of people killed in the

9/11 terror

attacks, to name only some of the recent cases. But

the claims that have generated the most controversy

– the claims that most Americans immediately

think of when they hear the word “reparations” –

are those advanced by African Americans seeking

redress for the injuries of slavery.

124

the modern reparations debate

and brown university

While debates over reparations for slavery have a

long history in the United States, the recent

salience of the issue can be traced to the

1990s.

Inspired in part by the successes of other historical

redress movements, a growing number of African

American individuals and groups began to press

for reparations for the injuries of slavery and the

transatlantic slave trade. The resulting debate,

unfolding in legislatures, federal courts, and in the

court of public opinion, has proceeded along dis-

tinctly racial lines. Contrary to some media por-

trayals, not all African Americans advocate slavery

reparations. Many regard the idea with indifference;

some are vociferously opposed. But when surveyed

on the matter, a majority of black Americans

express support for some form of reparations for

slavery – somewhere between half and two-thirds,

depending on how the question is posed. White

Americans, in contrast, are almost unanimously

opposed – and often intensely hostile – to the idea,

particularly when the question centers on mone-

tary payments. The most systematic study, con-

ducted by scholars at Harvard and the University

of Chicago, found that just four percent of white

respondents believed that “the Federal Government

[should] pay monetary compensation to African

Americans whose ancestors were slaves.”

125

Just as Brown was an important terrain in the

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battles over

slavery and abolition, so did it ﬁnd itself thrust into

the middle of the modern slave reparations debate.

In 2001, conservative author David Horowitz placed

a paid advertisement, “Ten Ideas Why Reparations

for Slavery is a Bad Idea – and Racist Too,” in

college newspapers around the country, including

the

Brown Daily Herald. As its title suggests, the

advertisement offered a series of arguments against

reparations: that black as well as white Americans

had beneﬁted economically from slavery; that

reparations had already been paid in the form of

58 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Confronting Slavery’s Legacy:

The Reparations Question

“welfare beneﬁts and racial preferences”; that “most

Americans have no connection (direct or indirect)

to slavery”; that the continuing “hardships” of

some African Americans were a “result of failures

of individual character rather than the after-effects

of racial discrimination and a slave system that

ceased to exist well over a century ago.” The appear-

ance of the advertisement provoked controversy

on several college campuses, nowhere more than

at Brown, where a group of student protestors

demanded that the

Herald print a retraction or at

least relinquish the money it had received to run the

ad. When the editors refused, some of the protes-

tors stole an entire day’s press run of the paper.

The papers were later returned, but the story of

the theft appeared in newspapers all across the

United States, often accompanied by editorials pil-

lorying Brown for its failure to protect the free

exchange of ideas. Among the newspapers chiding

the University was the

New York Times, which

noted that “overlooked in much of the uproar over

[the

Herald’s] publication of the advertisement is

the deeper national debate on reparations over

slavery, which could have found fertile ground for

discussion on this campus.”

126

The issue resurfaced at Brown in 2002, with

the ﬁling of the ﬁrst in a series of class-action law-

suits by descendants of African American slaves

seeking monetary damages from private corpora-

tions alleged to have proﬁted from slavery and the

slave trade. As fate would have it, the ﬁrst defen-

dant in the ﬁrst suit was FleetBoston, a bank

whose lineage traces back to the Providence Bank,

founded by the four Brown brothers in

1791.

While Brown was not a named party in the action,

it was mentioned (along with Harvard) in the nar-

rative portion of the complaint as an example of a

wealthy institution with assets derived from slavery

and the slave trade. A few days later, Harvard Uni-

versity Law Professor Charles Ogletree, chair of a

recently-established Reparations Coordinating

Committee, published an opinion essay in the

New

York Times

announcing that Brown, Yale, and Har-

vard were all “probable targets” of a lawsuit to be

ﬁled by his organization later that year.

127

The threatened lawsuit was never ﬁled. As for

the other suits, federal courts have dismissed virtu-

ally all of them on various procedural grounds.

At this writing, there seems to be little chance that

federal courts will entertain slavery reparations

claims. But this outcome was not clear when the

steering committee began its work, which doubt-

less accounts for some of the public interest

aroused by news of the committee’s appointment.

reparations in historical perspective

In keeping with its charge from President Sim-

mons, the steering committee devoted a great deal

of attention to the slavery reparations issue. We

organized several programs on the topic, hosting

public addresses by prominent supporters and crit-

ics of reparations, as well as by scholars studying

the issue’s legal, theological, political, and philo-

sophical underpinnings. Our goal, again in keep-

ing with our charge, was not to resolve the issue

but rather to “provide factual information and crit-

ical perspectives” to enrich discussion of the issue

on our campus and in the nation as a whole. As

our research proceeded, we became particularly

interested in the historical roots of the reparations

issue, a context that is almost completely ignored

59 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

The theft of the newspapers by student protestors was widely

cited in the national media as evidence of Brown’s failure

to nurture the free exchange of ideas. Among the newspapers

chiding the University was the

New York Times, which noted

that “overlooked in much of the uproar over [the

Herald’s]

publication of the advertisement is the deeper national debate

on reparations over slavery, which could have found fertile

ground for discussion on this campus.”

in the current controversy. What actually hap-

pened when slavery was abolished, ﬁrst in north-

ern states like Rhode Island and later in the Amer-

ican South? What burdens did slavery impose –

not simply on the formerly enslaved, but on the

nation as a whole – and what attempts were made

to alleviate them? What forms have demands for

redress taken at different times, and what

responses have they elicited? In short, where did

the reparations issue come from?

Probably the most striking thing that our

investigation revealed was just how long the debate

has raged. In both the North and the South, the

post-emancipation years saw widespread acknowl-

edgement of slavery’s terrible legacy, as well as a

variety of proposals for remedying it, from the col-

onization of black people beyond the borders of

the United States to programs of land redistribu-

tion and publicly-funded education. A few such

programs were begun. But in the end, very little

was done to compensate the newly free for their

years of unremunerated toil and still less to bridge

the racial chasm that slavery had carved in the

nation. On the contrary, the years after abolition

saw an intensiﬁcation of white racist attitudes,

accompanied by the enactment of policies designed

to ensure continued black subordination and to

perpetuate the economic disparities inherited from

slavery. What bearing this history has on current

reparations demands is an issue on which different

readers will draw different conclusions, but it cer-

tainly deserves to be entered into the debate.

reparations arguments in

the eighteenth century

Surely the most common misconception about the

slavery reparations issue is that it is new – a “scam”

(in the words of a recent

Providence Journal edito-

rial) “devised by trial lawyers to keep the victim

industry humming and themselves rich.” In fact,

the debate reaches back to the eighteenth century,

with Providence as one of the main theaters. The

Quakers who spearheaded the anti-slavery move-

ment in Rhode Island were virtually unanimous in

insisting that manumitted slaves were entitled to

reparations from their masters, ﬁnding warrant in

Scripture (particularly the Book of Deuteronomy,

which enjoins masters to share their estates with

former slaves as a show of respect and apprecia-

tion) as well as in the demands of plain justice. If

holding another person in slavery was sinful, the

Quakers reckoned, then surely perpetrators should

atone for the offense by offering some kind of

amends to their victims. Moses Brown had not yet

been formally admitted to Quaker meeting when

he manumitted his slaves in

1773, but he recog-

nized this obligation, providing his former slaves

with access to land and a promise of education for

their children.

128

In 1783, the Massachusetts legislature enter-

tained one of the earliest extant reparations petitions.

The appellant was an aged African-born woman

named Belinda, who sought a small portion of the

estate of her erstwhile master, Isaac Royall. A

British loyalist, Royall had ﬂed Massachusetts

shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord.

His property was conﬁscated by the legislature,

and Belinda, who had served him for forty years,

became free. But she was old and without any means

to provide for herself and her invalid daughter,

forcing her to turn to the state. While the petition’s

authorship is unclear – other sources suggest that

Belinda was illiterate – there is no doubting the

power of the words, which traced her life from her

capture in Africa to her current plight, in which,

“by the very laws of the land, [she] is denied one

morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath

60 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

And when thou sendest him out free from thee,

thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt

furnish him liberally out of thy ﬂock, and out

of thy ﬂoor, and out of thy winepress: of that

wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee

thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remem-

ber that thou wast a bondman in the land of

Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee:

therefore I command thee this thing to day.

Deuteronomy 15: 13-15

been accumulated by her own industry, and the

whole augmented by her servitude.” Whether

motivated by sympathy, principle, or the pleasure

of disbursing the estate of a disgraced Loyalist, the

Massachusetts legislature awarded Belinda and her

daughter a £

15 annual pension, though it is

unclear how long the payments were made.

129

freedom dues and the problem

of gradual abolition

The idea that former slaves were entitled to repa-

rations would not have seemed outlandish to most

eighteenth-century Americans. In a society in

which individual towns were responsible for the

indigent, it was customary to provide the newly

free with some form of provision to ensure that

they did not become “chargeable” to the public.

Apprentices acquired marketable skills as well as

an elementary education. Indentured servants

received “freedom dues” upon the end of their

terms, typically land and a suit of clothes, to mark

their new status. The question, put simply, was

whether black people emerging into freedom

would receive similar consideration. The problem

was complicated, in Rhode Island and in most

other northern states, by the nature of the gradual

abolition process. Rhode Island’s abolition law

freed no one, but merely speciﬁed that individuals

born in the state after March

1, 1784, would be

free. The issue of slavery reparations was thus

entangled with the immediate question of provid-

ing for the maintenance of small children whose

parents, or at least mothers, were still enslaved.

The Rhode Island legislature recognized the

problem, and debated how to address it. In the

original Gradual Abolition Act, infants were left in

the care of their mothers, while the responsibility

for supporting them was placed on individual

towns. This responsibility included a publicly-

funded education. In a passage that clearly bore

the imprint of Moses Brown, the act speciﬁed that

“such Children be educated in the Principles of

Morality and Religion, and instructed in reading,

writing, and Arithmetic” – a promise that rou-

tinely appeared in indenture agreements involving

white children, but that had never previously been

applied to black children. A year later, however,

the legislature amended the law, after towns

protested that providing “Support and Education”

to the children of slaves was “extremely burthen-

some.” The new act shifted the onus back onto

individual masters, who became responsible for

the upkeep of their female slaves’ freeborn chil-

dren. To compensate the masters for assuming

these costs, as well as for the loss of valuable prop-

erty, the amended law required such children to

serve their mothers’ owners – in effect, to serve as

slaves – for terms of twenty-one years. The

amended law said nothing about compensating or

educating the newly free. The promise of publicly-

funded education simply fell away.

130

after slavery: free people of color

in rhode island

In the end, Rhode Island’s newly free received

nothing, entering society not as independent citi-

zens but as quasi-slaves, members of an impover-

ished and degraded class. A kind of self-fulﬁlling

cycle was created, with blacks’ degraded condition

offering seeming proof of prevailing assumptions

about their innate inferiority and dependence, thus

justifying continued discrimination against them.

Racial lines hardened. Free people of color faced

exclusion from public facilities and all but the most

menial jobs. They were subject to a nightly curfew,

enforced by white patrols, and required to “bind

out” their children as apprentices, as insurance

against “idleness.” In

1798, the Rhode Island legis-

lature, alarmed by an apparent increase in the free

61 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

The 1784 Rhode Island Gradual Abolition Law speciﬁed

that the children of slaves were to be “instructed in reading,

writing, and Arithmetic” at public expense. A year later,

however, the legislature amended the law, after towns

protested that providing “Support and Education” to the

children of slaves was “extremely burthensome.”

black population, made it more difﬁcult for mas-

ters to free their slaves, while also increasing the

penalties for anyone caught abetting fugitives.

Another law, passed the same year, prohibited the

marriage of “any white person with any Negro,

Indian, or mulatto.” (The law apparently did not

prevent sexual congress across the color line, since

two years later the legislature barred black women,

free or slave, from bringing paternity suits against

white men.) Rhode Island was also one of two

New England states to racialize the franchise. In

1822, a six-person committee of the legislature

(including ﬁve Brown alumni and two members of

the Brown Corporation) inserted the word “white”

into the state’s voting laws, disfranchising even the

small number of black men who met the property

qualiﬁcation.

131

In Rhode Island, as elsewhere, the impulse to

exclude free black people existed in counterpoint

with the impulse to control them. During slavery,

most black people lived in or near their masters’

homes, ensuring close supervision. The emergence

of distinct black neighborhoods after emancipation

generated great anxiety among whites, who saw

such districts as dangerously disorderly, vice-ridden

places. The result, in cities all across the North,

was a wave of “race riots” – essentially pogroms,

in which white mobs rampaged through black neigh-

borho

ods, burning buildings and beating inhabi-

tants. Providence experienced two such riots. Hard-

scrabble, an aptly named black neighborhood,

was attacked by a mob in

1824. Snow Town was

razed seven years later. Victims of the attacks were

not compensated for their losses, nor were the

perpetrators punished for their crimes. The Hard-

scrabble rioters were prosecuted, but they escaped

with acquittals or token sentences after a rousing

speech by their defense attorney, Joseph Tillinghast,

a Brown alumnus and future member of the Brown

Corporation, who compared the destroyed neigh-

borhood to “ancient Babylon,” with its “graven

images” and “idolatrous rites and sacriﬁces.” Hard-

scrabble, Tillinghast declared, was a “nuisance”

and “sink of vice” whose destruction was a “beneﬁt

to the morals of the community.”

132

62 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Bobalition’ broadside,

New England, ca.

1830. A common form

of racist caracature,

such broadsides mocked

black pretensions to

freedom and citizen-

ship.

‘

63 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Broadside, ca.1824, ridiculing victims of

the Hardscrabble riot and promising the same

to other black people settling in the city.

black rhode islanders and

the quest for education

Black Rhode Islanders did not simply submit to

this regime. They created businesses, organized

churches and benevolent societies, and defended their

right to urban space. The Hardscrabble riot, for

example, was sparked by a group of black men refus-

ing to cede the sidewalk to a group of approaching

whites. Above all, they sought education. Denied

the publicly-funded education pledged in the orig-

inal act of abolition and excluded from most private

academies, blacks in Providence launched a sub-

scription campaign to build a school of their own.

The fruit of their efforts was the “African Union

Meeting and School-House,” which opened in

1821,

on land donated by Moses Brown.

133

After decades of petitions and proposals, the

Rhode Island state legislature ﬁnally created a sys-

tem of public education in

1828. But the system

was racially segregated, with blacks in Providence

conﬁned to a single overcrowded school offering

only elementary instruction. The segregated system

persisted until the late

1850s, when black citizens,

inspired by successful litigation in neighboring

Massachusetts, launched a campaign to integrate

public schools. In

1858 and ’59, as the nation tum-

bled toward civil war, the politics of Rhode Island

were consumed by the debate, the terms of which

eerily anticipated the struggle over integrating

southern schools a century later. While proponents

of integration spoke of the principles of democracy

and the beneﬁts of mingling “different classes of

children,” their more numerous opponents dismissed

the proposal as the work of irresponsible “new

comers and agitators.” Integrationists “would see

our public schools quite broken up, and our means

of public education quite destroyed, rather than

that one little nigger boy should be compelled to

go to the school that has been assigned to him,”

the editors of the

Providence Journal opined. “Nor

is it proper,” they added in a subsequent editorial,

“that our public education, supported at such great

cost, should be made subordinate to any theories

of a social equality that does not exist and never has

existed...[S]eparation of the negro children from

the white children...is best for both.”

134

abolishing southern slavery, 1862-65

The struggles over the meaning of black freedom

in Rhode Island and other northern states would be

repeated, in different terms and on a vastly greater

scale, in the American South. Southern slavery

did not end through gradualist legislation but in

the context of civil war. In April

1862, a year after

the commencement of hostilities, the U.S. Con-

gress passed the Compensated Emancipation Act,

abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.

The compensation referred to in the title went not

to the newly free but to their former owners, who

received, on average, $

300 from the federal govern-

ment for each emancipated slave. Six months later,

President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary

Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on

January 1, 1863. As numerous historians have noted,

the proclamation freed no one immediately; its

provisions applied only to regions still in rebellion,

leaving slavery intact in the border states and other

areas under Union occupation. Even so, the proc-

lamation radically altered the character of the

war, transforming the advancing Union Army into

64 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

In 1858 and ’59, as the nation tumbled

toward civil war, the politics of Rhode

Island were consumed by the debate over

integrating public schools. The terms

of the debate eerily anticipated the struggle

over southern integration a century later,

with proponents of integration speaking

of beneﬁts of mingling “different classes of

children” and their more numerous

opponents dismissing the idea as the work

of irresponsible “new comers and agitators.”

an army of liberation. The proclamation also

included provisions for enlisting black soldiers,

nearly a quarter million of whom eventually served

in Union forces, further consolidating black claims

to freedom and citizenship. With the ratiﬁcation

of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Consti-

tution in December

1865, slavery in the United

States was formally abolished, and four million men,

women, and children became free.

135

reconstruction and

the reparations question

The Civil War was followed by the era of Recon-

struction. While much about the period is disputed,

certain facts are clear. In the immediate aftermath

of the war, southern legislatures, still dominated by

the old planter class, sought to recreate slavery by

other means, imposing curfews, vagrancy statutes,

and other “Black Codes” designed to restrict the

physical and economic mobility of the newly free.

This period was followed, from

1866 to 1876,

by Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction, which

saw an attempt to extend basic rights of citizenship

to African Americans. These years were high-

lighted by the adoption of two more amendments

to the U.S. Constitution: the Fourteenth Amend-

ment, which barred states from discriminating on

the grounds of race, color, or prior condition

of servitude; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which

prohibited states from imposing racially-based

restrictions on voting. Over the next few years,

southern blacks entered the political system, voting

and serving in public ofﬁce, including in the U.S.

House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The

enfranchisement of African Americans generated

bitter controversy. As in the post-emancipation

North, the racial ideas forged in the crucible of

slavery did not simply disappear with abolition; on

the contrary, they became sharper, as white south-

erners found themselves forced to compete eco-

nomically and politically with their former bonds-

men. The result was a concerted campaign of

violence and intimidation, culminating in the restora-

tion

of avowedly white supremacist regimes in all

of the southern states. With the withdrawal of fed-

eral troops from the South in

1877, the Recon-

struction experiment was essentially over.

136

Though the term “reparations” was rarely, if

ever, used, emancipation triggered a wide-ranging

debate over how and whether to provide for the

newly free, a debate that began while the war was

still going on and continued even after the collapse

of Reconstruction. For some, including Abraham

Lincoln for a time, the solution appeared to lie

in government-subsidized colonization. Convinced

that white southerners would never accept their

former slaves as political equals, colonizationists

argued that it was in black people’s own interests to

leave America and start afresh in a country of their

own. Others insisted that African Americans had

a fundamental right to remain in the United States,

sharing in the wealth and opportunity that their

unpaid labor had helped to create. A few argued that

freedpeople were entitled to receive back wages for

their years in slavery, offering various calculations

of the amount due. At least one freedman sent

a bill to his former owner for his years of unpaid

labor. In the end, however, the reparations debate

after the Civil War came to focus on land – the

proverbial “forty acres and a mule.”

137

forty acres and a mule

Few phrases in American history evoke such pas-

sion – or such disparate understandings – as forty

acres and a mule. For many whites, at the time

and still today, the idea of the federal government

handing out land to freedpeople was and is a hare-

brained notion – “the Negroes’ forty acre delusion,”

to quote one historian. For many African Ameri-

cans, on the other hand, the granting of forty acres

of land was a solemn promise on which the nation

has yet to make good. Not surprisingly, the issue

looms large in the modern slavery reparations move-

ment. Plaintiffs in several prominent reparations

65 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

suits have cited the promise of forty acres as the

basis for tort action or for calculating the damages

due to African Americans. (The most generous

calculation, based on average southern land values

1865 and six percent interest per annum, puts

the current value of forty acres at about $

1.5 mil-

lion.) The power of the idea is also apparent in the

designation of H.R.

40, a bill proposed by Con-

gressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) to convene a

national commission to study slavery and its legacy

and to make recom-

mendations to Con-

gress on appropriate

remedies. Originally

introduced as H.R.

3745, the bill was

later renamed H.R.

40 to link it with the

historic claim to forty

acres.

138

Today, as at the

time, the status of the

forty-acre claim rests

on the meaning of a

series of laws and

orders promulgated

during and immedi-

ately after the Civil

War. In

1862, shortly

after the war began, Congress passed an act per-

mitting the U.S. government to conﬁscate the

property of those who had taken up arms against it.

Most of the subsequent controversy over land

redistribution centered on such property. What is

often overlooked in discussions today is the fact

that the bill authorized conﬁscation for only one

generation, in deference to the U.S. Constitution’s

prohibition of bills of attainder; after the original

owner died, title to the land was to revert to

his heirs. Similar uncertainties underlay General

Sherman’s famous Field Order #

15 of January

1865, the order from which the phrase “forty acres

and a mule” comes. Finding the mobility of his

army hampered by thousands of black refugees,

Sherman designated a swath of abandoned rebel

lands, stretching south from Charleston and thirty

miles inland from the sea, for the exclusive occu-

pation of blacks. The order, which conferred only

possessory, or temporary, title, speciﬁed that the

land be divided into homesteads not exceeding forty

acres per family, with use rights to surplus army

mules for plowing. Six weeks later, the U.S. Con-

gress gave an apparent statutory basis to Sherman’s

order when it passed the ﬁrst Freedmen’s Bureau

Act. The act empowered the newly-created bureau

to resettle former slaves (and white refugees who

had remained loyal to the Union) onto homesteads

not exceeding forty acres, granting them an exclu-

sive right to occupy the land for three years, in

exchange for a nominal rent. At the end of the term,

occupants would have an option to purchase the

land. But this bill too was ambiguous, specifying

that purchasers would receive only “such title...

as the United States can convey” – an acknowledge-

ment of Congress’s own uncertainty of its right to

dispose of the land permanently.

139

Even these tentative steps were too much for

Andrew Johnson, who acceded to the presidency

after Lincoln’s assassination. A former slaveowner,

Johnson had accepted emancipation during the

Civil War, but he was no friend to racial equality.

“This is a country for white men,” he once declared,

“and as long as I am President, it shall be a gov-

ernment for white men.” True to his word, Johnson

issued blanket pardons to former rebels and ordered

the return of conﬁscated and abandoned land to

its original owners. Black people occupying the land

were given the option of signing labor contracts

with restored white landlords or leaving. When

Congress passed a second Freedmen’s Bureau bill in

1866, extending the life of the bureau, Johnson

vetoed it, arguing that it conferred on black people

rights that the government had never granted to

“our own people.” Johnson’s veto of the bill, as well

as of the landmark 1866 Civil Rights bill, contributed

to the escalating conﬂict between the executive

and legislative branches of the government, which

culminated in the President’s impeachment and

near removal from ofﬁce. But on the issue of land

66 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Few phrases in American history evoke

such passion as “forty acres and a mule.”

For many whites, at the time and

still today, the idea of dispensing land to

freedpeople was and is a delusion. For

many African Americans, on the other

hand, the promise of forty acres of land

was a solemn pledge on which the nation

has yet to make good. Not surprisingly,

the issue looms large in the modern

slavery reparations movement.

redistribution, the President carried the day.

Congress eventually enacted a second Freedmen’s

Bureau bill (over Johnson’s veto), but the idea of

redistributing land to former slaves had disappeared.

What little land black southerners ultimately

obtained from the federal government came not

as reparations for slavery but through the opera-

tion of the

1866 Southern Homestead Act, which

opened up a portion of public lands for private

purchase, with freedmen (and loyal whites) enjoy-

ing an exclusive option for the ﬁrst six months. But

few former slaves had money to buy the land, most

of which ended up in the hands of private timber

companies.

140

Whether the facts of the postwar struggle

over land redistribution bolster the claims of advo-

cates of reparations or their opponents is a matter

of interpretation. Clearly there was widespread

debate about the issue. Radical Republicans like

Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, and Charles

Sumner warned that, without a thoroughgoing

change in southern land titles, the old master class

would retain political power and freedpeople

would remain in a position of abject dependence.

Others warned that redistributing land would

itself breed dependency, teaching the freedpeople

to rely on federal largesse rather than on their own

industry. Still others opposed land redistribution

precisely to ensure continued black dependency.

If black people were given land, one Pennsylvania

senator asked, “Who would black boots and curry

the horses, who would do the menial ofﬁces of the

world?” As for the freedpeople themselves, most

assumed that the land they had been allotted under

Field Order #

15 and later under the ﬁrst Freed-

men’s Bureau Act would be theirs in perpetuity,

and the federal government’s decision to restore it

to white rebels was a shattering and bewildering

betrayal. One hundred and forty years later, the

phrase “forty acres and a mule” still carries the res-

onance of their feelings.

141

black life in the era of jim crow

The single inescapable fact is that freedpeople did

not receive land during Reconstruction. Nor did

they receive monetary compensation, access to

credit, use rights to surplus government mules, or

anything else that might have provided a material

foundation for their newly acquired civil and

political rights. In the decades that followed, they

would be dispossessed of these rights as well. By

century’s end, black southerners had been effectively

disfranchised and consigned to a rigid system of

“Jim Crow” segregation, encompassing everything

from schools and streetcars to the separate “white”

and “colored” Bibles used to swear witnesses in

southern courtrooms. The process was abetted by

a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, which nar-

rowed Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due

process and equal protection of the laws down to a

nullity while giving a constitutional seal of approval

to the various devices – poll taxes, literacy tests,

grandfather clauses, closed primaries – invented by

southern states to nullify blacks’ right to vote.

67 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

The islands from Charleston, south, the aban-

doned rice ﬁelds along the rivers for thirty miles

back from the sea, and the country bordering the

St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart

for the settlement of the negroes made free by

acts of war and the proclamation of the President

of the United States...each family shall have a

plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable

ground. . . . In order to carry out this system of

settlement, a general ofﬁcer will be detailed as

Inspector of Settlements . . . who will furnish

personally to each head of family, subject to the

approval of the President of the United States,

a possessory title in writing, giving as near as

possible a description of boundaries; and who shall

adjust all claims or conﬂicts that may arise under

the same, subject to the like approval, treating

such titles altogether as possessory . . .

Field Order 15, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman,

January 16, 1865

Ultimately it would take nearly a century, until the

1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act,

for African Americans to reclaim the rights they

had brieﬂy enjoyed during Reconstruction.

142

The character of

the political and eco-

nomic regime that

emerged during the

Jim Crow era was

starkly revealed in

convict leasing, one

of the signatures of

the “New South”

criminal justice sys-

tem. Under the

system, the roots of

which traced back to

slavery, black male

prisoners were leased

out as forced laborers.

The prisoners, many of whom had been arrested

for vagrancy or other petty crimes, worked not

only on roads and other public works but also in

private enterprises, including farms, mines, and

factories. Numerous historians have documented the

substantial proﬁts that ﬂowed to the system’s oper-

ators, as well as the brutal treatment meted out

to leased black convicts, many of whom died before

completing their sentences.

143

White supremacy was reinforced by other,

less dramatic forms of social control, ranging from

cultural practices such as “coon songs” and black-

face minstrelsy to scholarly treatises in emerging

disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.

Social Darwinism, the signature ideology of the

late nineteenth century, gave a seemingly scientiﬁc

imprimatur to stereotypes of blacks as an “unﬁt”

racial stock, incapable of bearing the responsibilities

of citizenship. Drawing on what was later shown

to be specious census data, many scholars predicted

that African Americans would soon become extinct.

Incapable of surviving as free people in a competi-

tive economy, black people in America were des-

tined to die out, just like the allegedly “vanishing

Indian.” White insurance companies used such

beliefs to justify their refusal to insure African

Americans, a practice that continued long after the

underlying arguments had been discredited.

144

lynch law and the

2005 u.s. senate apology

Black southerners resisted assaults on their freedom.

They struggled to acquire land and voted when

they could. They armed themselves, organizing

militias and Union clubs to repel nightriders.

Denied service by white banks, hotels, and insur-

ance companies, they created their own. But resist-

ance carried its own risks. Between

1880 and

1930, at least thirty-ﬁve hundred African Americans

were lynched in the United States. As Memphis

editor Ida B. Wells noted at the time, lynch mobs,

while typically justifying their actions in terms of

protecting white women from rapacious black

men, routinely targeted those who were economi-

cally successful or simply deﬁant. In virtually no

cases were perpetrators convicted of or even tried

for their crimes. Recognizing the impossibility

of securing convictions in southern courts, activists

waged a half-century campaign for a federal anti-

lynching statute, but their bills invariably failed of

passage in the U.S. Senate. It was this history that

lay behind the

2005 Senate lynching apology.

145

education and the meaning

of black freedom

If the struggle over land redistribution was the

most important arena for determining the mean-

ing of black freedom after the Civil War, then the

struggle over schooling was the second most

important. In the nineteenth century, even more

than in our own time, education was the corner-

stone of America’s democratic faith, the foundation

of cherished ideas about opportunity, meritocracy,

and mobility. It was also an arena in which the

legacy of slavery could not have been more blatant:

In most southern states, it was a crime to teach

a slave to read. As a member of the Virginia state

68 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

While Radical Republicans promoted land

redistribution as the only way to guarantee

the economic independence of the newly

free, others opposed it precisely to ensure

continued black dependency. If black

people were given land, one Pennsylvania

senator asked, “Who would black boots

and curry the horses, who would do the

menial ofﬁces of the world?”

legislature declared in 1832: “We have, as far as pos-

sible, closed every avenue by which light can enter.

If we could extinguish the capacity to see light,

our work would be completed; they would then be

on a level with the beasts of the ﬁeld, and we should

be safe.”

146

With the coming of emancipation, many peo-

ple, black and white, saw education as the best

means to repair the damage of slavery and prepare

the newly free for the full enjoyment of their

rights as citizens. Even before the war was over,

northern teachers and missionaries had begun ﬂock-

ing south in what W.E.B. Du Bois later dubbed

“the crusade of the New England schoolm’am.”

Hundreds of schools were opened across the region,

some by black people themselves, others under the

auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau or reconstructed

state governments. Though typically understaffed

and underfunded, these schools enabled hundreds of

thousands of African Americans, adults as well as

children, to learn to read.

147

Not everyone approved of the idea of educat-

ing freedpeople, and black schools were a frequent

target of vandals and arsonists. With the onset

of Jim Crow, education came in for renewed assault.

Though the Fourteenth Amendment prevented

southern legislatures from closing black schools

outright, such schools were rigidly segregated and

starved of resources. In contrast to the idea of

redistributing land, the idea that former slaves were

entitled to an education equal to that available to

whites persisted in Republic Party circles for more

than a generation. Three times in the

1880s Repub-

licans in the House of Representatives passed the

Blair Bill, offering states millions of dollars in

federal funds for public schools, proportionate to

their illiteracy rates – in effect, offering federal

resources to underwrite the education of southern

freedpeople. Three times Senate Democrats

refused to allow the bill to come to a vote.

148

The dream of an equal education for former

slaves was ﬁnally extinguished in

1896, with the

Supreme Court’s embrace of the doctrine of “sepa-

rate but equal” in the

Plessy v. Ferguson case. Of

course, separate facilities were never equal. Over the

next half century, white students in southern schools

routinely received ﬁve to ten times more funding

per capita than their black peers. Curricula in black

schools were canted toward “practical” subjects

like agriculture and domestic science, intended

to prepare black students for the menial positions

awaiting them. In many areas, instruction was

limited to the elementary grades, and even that was

restricted to a few months per year to ensure that

black children’s labor was available during planting

and harvesting seasons. At the time of the Supreme

Court’s

1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision,

which ﬁnally repudiated the doctrine of “separate but

equal,” only about a third of African American

children completed high school. In some southern

states, the ﬁgure was less than ten percent. In sum,

a medium that many in the

1860s had seen as

the means to repair the legacy of slavery became a

means of perpetuating that legacy for another cen-

tury and beyond.

149

african americans and

higher education: the case

of brown university

Educational inequality was even greater at the

tertiary level. The Reconstruction era saw the cre-

ation of the South’s ﬁrst black colleges, including

Howard and Fisk, both founded in

1866. But the

total number of students that these colleges could

accommodate was initially very small – typically

less than a hundred per year. The number of black

students in historically white universities was even

smaller. One needs look no further than the experi-

ence of Brown. Like many of its peer institutions,

69 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

In no arena was the legacy of slavery more blatant than in

education: In most southern states, it was a crime to teach a

slave to read. “We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue

by which light can enter,” a Virginia state legislator declared

1832. “If we could extinguish the capacity to see light,

our work would be completed; they would then be on a level

with the beasts of the ﬁeld, and we should be safe.”

Brown did not admit black students before the

Civil War, at least not knowingly. In

1877, it pro-

duced its ﬁrst two black graduates, George Wash-

ington Milford and Inman Page. Over the next

seventy years, from the end of Reconstruction

through the end of World War II, Brown graduated

about sixty more African Americans – a little less

than one black student per year. Many of these

individuals, it should be noted, went on to careers

of great distinction. Inman Page became a distin-

guished educator in the Oklahoma Territory, where

his students included the novelist Ralph Ellison.

John Hope, Class of

1894, became president of

Atlanta University. (He also became the namesake

of historian John Hope Franklin, one of the speakers

hosted by the steering committee.) Fritz Pollard,

Class of

1919, became the ﬁrst African American

coach in the National Football League. His class-

mate Rudolph Fisher was one of the great writers of

the Harlem Renaissance, though at Brown he stud-

ied medicine. J. Saunders Redding, Class of

1928,

became a distinguished author and scholar, a pio-

neer in the study of African American literature.

1949, he spent a semester as a visiting professor

at Brown, becoming the ﬁrst black member of the

University’s faculty, before returning to his position

at the historically-black Hampton Institute. At

least half a dozen other graduates became univer-

sity professors. Others became lawyers and doctors.

Yet the number of black students admitted to Brown

did not increase beyond one or two a year until

the

1950s.

150

reparations demands in

the age of jim crow

The dream of reparations for slavery did not end

with Reconstruction. The late nineteenth century

witnessed a variety of proposals. In the

1880s,

Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, a black political

leader in Georgia during Reconstruction and later

the chief apostle of the “back-to-Africa” move-

ment, argued that African Americans were owed

“forty billions of dollars for actual services ren-

dered,” a ﬁgure based on two million people earn-

ing one hundred dollars per year for two hundred

years. Turner offered to settle accounts for $

100

million, the amount he calculated was necessary to

transport all African Americans to Liberia. Little

came of the proposal, though it did receive a back-

handed endorsement from two of the U.S. Senate’s

most notorious white supremacists, Matthew

Butler of South Carolina and John Morgan of

Alabama, who in

1890 facetiously introduced a bill

to transport any African Americans unhappy in the

South to the Congo.

151

The year 1890 also saw the submission to the

U.S. Congress of an “Ex-slave Pension and Bounty

Bill.” Written by a white southerner concerned

with the plight of aged former slaves, the bill never

came up for discussion in Congress. But it did

become the unlikely foundation of the ﬁrst popu-

lar reparations movement, the National Ex-Slave

Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association,

under the leadership of a black seamstress named

Callie House. House’s twenty-year campaign to

get a slave pension bill onto the ﬂoor of Congress

proved unavailing, but her efforts were sufﬁcient

to antagonize federal ofﬁcials, who prosecuted her

for mail fraud. Though the government produced

no evidence of misconduct, she was convicted

nonetheless on grounds that her activities were

70 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

The night school has been frequently disturbed.

One evening a mob called out of the school

house, the teacher, who upon presenting himself

was confronted with four revolvers, and menac-

ing expressions of shooting him, if he did not

promise to quit the place, and close the school.

The freedmen promptly came to his aid and

the mob dispersed. About the 18th or 19th of the

month . . . a formidable disturbance took place at

the school. The same mob threatened to destroy

the school that night, and the freedmen, learning

this, assembled . . . at their place of instruction

in a condition of self-defense.

Captain C.M. Hamilton to the Ofﬁce

of the Adjutant General, 1866

prima facie fraudulent, since there

was no realistic chance that Con-

gress would enact the proposed

legislation.

152

House’s efforts also laid the

foundations of the ﬁrst slave repa-

rations lawsuit. In

1916, activists

with ties to the ex-slave pension

movement ﬁled a suit in federal

court, seeking some $

68 million

from the U.S. government, a sum

based on the revenues the govern-

ment had collected in taxes and

duties on southern cotton in the

last years of slavery. Like later

reparations suits against the fed-

eral government, the case,

Johnson v. McAdoo, was

dismissed on procedural grounds, including the

government’s sovereign immunity from suit.

153

By the time Johnson v. McAdoo was ﬁled, half

a century had passed since emancipation, and a

majority of former slaves had passed away. In decades

to come, the balance would follow. One of the last

recorded reparations claims by living survivors

of slavery came in an appeal to President Franklin

Roosevelt in

1934, during the depths of the Great

Depression. Was there “any way to consider the

old slaves,” the authors asked, some way of “giving

us pensions in payment for our long days of ser-

vitude?” The answer, as on previous occasions, was

no, but the timing of the question is noteworthy.

Just one year later, Roosevelt signed the Social

Security Act, creating the nation’s ﬁrst federal sys-

tem of old-age pensions. The act is rightly remem-

bered as the most important piece of social welfare

legislation in American history. Less frequently

noted is the fact that the system was deliberately

designed to exclude domestic and agricultural work-

ers, the two largest black employment categories,

thus ensuring that neither “the old slaves” nor mil-

lions of their descendants were eligible to receive

beneﬁts.

154

race and the making of

the welfare state

The exclusion of millions of African Americans

from participation in the Social Security system

was not mere happenstance. On the contrary, most

of the signature programs of the New Deal –

Social Security, industrial wage codes, agricultural

subsidies – were crafted in ways that directed vir-

tually all of the beneﬁts to whites. Even govern-

71 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Portrait of Inman Page by Richard

Yarde. In

1877, Page and George

Washington Milford became the

ﬁrst African Americans to graduate

from Brown University.

mental programs that were ostensibly color-blind

often operated in racially discriminatory ways.

Eligibility for Aid to Dependent Children, for

example, the primary component of what we today

call “welfare,” was determined by local administra-

tive bodies, which routinely denied black people

beneﬁts to which they were entitled, a pattern that

continued into the

1960s. The same would later

be true of the G.I. Bill, under the auspices of

which millions of returning servicemen were able

to attend college. Contrary to modern stereotypes

about blacks and welfare, the American welfare

state was a crucial element in perpetuating the

tradition of white entitlement and black exclusion

inherited from slavery and Jim Crow.

155

Nowhere was racial discrimination more

blatant or of greater long-term signiﬁcance than in

federal housing policy. Facing a record number of

home foreclosures during the Depression, the U.S.

government set out to transform the way in which

Americans were housed. The cornerstones of this

system were the Home Owners Loan Corporation,

established in

1933, and the Federal Housing

Administration, founded a year later. These two

agencies, later joined by the Veterans Administration,

essentially offered federal guarantees of private

mortgages, greatly reducing the costs, complexity,

and risks of the existing system. The policy’s object

was to make America a nation of homeowners

and it succeeded spectacularly. In the space of four

decades, some

35 million American families capi-

talized on these federal programs to add home

equity to their estates. One can scarcely overstate

the signiﬁcance of this development. In a nation in

which upward of

80 percent of wealth is accumu-

lated through intergenerational transfers, and

in which home equity represents the single largest

component of such transfers, the H.O.L.C. and

F.H.A. dramatically enhanced the life chances of

well over one hundred million Americans.

156

Virtually all of those Americans were white.

The F.H.A. and H.O.L.C. circulated color-coded

maps to real-estate agents and lenders, with black

and mixed-race neighborhoods marked in red.

Such neighborhoods were automatically classiﬁed

as economically unstable, making residents ineligi-

ble to receive federal mortgage guarantees to

purchase or repair homes. At the same time, the

F.H.A. refused to underwrite mortgages to “incom-

patible groups” – that is, to African Americans

trying to move into white neighborhoods – on the

grounds that mixing people of different “social and

racial classes” led to “instability and a reduction

in values.” The explicitly racial language was

later stricken from F.H.A. manuals, but the policy

persisted. A study by the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People found that

black people had been excluded from access to

98 percent of all F.H.A.-guaranteed mortgages be-

tween

1948 and 1961, precisely the period in which

the American suburban system was created. Only

72 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Thus in the underground of our unwritten his-

tory, much of that which is ignored deﬁes our

inattention by continuing to grow and have

consequences. . . . Perhaps if we learned more of

what has happened and why it happened, we will

learn more of who we really are, and perhaps

if we learn more about our unwritten history, we

won’t be so vulnerable to the capriciousness of

events as we are today. . . . Such individuals as

Dr. Page . . . worked, it seems to me, to such an

end. Ultimately theirs was an act of faith: faith in

themselves, faith in the potentialities of their

own people, and despite their social status as

Negroes, faith in the potentialities of the demo-

cratic ideal. Coming so soon after the betrayal

of the Reconstruction, theirs was a heroic effort.

It is my good fortune that their heroism became

my heritage, and thanks to Inman Page and

Brown University is it also now a part of the heri-

tage of all Americans who would become conscious

of who they are.

Novelist Ralph Ellison, on his former teacher Inman Page,

Brown Class of 1877, in

Going to the Territory

with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, enacted as a trib-

ute to the slain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., did

racial discrimination in mortgage provision become

illegal. By that time the racial character of America’s

cities and suburbs – and with it the racial character

of the nation’s public school system – had become

ﬁrmly entrenched.

157

civil rights, black power, and the

revival of the reparations question

The 1968 Fair Housing Act, coming on the heels

of the

1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights

Act, represented the last great legislative victory

of the Civil Rights era. In law, if not yet in practice,

African Americans had ﬁnally achieved the full

American citizenship promised a century before.

Yet

1968 was also a year of bitter disillusionment,

marked by the murder of Dr. King, the eruption of

ghetto revolts in more than a hundred American

cities, and a growing awareness of the profound

economic disparities that continued to divide black

and white Americans, notwithstanding the recent

legislative gains. As King himself famously put it,

“What good is it to sit at a lunch counter if you

can’t afford a hamburger?” The modern slave repa-

rations movement was a product of this historical

moment.

The slave reparations movement that emerged

in the late

1960s was distinguished from its prede-

cessors in at least two important respects. Most

obviously, it was a movement of descendants of slaves

rather than of the formerly enslaved themselves,

all but a handful of whom had died. It was also a

movement profoundly shaped by the contemporary

Black Power movement, with its emphasis on

black autonomy and economic empowerment and

its deep skepticism about the value of integration.

The most visible of the new reparations organiza-

tions was the Republic of New Africa, a black

nationalist organization founded in

1968 in Detroit,

site of the bloodiest of the era’s ghetto revolts.

Founded by two brothers, Gaida and Imari Obadele

(nee Milton and Richard Henry), the Republic

of New Africa demanded $

400 billion in “slavery

damages” from the U.S. government, along with

the cession of ﬁve southern states – Louisiana,

Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina

– as the territorial basis of a separate black nation.

(In the

1990s, Imari Obadele would reemerge

as the president and founder of N’COBRA, the

National Committee of Blacks for Reparations in

America.)

158

the black manifesto

Detroit was also the birthplace of the “Black Man-

ifesto.” Drafted at the National Black Economic

Development Conference, which met in the city in

1969, the manifesto was announced to the world a

short time later when a group of civil rights move-

ment veterans, led by James Forman, disrupted

services at New York’s Riverside Church to present

its demands. Addressing “the White Christian

Churches and the Jewish Synagogues in the United

States of America and All Other Racist Institu-

tions,” the manifesto demanded $

500 million “as

the beginning of the reparations due us as people

who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized,

killed, and persecuted.” It went on to specify the

uses to which the fund would be put, including the

establishment of a southern land bank, the creation

of black publishing houses and television networks,

a strike fund for black workers, and the founding

of a black university. While authors of the Black

Manifesto did not envision a separate black nation,

as leaders of the Republic of New Africa did, their

73 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Was there “any way to consider the old slaves,” the authors

of the appeal asked the President, some way of “giving us

pensions in payment for our long days of servitude?”

The answer, as on previous occasions, was no, but the timing

is noteworthy. One year later, Roosevelt signed legislation

creating the Social Security system – a system from which

agricultural and domestic workers, the two largest black

employment categories, were excluded.

proposals were clearly intended to enhance black

autonomy and self-determination.

159

The Black Manifesto provoked a brief ﬂurry

of media comment, much of it condemning the dis-

ruptive tactics employed by Forman and his com-

rades. The substance of the appeal was largely

ignored, or at best dismissed as hopelessly quixotic.

“[T]here is neither wealth nor wisdom enough

in the world to compensate in money for all the

wrongs in history,” the New York Times editorialized.

The manifesto generated more sustained discus-

sion in academic circles, including among legal

scholars. Probably the most authoritative examina-

tion of the issue was

The Case for Black Reparations

by Boris Bittker, the Sterling Professor of Law at

Yale. By his own account, Bittker began his research

as a skeptic, and he emerged convinced that the

legal obstacles to slavery reparations claims were

indeed all but insurmountable, particularly when cast

in terms of individual payments. But he also con-

cluded that a compelling case for collective repara-

tions could be made for the injuries of Jim Crow,

especially for the long denial of equal education.

To “concentrate on slavery,” he wrote, “is to under-

state the case for compensation, so much so that

one might almost suspect that the distant past is

serving to suppress the ugly facts of the recent past

and of contemporary life.” For better or worse,

few reparations advocates have attended to Bittker’s

observation.

160

The slavery reparations issue continued to

bubble through the

1970s and ’80s, chieﬂy in black

nationalist circles. In the late

1980s and early 1990s,

the issue burst back into national prominence,

attracting unprecedented interest and support. To

some extent, this revival was a response to the pro-

liferation of retrospective justice movements and

claims in the United States and around the world.

But it also reﬂected the speciﬁc circumstances of

black America, including widespread anger and frus-

tration at the conservative turn in American politics.

With ebbing support for civil rights legislation,

federal courts increasingly unreceptive to racial

discrimination claims, and afﬁrmative action under

political and legal assault, some African Americans

concluded that reparations were the only means

left to address the persistent racial inequalities

plaguing American society. “Afﬁrmative action for

Black Americans as a form of remediation for per-

petuation of past injustice is almost dead,” wrote

legal scholar Robert Westley in an inﬂuential article.

The time had come to “revitalize the discussion

of reparations.”

161

the 1988 civil liberties act

African American interest in the reparations issue

also received an enormous boost from the

1988

Civil Liberties Act, which granted a formal apology

and monetary reparations of $

20,000 to Japanese

Americans interned during World War II. Given the

salience of the Japanese-American case in the

reparations debate, it is worth brieﬂy examining the

act. Aside from a

1948 law providing token com-

pensation to some internees for lost property, the

internment was little discussed in the decades after

the war. Former internees themselves often buried

the experience, regarding it as a source of shame

and embarrassment. The daughter of Fred Kore-

matsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent

who had taken a case to the Supreme Court in

1944

in a vain effort to stop the internment, learned

about her father’s experience only after stumbling

74 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

The slavery reparations movement that

emerged in the late

1960s was distinguished

from its predecessors in at least two

important respects. Most obviously, it was

a movement of descendants of slaves rather

than of the formerly enslaved themselves,

all but a handful of whom had died. It was

also a movement profoundly shaped by

the contemporary Black Power movement,

with its emphasis on black autonomy and

economic empowerment.

across a reference to the case in her high school his-

tory textbook. Her father had never mentioned it.

162

After decades of silence, a broad redress move-

ment emerged in the

1970s and ’80s. While surviv-

ing internees were well represented in the move-

ment, much of the impetus came from younger

Japanese Americans seeking acknowledgement of

the injuries endured by their aging parents and

grandparents. The movement drew strength from

new research on the internment by scholars work-

ing in the emerging ﬁeld of Asian American studies.

Its inﬂuence was further enhanced by the presence

in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives

of individuals who had been directly touched by

wartime events, including two who were interned

and two who fought in the U.S. Army as members

of a highly decorated Japanese-American regi-

ment. The movement achieved an early victory in

1976, when President Gerald Ford formally apolo-

gized for the government’s action, but organizers

pressed for more. While some pursued reparations

through class-action litigation (the case,

Hohri v.

United States

, was eventually dismissed on statute-of-

limitations and other procedural grounds), others

followed the legislative route, securing the passage

of a law appointing a national commission to

investigate the history of the episode and to recom-

mend appropriate remedies. The outcome of the

process was the Civil Liberties Act, signed into law

by President Ronald Reagan.

163

the japanese-american case as a

precedent for slavery reparations

Whether the Civil Liberties Act represents a

precedent for slavery reparations is questionable.

Most obviously, the act paid reparations only to

surviving internees, not to their descendants. The

authors of the Civil Liberties Act were also careful

to present the internment not as an injury to a par-

ticular group but as a constitutional violation that

had injured the entire nation. This strategy was

apparent not only in the act’s title, which made no

mention of Japanese Americans, but also in the

75 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Final pages of the

Sally’s account book.

opening section, which described the bill as an effort

to “discourage the occurrence of similar injustices

and violations of civil liberties in the future; and

make more credible and sincere any declaration

of concern by the United States over violations of

human rights committed by other nations.” Finally,

the bill included a rider, attached by Senator Jesse

Helms, explicitly “to preclude...this legislation

from being used as a precedent in the courts

or elsewhere to give precedent or standing to any

future claims on the part of...any other citizen or

group claiming to have been dealt an injustice

by the American Government at some time in the

past.” (Helms proposed another amendment, not

adopted by his colleagues, withholding all pay-

ments until the government of Japan had compen-

sated families of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor,

a proposal that precisely recapitulated the racist

logic of the original internment.)

164

Whatever the relevance of the Civil Liberties

Act to slavery redress, it was certainly embraced as

a precedent by reparations advocates. If nothing

else, the law showed that it was possible for the

American nation to confront an historical injustice

in a serious way, to apologize publicly for it, and to

offer material amends. The act unleashed a torrent

of articles in magazines and law reviews, reexamin-

ing slavery reparations claims in the context of the

Japanese-American case. Its inﬂuence was also

manifest in H.R.

40, introduced by Congressman

John Conyers in April

1989. Conyers’s bill called for

the appointment of a nonpartisan commission

“to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent

de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimina-

tion against African Americans, and the impact of

those forces on living African Americans,” and to

recommend remedies to Congress – a formulation

almost identical to the language of the bill that

established the internment commission. (Although

Conyers has regularly reintroduced the bill, he has

yet to muster the votes to move it from committee

onto the ﬂoor of the House.)

165

seeking reparations

through litigation

While the Civil Liberties Act and H.R. 40 exem-

plify the pursuit of reparations through the legisla-

ture, others pursued reparations through courts.

Berry v. United States and Cato v. United States, ﬁled

in California in

1994 and 1995, respectively, both

sought reparations for slavery from the federal

government. The two cases based their claims on

different legal theories. Berry referenced the promise

of forty acres of land during Reconstruction, and

sought forty acres in compensatory damages.

(The acreage speciﬁed in the suit included most of

downtown San Francisco.) Cato sought monetary

damages for the crime of slavery itself, including

“kidnapping of ancestors from Africa” and “forced

ancestral indoctrination into a foreign society.” In

the end, neither theory was tested. Both cases were

dismissed on procedural grounds, including the

sovereign immunity of the federal government from

lawsuits, the failure of plaintiffs to establish legally

actionable harms, and the political questions

doctrine.

166

A second batch of reparations cases was ﬁled

in the early

2000s, targeting not the federal gov-

ernment but corporations alleged to have proﬁted

from slavery, the slave trade, and slave-related

industries. The cases were clearly inspired by

recent settlements in class-action suits brought by

Holocaust victims and their descendants against

Swiss banks and German corporations complicit in

Nazi forced-labor practices; indeed, some of the

lawyers who ﬁled slavery cases had previously

worked on Holocaust claims. In March

2002,

Deadria Farmer-Paellman, a longtime reparations

activist, and Edwin Fagan, one of the lead attor-

neys in the German forced-labor litigation, ﬁled

suit in federal court in Brooklyn against Fleet-

Boston Bank, railroad giant CSX, Aetna Insurance,

and up to one thousand “Corporate [John] Does”

to be named later. Though the suit speciﬁed no

damages, Farmer-Paellman and Fagan publicly

mentioned the ﬁgure of $

1.4 trillion, their calcula-

tion of the current value of the forty-acre plots

denied to freedpeople after the Civil War.

167

76 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Several other suits followed. Consolidated

into a single case, “in re: African American Slave

Descendants Litigation,” the cases were argued in

the Northern District of Illinois in

2004. The

result was a thoroughgoing defeat for reparations

advocates. The plaintiffs, the presiding judge ruled,

had failed to clear the procedural hurdles neces-

sary for the court even to consider the merits of

the case. The judge identiﬁed three main deﬁcien-

cies in the ﬁling, including lack of standing (the

plaintiffs’ failure to establish a direct line of descent

between themselves and a speciﬁc injured party),

the expiration of statutes of limitations in all juris-

dictions, and the political question doctrine. The

plaintiffs were given leave to ﬁle an amended

complaint, but it too was dismissed on the same

grounds. In

2005, the case was resubmitted with

additional arguments and materials (including

DNA evidence establishing a genetic link between

African Americans today and Africans transported

to the Americas on slave ships) but this case too

was dismissed. Although an appeal of this last dis-

missal is pending, the idea of securing reparations

for slavery through litigation against private compa-

nies appears to have come to a dead end, at least

for the time being.

168

municipal disclosure ordinances

Even as these suits wound their way through the

federal courts, a new front was being opened. In

October

2002, the Board of Alderman of the city of

Chicago unanimously adopted the nation’s ﬁrst

“Slave-Era Disclosure Ordinance,” requiring com-

panies with city contracts to examine their historical

records, including records of predecessor compa-

nies, and to disclose proﬁts derived from slavery.

Under terms of the ordinance, companies found to

have ties to slavery suffer no penalties; sanctions

are reserved for companies that fail to disclose such

ties. Los Angeles adopted a similar ordinance in

May

2003. Detroit followed a month later. With

the failure of litigation, the reparations movement

appears to have redirected its energies toward this

front, and there are now more than a dozen major

cities with ordinances in place or in prospect.

169

Thus far, the impact of the new disclosure

ordinances has been borne by large American banks,

which tend to have many predecessor companies,

as well as many municipal contracts. In December

2004, J.P. Morgan Chase, the nation’s second-

largest bank, submitted an amended disclosure

statement to the city of Chicago, revealing that two

of its predecessor banks in Louisiana had accepted

some thirteen thousand enslaved African Americans

as collateral for loans. Through defaults, the banks

eventually owned – and, in turn, sold – about ten

percent of these people. The disclosure was accom-

panied by a public letter of apology from the bank’s

president, as well as the announcement of a $

million scholarship fund for African American stu-

dents from Louisiana. Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-

largest bank, made a similar disclosure in June

2005. Thus far only one institution appears to have

been disqualiﬁed from a city contract. In October

2005, Lehman Brothers of New York was removed

as co-underwriter of a $

1.5-billion bond issue for

Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after failing to submit an

amended disclosure statement, an action that

reportedly cost the ﬁrm $

500,000.

170

disclosures by private institutions

Recent years have also seen a series of voluntary

disclosures by private institutions. Churches have

played the leading role, with denominations ranging

from the Southern Baptist Convention to the

Church of England adopting resolutions acknowl-

edging and expressing contrition for their historical

ties to slavery and the slave trade. The most recent

77 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

Senator Helms proposed another amendment to the Civil

Liberties Act, withholding all reparations payments to former

internees until the government of Japan had compensated

families of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor. The proposal,

which precisely recapitulated the racist logic of the original

internment, was not adopted.

institution to act is the Episcopal Church, which

adopted a resolution in June

2006 expressing “pro-

found regret” for its complicity in slavery, as well

as its for its long silence about racial discrimination

in the era of Jim Crow. In addition to the apology,

the church announced a three-year self-study of its

relationship to slavery and the slave trade, to be

accompanied by a sustained process of dialogue

and reﬂection on possible remedies. The expressed

goal of the exercise is to try to “repair the breach”

that slavery carved in the life of the church and the

nation.

171

If the Episcopal Church’s efforts reﬂect its

identity as a religious institution, the action of the

Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously-

published newspaper, bespeaks its institutional

identity. In searching the paper’s archives for back-

ground on reparations claims against Aetna, a local

insurance company,

Courant reporters uncovered

an entire forgotten history of slavery and slave

trading in Connecticut. This history embraced the

newspaper itself, which routinely ran paid advertise-

ments for runaway slaves and upcoming slave

auctions. On July

4, 2000, the paper published a

front-page editorial, “A Courant Complicity, an

Old Wrong,” apologizing for “any involvement by

our predecessors at the

Courant in the terrible

practice of buying and selling human beings.” The

paper went on to produce a special edition focus-

ing on Connecticut and slavery, entitled “Com-

plicity.” The edition, later published in expanded

form as a book, has been distributed to schools

across the state.

172

Universities have also been important sites of

historical discovery and dialogue. While the ven-

ture at Brown has generated the most national

attention, other institutions have also confronted

their historical ties to slavery. In

2004, the Faculty

Senate of the University of Alabama adopted a res-

olution apologizing for the faculty’s complicity in

slavery in the years before the Civil War. The

apology focused on previous faculty members’ role

in whipping slaves on campus, a responsibility for-

mally assigned to the faculty by the Board of

Trustees in the

1840s to forestall students whip-

ping their personal slaves excessively. In

2005, the

University of North Carolina unveiled a public

memorial, Unsung Founders, honoring the people

of color, enslaved and free, who had helped to

build the university. At the same time, Emory Uni-

versity announced a “Transforming Community

Project,” a ﬁve-year program of activities and

workshops designed to facilitate dialogue on the

university’s historical relationship to slavery and

Jim Crow, as well as on the current politics of race

on the campus.

173

racial inequality in

the twenty-first century

Time will tell whether recent initiatives by churches,

newspapers, and universities represent isolated

gestures or the beginning of a broad national dis-

cussion about slavery and its legacies. What is cer-

tain is that there is much still to discuss. While

the nature and sources of racial inequality today are

ﬁercely debated, there is no question that we live

in a society characterized by dramatic racial dis-

parities. According to the

2000 U.S. Census, more

than one in ﬁve African Americans – and nearly

one in three African American children – lives below

the federal poverty line. Recorded in the midst

of a booming economy, these ﬁgures are the lowest

78 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

In December 2004, J.P. Morgan Chase,

the nation’s second-largest bank, submitted

an amended disclosure statement to the

city of Chicago, revealing that two of its

predecessor banks in Louisiana had accepted

some thirteen thousand enslaved African

Americans as collateral for loans. The

disclosure was accompanied by a public letter

of apology from the bank’s president, as

well as the announcement of a $

5-million

scholarship fund for African American

students from Louisiana.

in U.S. history, yet they are still more than three

times the comparable ﬁgures for non-Hispanic

whites. Median white family income is about

percent higher than the median black income; the

gulf in wealth, a measure of assets accumulated

over generations, is vastly greater. Average black

life expectancy is six years less than for white

Americans, while the black infant mortality rate is

twice as high. African Americans are far more

likely than their white peers to be ill-housed and

ill-educated, and to lack essential medical care.

Racial disparities are perhaps most dramatic in

rates of incarceration, with African Americans, and

black males in particular, about seven times more

likely than whites (and three times more likely than

Latinos) to be lodged in state or federal prison.

174

The persistence of racial inequality in America

today was thrown into sharp relief by Hurricane

Katrina, one of the signal events of the steering

committee’s three-year tenure. Had the committee

wished to contrive an event to illustrate the con-

tinuing relevance of our nation’s racial history it

could scarcely have done better than Katrina, which

devastated the Gulf Coast in September

2005. As

President George W. Bush noted in a national

address from the devastated city of New Orleans,

the hurricane and ensuing ﬂood exposed the reality

of “deep, persistent poverty” in the United States,

poverty with “roots in a history of racial discrimina-

tion, which cut off generations from the opportu-

nity of America.” Equally important, Katrina

exposed a vast gulf in the way in which different

Americans see their worlds. Whatever one thinks of

the merits of the various arguments, the angry alle-

gations hurled in the aftermath of the storm – accu-

sations of government indifference and betrayal,

the attempt to shift responsibility for the suffering

onto victims themselves, charges and counter-

charges of misrepresentation and media bias –

clearly bespoke a nation that remains deeply con-

ﬂicted about the meaning of its past.

The problems exposed by Katrina take us

back once more to the challenge of retrospective

justice. How does a society “repair” such deeply-

rooted economic, political, and psychological

divisions? Is the discourse of reparations, with its

emphasis on “healing injuries” and remedying past

injustice, a useful medium for thinking about our

responsibilities in the present? Are exercises in retro-

spective justice inherently divisive and backward

looking, as some critics have alleged, or can they

provide a way to nurture common citizenship and

awaken new visions of the future? How might

such programs work in practice? These are just

some of the questions that might be taken up in a

continuing national dialogue about slavery and

justice. It is our hope that this report, in providing

information about the history of our University

and our nation, as well as about the efforts of other

institutions and societies to confront legacies of

historical injustice, may enable Americans of all

persuasions to discuss such questions more openly

and thoughtfully.

79 confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question

hen she appointed the University

Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Presi-

dent Simmons noted that we would confront ques-

tions “about which men and women of good will

may ultimately disagree,” including those posed by

the question of reparations for slavery. She did not

ask the steering committee to try to resolve the

debate, and she made clear that the committee

would not determine whether or how Brown

might pay monetary reparations. Our task, rather,

was to provide “factual information and critical

perspectives” to enable our students and the nation

to discuss the historical, legal, political, and moral

dimensions of the controversy in reasoned and

intellectually rigorous ways. Brown’s own history,

the president observed, gave the University a spe-

cial opportunity and obligation to provide intellec-

tual leadership and foster civil discourse on this

important national issue.

In the preceding pages, we have tried to fulﬁll

this charge. Yet after years of reading and organiz-

ing public programs, we have drawn certain con-

clusions, which we offer as a ﬁnal stimulus for

reﬂection and debate.

American slavery and the transatlantic trade

that fed it were crimes against humanity. Indeed,

they were the very deﬁnition of such crimes –

offenses that, in their denial of the shared human-

ity of certain categories of people, diminished the

humanity of all people, whether victims, perpetra-

tors, or bystanders. The familiar extenuations –

that slavery and slave trading were once legal; that

they ended a long time ago; that direct victims and

perpetrators are long since dead; that many, even

most, Americans are descendants of immigrants

who came to the United States after

1865 – are all

true, but they neither expunge the crimes nor

erase their enduring legacies.

In labeling slavery and the slave trade as

crimes against humanity, we are not merely

indulging hindsight or projecting our present val-

ues back onto the past. While the international

legal regime for responding to crimes against

humanity was codiﬁed only in the twentieth cen-

tury, the concepts that undergird it, the basic intu-

itions about the shared nature and irreducible

moral worth of all human beings, come to us

directly from the eighteenth century. Indeed, they

emerged in large measure out of the struggles over

slavery and the slave trade recounted here. As we

have seen, Brown was an important terrain in

these struggles. In the late eighteenth century, the

college’s governing Corporation and its namesake

family were rent by the campaign to end the

transatlantic slave trade, with some members

bringing prosecutions against other members for

illegal slave trading. The battle was rejoined a gen-

eration later, with students and faculty debating

the merits of abolition even as the burgeoning

Rhode Island textile industry tied the fortunes of

the University and the state more closely to south-

ern slavery. Attending to this history not only chal-

lenges prevailing understandings of the “free

North” and “slave South,” but also casts the work

of the steering committee in a different light. In

exploring Brown’s historical relationship to slavery

and the slave trade, and in debating our own

responsibilities in light of it, we are participating

in a conversation that began on this campus more

than two centuries ago.

80 slavery and justice: concluding thoughts

Slavery and Justice: Concluding Thoughts

Like other great historical crimes, slavery had

profound consequences. The most fundamental

was racism – the enduring stigma borne by darker-

skinned people. But the institution left other lega-

cies as well, including vast gulfs of wealth and

poverty, privilege and deprivation. Americans who

lived through the process of emancipation, ﬁrst

in northern states like Rhode Island and later in the

South, recognized at least some of slavery’s conse-

quences, and they proposed a variety of programs to

redress them, from land redistribution to publicly-

funded education. In the end, however, virtually

nothing was done, in either the North or the South,

to compensate the formerly enslaved for their years

of unpaid toil or to welcome them into the ranks of

free people. On the contrary, the post-emancipation

years, North and South, saw a hardening of racist

attitudes, accompanied by the erection of new

barriers to ensure African Americans’ continued

subjugation.

The system of racial discrimination that pre-

vailed after slavery was most blatant in the American

South, where

245 years of slavery were succeeded

by nearly a century of state-sanctioned segrega-

tion, disfranchisement, and violence. But the sys-

tem was national in scope and underwritten by a

host of public and private institutions, from federal

agencies like the Social Security Administration

and the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which

denied black Americans access to programs and

assets available to whites, to elite universities like

Brown, which between the

1870s and 1950s

enrolled fewer than one African American student

per year. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act

1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the

Fair Housing Act of

1968, the centuries of formal

racial discrimination ﬁnally came to an end, and

African Americans assumed, in law if not always in

practice, their full rights and privileges as American

citizens. In the years since, the United States has

seen evidence of substantial progress, including

the emergence of a sizeable black middle class and

a dramatic increase in the number of African

Americans studying in colleges and universities.

Yet the nation also continues to be marked by pro-

found racial disparities in most measures of human

welfare, including education, employment, wealth,

rates of incarceration, access to housing and health

care, infant mortality, and life expectancy.

But material inequalities are only part of the

legacy that slavery and the subsequent regime

of Jim Crow bequeathed to the nation. One of the

things that steering committee members learned

in our exploration of other cases of historical injus-

tice around the world is that crimes against human-

ity weigh on societies in many different ways. In

the worst circumstances, they leave legacies of rage

and contempt that, left untended, virtually ensure

the eruption of new atrocities in the future. In

less dramatic cases, they leave a residue of ill will,

festering feelings of resentment, distrust, and

defensiveness that can poison politics and impair a

society’s ability to face the challenges of the pres-

ent and future with civility and common purpose.

Surveying the state of racial politics in America

today, the rancor and raw emotions that discussions

of racial issues seem instantly to arouse, it is hard

to resist the conclusion that the United States

is such a society.

The challenge, of course, is not only to under-

stand the sources of our current predicament but

also to devise ways to make the situation better.

This is the task of retrospective justice. As we have

seen, the last sixty years – and the last twenty

years, in particular – have witnessed the emergence

of an international consensus on the importance of

confronting traumatic histories, as well as the cre-

ation of a variety of modalities and mechanisms for

doing so. These approaches include not only the

payment of monetary reparations (the focus of the

current slavery reparations debate in the United

States), but also international tribunals, formal

apologies, truth commissions, the creation of public

memorials and days of remembrance, educational

initiatives, and a wide variety of other non-monetary

reparations programs. In the preceding pages, we

have tried to illuminate the possibilities and poten-

tial pitfalls of these different approaches, as well

as some of the speciﬁc circumstances in which they

81 slavery and justice: concluding thoughts

have been or might be used. Clearly there is no

magical formula for righting historical wrongs.

Retrospective justice is a messy and imperfect

business, and societies and institutions that under-

take it should do so with humility and a clear-eyed

recognition of the inadequacy of any reparative

program to restore what was taken away. Yet look-

ing at the experience of other societies that have

confronted (or failed to confront) legacies of his-

torical injustice – at the contrasting experiences of

West Germany, East Germany, and Japan follow-

ing World War II; at the operation of truth com-

missions in South Africa and elsewhere; at the bitter

controversies spawned by the Turkish govern-

ment’s denial of the Armenian genocide or by the

Australian government’s refusal to apologize to

Aboriginal children abducted from their families as

part of a state-sponsored forced assimilation policy

– there seems good reason to believe that commu-

nities that face their histories squarely emerge

stronger than those that choose the path of denial

and evasion.

In the course of its research, the steering com-

mittee was struck not only by the sheer variety of

reparative justice initiatives around the world but

also by the ambivalent response of many Americans

to these efforts. On one hand, Americans have

played a leading role in creating the international

humanitarian regime. Judges and prosecutors from

the United States laid the foundations of inter-

national humanitarian law at Nuremberg, and it

was American military ofﬁcials who drafted the ﬁrst

German restitution and reparations policies for

victims of Nazi atrocities. U.S. courts and legislatures

have become the premier venues for reparations

claims of various sorts, and many American politi-

cal leaders have been outspoken in demanding that

leaders of other nations (particularly the current

government of Japan) acknowledge and make

amends for the misdeeds of their predecessors. On

the other hand, many Americans remain distinctly

uneasy about broaching aspects of their own his-

tory, particularly in regard to slavery. While recent

years have seen a proliferation of national and

institutional apologies for various offenses, a pro-

posed apology for slavery – a one-sentence Con-

gressional resolution introduced in

1997 apologiz-

ing to “African Americans whose ancestors

suffered as slaves under the Constitution and the

laws of the United States until

1865” – died before

it could even come up for discussion on the ﬂoor

of the House of Representatives. It is difﬁcult to say

precisely where this reticence about slavery comes

from, but it seems to us to be a matter worthy of

further reﬂection.

All of which leads to one ﬁnal conclusion. If

this nation is ever to have a serious dialogue about

slavery, Jim Crow, and the bitter legacies they have

bequeathed to us, then universities must provide

the leadership. For all their manifold ﬂaws and

failings, universities possess unique concentrations

of knowledge and skills. They are grounded in val-

ues of truth seeking and the unfettered exchange

of ideas. They are at least relatively insulated from

political pressure. Perhaps most important, they

are institutions that value historical continuity,

that recognize and cherish the bonds that link the

present to the past and the future. The fact that so

many of our nation’s elite institutions have histories

that are entangled with the history of slavery only

enhances the opportunity and the obligation.

82 slavery and justice: concluding thoughts

83 recommendations

Recommendations

e cannot change the past. But an

institution can hold itself accountable for the past,

accepting its burdens and responsibilities along

with its beneﬁts and privileges. This principle applies

particularly to universities, which profess values of

historical continuity, truth seeking, and service.

In the present instance, this means acknowledging

and taking responsibility for Brown’s part in griev-

ous crimes.

In the course of its research, the steering

committee examined dozens of examples of retro-

spective justice initiatives from around the world.

While each case is unique, the most successful

generally combine three elements: formal acknowl-

edgement of an offense; a commitment to truth

telling, to ensure that the relevant facts are uncov-

ered, discussed, and properly memorialized; and

the making of some form of amends in the present

to give material substance to expressions of regret

and responsibility. The University’s response

should partake of all three of these elements. Equally

important, it should reﬂect Brown’s speciﬁc nature

as an educational institution. What universities

do best is learning and teaching, and these are the

areas in which Brown can most appropriately and

effectively make amends.

Acknowledgement

While members of the steering committee have dif-

ferent opinions about the propriety and value of an

institutional apology, we believe that it is incumbent

on the University, at a minimum, to acknowledge

formally and publicly the participation of many of

Brown’s founders and benefactors in the institution

of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, as well

as the beneﬁts that the University derived from them.

Tell the truth in all its complexity

Every confrontation with historical injustice begins

with establishing and upholding the truth, against

the inevitable tendencies to deny, extenuate, and

forget. The appointment of the steering committee

and the various public programs it sponsored have

already done a great deal to create awareness of

a history that had been largely erased from the col-

lective memory of our University and state. Yet

there is more to be done. We recommend that the

University

• release this report publicly, in both print and

electronic versions, and circulate it widely among

students, academic and non-academic staff, and

alumni, as well as among other interested parties

in Rhode Island and throughout the United States;

• sponsor public forums, on campus and off,

to allow anyone with an interest in the steering

committee’s work to respond to, reﬂect upon, and

criticize the report;

• include discussion of the University’s histor-

ical relationship to slavery as a normal part of

freshmen orientation;

• commission a new history of the University

to replace the currently available text, which makes

virtually no reference to slavery or the slave trade,

or to the role that they played in Brown’s early

history;

• lend its support and assistance to other

institutions that might be considering undertaking

similar investigations of their own histories.

Memorialization

Few if any institutions in our society are as quick to

erect memorials as universities. The Brown campus

contains literally hundreds of statues, stones, por-

traits, plaques, and other markers, each placed by

one generation to inform and edify generations to

come. Yet there are no memorials acknowledging

the University’s entanglement with the trans-

atlantic slave trade. To the best of our knowledge,

there is only one such marker in the vicinity of

the campus, a small brass plaque near the entrance

of the John Brown House, which mentions slave

trading in a list of its one-time owner’s activities.

Installed by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Soci-

ety and the Rhode Island Historical Society after a

long and public debate, the plaque was almost

immediately defaced by vandals.

As this example suggests – and as programs

sponsored by the steering committee on the politics

of slavery and Holocaust memorials conﬁrmed –

memorializing traumatic histories can be difﬁcult

and awkward. The challenge, easier to articulate

than to accomplish, is to create a living site of mem-

ory, inviting reﬂection and fresh discovery without

provoking paralysis or shame. We believe that

Brown can and should answer this challenge. We

recommend that the University

• undertake to create a slave trade memorial to

recognize its relationship to the transatlantic trade

and the importance of this trafﬁc in the history of

Rhode Island;

• sponsor a public competition to design such

a memorial, keeping in mind that debate and con-

troversy over an appropriate design are integral

parts of the process of coming to terms with the past;

• designate an annual day of remembrance

on the academic calendar, to be marked by a visit

to the memorial by University representatives, an

endowed lecture, and other activities designed

to encourage continued reﬂection on this aspect

our history.

Create a center for continuing research

on slavery and justice

Universities express their priorities ﬁrst and fore-

most in their selection of ﬁelds of study. We believe

that Brown, by virtue of its history, has a special

opportunity and obligation to foster research and

teaching on the issues broached in this report,

including slavery and other forms of historic and

contemporary injustice, movements to promote

human rights, and struggles over the meaning

of individual and institutional responsibility. We

recommend the establishment of a scholarly center

dedicated to these questions. The center should

include

• a full-time director;

• a newly-created endowed professorship,

lodged jointly in the center and an appropriate

academic department, to be held by a distin-

guished scholar whose research engages broad

questions of justice and injustice;

• fellowships for postgraduate and senior

scholars;

• abundant research opportunities for Brown

students, both undergraduates and graduates;

• internships and service-learning opportuni-

ties for undergraduates interested in working with

anti-slavery organizations and other institutions

dedicated to the promotion of human rights;

• public programming aimed at both the

University and the wider community;

• a signiﬁcant educational outreach compo-

nent, including workshops and curriculum devel-

opment, to help teachers integrate topics related

to slavery and justice into their classrooms;

• administrative and staff support, to ensure

sustainability and effective collaboration with

84 recommendations

existing departments and centers at Brown, includ-

ing the Swearer Center for Public Service, the

Watson Institute for International Studies, the Cogut

Humanities Center, the John Nicholas Brown

Center for the Public Humanities, and the Center

for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

Maintain high ethical standards in regard

to investments and gifts

With institutions as with individuals, taking respon-

sibility for an offense entails more than expressing

remorse for past conduct; it also requires a com-

mitment to doing better in the future. As we have

seen, Brown’s early endowment beneﬁted from

contributions made by slaveowners and slave traders.

Although slavery is no longer legal, it persists in

many parts of the world, alongside a variety of

other forms of gross injustice. Given its history, the

University has a special obligation to ensure that it

does not proﬁt from such practices.

Brown has already taken important steps in

this regard. The University recently introduced a

new procedure for the ethical review of major gifts

that is, at least on paper, one of the most rigorous

in the nation. It has also expanded the purview

(though not the resources) of the Advisory Com-

mittee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment,

which makes recommendations to the Brown Cor-

poration on proxy resolutions, as well as on ethical

concerns raised by members of the Brown com-

munity. The value of this process can be seen in

the University’s recent decision to divest itself of

all direct holdings in companies doing business in

Darfur, the scene of an ongoing genocide. Yet

there is also some cause for concern. Like most of

its peer institutions, Brown in recent years has

invested an increasing portion of its endowment in

“hedge” funds, commingled vehicles that afford

the University no inﬂuence over the companies in

which it is invested, and provide no clear knowl-

edge of what investments it holds at any given

moment. While the committee has no reason to

believe that Brown is involved in any unethical

practices, we ﬁnd this lack of transparency trou-

bling.

Recognizing the importance of growing the

endowment, yet mindful also of Brown’s distinc-

tive history, we recommend that the University

• uphold a strict procedure for the ethical

review of gifts;

• strengthen its commitment to socially-

responsible investment by expanding its holdings

in socially-responsible funds and offering facilities

to donors who wish to ensure that their gifts are

invested in such funds;

• provide the Advisory Committee on Corpo-

rate Responsibility in Investment with the logisti-

cal and staff support that it needs to do its work

effectively;

• review its investment strategies with a

goal of increasing transparency and ensuring

accountability.

Expand opportunities at Brown for those

disadvantaged by the legacies of slavery

and the slave trade

Over the last few years, hundreds of people have

written to the steering committee offering sugges-

tions about what Brown might do to make amends

for its history. The single most common sugges-

tion was creating special scholarships for African

American students. Given Brown’s failure to admit

more than a handful of black students during its

ﬁrst two hundred years, it is a logical suggestion, and

one whose spirit we endorse. But it is not a recom-

mendation that we can make.

Brown is a need-blind / need-based institution.

This means that the University, like most of its

peer schools, admits students without regard to

their ability to pay, committing itself to providing

whatever ﬁnancial aid an individual might require

through a combination of grants, work-study

employment, and loans. The obverse of this com-

mitment is that Brown, like its peers, does not

offer ﬁnancial assistance on any basis other than

ﬁnancial need. We believe that this policy, which

ensures that every qualiﬁed student can attend

85 recommendations

Brown, regardless of his or her ﬁnancial circum-

stances, is just and equitable.

This is not to say that there is nothing the

University can do. The commitment to need-blind/

need-based admissions does not preclude actively

recruiting students from disadvantaged back-

grounds, or tailoring the ﬁnancial aid packages of

the neediest students to increase the proportion

of grants versus loans. Indeed, the University has

recently done precisely this through the creation

of the Sidney Frank Scholars program, which frees

Brown’s most economically-disadvantaged stu-

dents of any future loan obligations. Nor does the

current system preclude increasing ﬁnancial aid to

international students, who are currently excluded

from the need-blind system.

Mindful of these constraints, but mindful also

of Brown’s history of racial exclusion, we recom-

mend that the University

• maintain a vigorous commitment to recruit-

ing and retaining a diverse student body, focusing

in particular on increasing the representation of

African American students at both the undergrad-

uate and graduate levels;

• strengthen such initiatives as the Sidney

Frank Scholars program and Talent Quest, a joint

program of the Brown Admission Ofﬁce and the

Brown Alumni Schools Committee, to ensure that

students from even the most economically disad-

vantaged backgrounds have every opportunity to

study and prosper at Brown;

• increase the amount of ﬁnancial aid avail-

able to needy students from outside the United

States, with a long-term goal of making Brown a

need-blind institution for international students;

• dedicate particular attention to the recruit-

ment of students from Africa and the West Indies,

the historic points of origin and destination for

most of the people carried on Rhode Island slave

ships;

• maintain a vigorous commitment to recruit-

ing and retaining a diverse faculty and nonacademic

staff.

Use the resources of the University to help

ensure a quality education for the children

of Rhode Island

If a single theme runs through this report, it is edu-

cation. This focus reﬂects not only Brown’s nature

as an educational institution but also the nature

of slavery: In large parts of our country, it was once

a crime to teach a black person to read. During the

age of abolition, many Americans, black as well as

white, recognized education as essential to repairing

the legacy of slavery and equipping the formerly

enslaved for the full enjoyment of their rights

as free people. The original Rhode Island Gradual

Abolition Act, for example, required towns to

provide the children of slaves with publicly-funded

instruction in “reading, writing, and Arithmetic,”

a provision that clearly reﬂected the inﬂuence of

Moses Brown. But the towns resented the expense

and the state legislature removed the requirement.

A similar process of advance and retreat occurred in

the South, where the promise of an equal educa-

tion for the newly free was swept away by the col-

lapse of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow,

with its specious doctrine of separate but equal.

Rather than promoting equality and common citi-

zenship, public schools became vehicles for per-

petuating inequality and segregation.

Racial segregation in public education was

ﬁnally declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme

Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education deci-

sion, yet today, more than half a century later,

American public schools continue to be character-

ized by

de facto racial segregation, as well as by

profound disparities in school quality and student

achievement. To appreciate the dimensions of the

crisis, one need look no further than Providence,

where forty-eight of the city’s forty-nine public

schools currently fail to meet federally-prescribed

minimum standards for academic achievement.

This situation represents a direct challenge to Brown

University. One of the most obvious and meaning-

ful ways for Brown to take responsibility for its

past is by dedicating its resources to improving the

quality of education available to the children of

our city and state.

86 recommendations

The resources that the University brings to the

task are formidable. Brown is home to an array

of institutions and programs with interests in pub-

lic education, including the Education Depart-

ment (which provides teacher training for both

graduate and undergraduate students), the Swearer

Center for Public Service, the Educational Alliance,

the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the

Choices Program of the Watson Institute for Inter-

national Studies, Brown Summer High School,

and the newly created Urban Education Policy

Program. Even more importantly, it is blessed with

extraordinarily energetic students, literally hun-

dreds of whom work in local schools as individual

tutors and mentors, as well as in such programs

as the Rhode Island Urban Debate League and the

Arts/Literacy Project.

As the sheer variety of programs and initiatives

suggests, Brown’s efforts have been highly decen-

tralized. They have also been ill-coordinated and

chronically underfunded, creating problems of sus-

tainability and limiting their systemic impact. The

recent appointment of a director of educational

outreach and the funding of a University liaison

position in the ofﬁce of the superintendent of Prov-

idence schools hold the promise of better coordi-

nation, but they are only the beginning. If Brown

is to make a meaningful impact in local schools,

it will require a sustained, substantial commitment

of energy and resources over many years. We rec-

ommend that the University

• create professional development opportuni-

ties for Rhode Island public school teachers,

including the opportunity to enroll in one Brown

class per semester, without charge;

• expand the number of course offerings and

available scholarships in Brown Summer High

School, which has a long record of success in prepar-

ing local students for the challenges of college-

level work;

• increase funding to Brown’s Masters of Arts

in Teaching Program, including full tuition waivers

for students who commit themselves to working

for at least three years in local public schools;

• create opportunities and incentives for

Brown faculty to offer enrichment courses in local

schools and to use their expertise to help develop

new programs and curricular materials;

• invest substantial resources, including dedi-

cated faculty positions, in the new Urban Education

Policy Program, with an eye to establishing Brown

as a national leader in this vital ﬁeld;

• expand internship and service-learning

opportunities for undergraduate students with

interests in public education;

• coordinate its efforts with those of Rhode

Island College, the Rhode Island School of Design,

and Johnson and Wales University, each of which

currently administers educational outreach pro-

grams in Providence public schools;

• provide administrative and staff support,

through agencies such as the Swearer Center and

the Ofﬁce of Educational Outreach, to ensure

effective collaboration and the sustainability of its

educational initiatives.

Appoint a committee to monitor implemen-

tation of these recommendations

87 recommendations

1 See Ruth Simmons, “Facing Up to Our Ties to

Slavery,”

Boston Globe, April 28, 2004. That statement, as

well as the president’s original charge to the committee,

are available at http://www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice.

2 For a calendar of committee-sponsored events, see

http://www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice.

3 The curriculum is available at

http://www.choices.edu/slavery.

4 For a selection of letters sent to committee see

http://www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice.

5 Faunce’s sermon is reprinted in The Sesquicentennial

of Brown University,

1764-1914: A Commemoration (Provi-

dence: Brown University,

1915).

6 On the history of slavery in different parts of the

world, see Orlando Patterson,

Slavery and Social Death: A

Comparative Study

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1982); M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology

(Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998, orig. pub.

1980); William D. Phillips Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to

the Early Transatlantic Trade

(Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press,

1985); Stanley Engerman, Seymour

Drescher, and Robert Paquette (eds.),

Slavery (New York:

Oxford University Press,

2001); David B. Davis, The Prob-

lem of Slavery in Western Culture

(Ithaca: Cornell Univer-

sity Press,

1966); Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Slav-

ery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); and

James Oakes,

Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the

Old South

(New York: Vintage Books, 1990). For an

overview on human trafﬁcking today, including readings

and resources, see http://www.humantrafﬁcking.org. The

U.S. State Department issues an annual report on human

trafﬁcking and the status of national and international

efforts to stop it; see http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/

tiprpt/

2006/.

7 Recent works on slavery in the Americas include

David B. Davis,

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New

World Slavery

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);

David Eltis,

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and

Robin Blackburn,

The Making of New World Slavery: From

the Baroque to the Modern,

1492-1800 (New York: Verso,

1997). The most thorough analysis of the scale and struc-

ture of the transatlantic trade is still Philip Curtin,

The

African Slave Trade: A Census

(Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press,

1969). See also David Eltis, “Free and

Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons,”

American Historical Review 88, 2 (1983), pp. 251-280.

8 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, op. cit. See also

Robin Blackburn, “Deﬁning Slavery: Its Special Features

and Social Role,” in Leonie J. Archer (ed.),

Slavery and

Other Forms of Unfree Labor

(Abingdon: Routledge, 1988);

M.I. Finley, “Slavery,” in David L. Sills (ed.),

International

Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

(New York: Macmillan,

1968), vol. 14, pp. 307-313; and James Oakes, “Slavery,”

in Mary K. Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams

(eds.),

Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York:

Scribners,

1993), vol. 3, pp. 1407-1418.

9 See “Observations on Slave Keeping,” Providence

Gazette

, December 4, 1773. Though there is no author

identiﬁed for the treatise, it may have been the work of

John Woolman, a prominent Quaker abolitionist. It was

almost certainly placed in the

Gazette by Moses Brown,

whose conversion to the anti-slavery cause in

1773 is dis-

cussed below. On the emergence of biologically-based

ideas of black inferiority, see Winthrop D. Jordan,

White

Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,

1550-

1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1968); George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and

Thomas F. Gossett,

Race: The History of an Idea in America

(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). On

dehumanization as an essential component of slavery, see

Davis,

Inhuman Bondage, op. cit.

10 A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race

and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period

(New

York: Oxford University Press,

1978).

88 endnotes

Endnotes

11 Steven Deyle, “’By farr the most proﬁtable trade’:

Slave Trading in British Colonial North America,”

Slavery

and Abolition

10, 1 (1989), pp. 107-125. The standard

work on New England slavery is still Lorenzo J. Greene,

The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (New York:

Columbia University Press,

1942). On the trading of

Native American captives to the West Indies, see Francis

Jennings,

The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and

the Cant of Conquest

(Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press,

1975).

12 Deyle, “By farr the most proﬁtable trade,” pp. 108-

109. On the 1645 episode, involving the ship Rainbow,

see Elizabeth Donnan (ed.),

Documents Illustrative of the

History of the Slave Trade to America, Volume III: New

England and the Middle Colonies

(Washington: Carnegie

Institution,

1932), pp. 6-9.

13 “Act of the General Court, May 19, 1652,” in Don-

nan,

Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade,

vol. III, p.

108. Recent studies of slavery and abolition

in Rhode Island, including the efforts of later generations

to minimize the institution’s signiﬁcance and severity,

include Joanne Pope Melish,

Disowning Slavery: Gradual

Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England,

1780-1860

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Robert K. Fitts,

Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slavery

Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island

(New York: Garland Publishing, 1998); and John Wood

Sweet,

Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American

North,

1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press,

2003).

14 See “An Act authorizing the Manumission of

Negroes, Molattoes & Others, and for the gradual Aboli-

tion of Slavery. February

26, 1784,” Acts and Resolves...

of Rhode Island

, vol. 23, c# 00210; and “Act repealing Part

of the act respecting the Manumission of Slaves. October,

1785,” Acts and Resolves...of Rhode Island, vol. 24, p. 132.

The terms of Rhode Island’s gradual abolition legislation

are discussed in more detail below.

15 The classic work on the Rhode Island slave trade is

Jay Coughtry,

The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the

African Slave Trade

1700-1807 (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-

versity Press,

1981); see especially the appendix, pp. 239-

285, which lists 954 known Rhode Island slaving voyages

between

1709 and 1807. See also Sarah Deutsch, “Those

Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers,

1735-1774,” New

England Quarterly

55, 2 (1982), pp. 229-253; Alexander

Boyd Hawes,

Off Soundings: Aspects of the Maritime History

of Rhode Island

(Chevy Chase: Posterity Press, 1999), pp.

103-207; and J. Stanley Lemons, “Rhode Island and the

Slave Trade,”

Rhode Island History 60, 4 (2002), pp. 95-104.

Donnan,

Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave

Trade to America, Volume III: New England and the Middle

Colonies

(Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1932),

contains a wealth of primary source material about the

Rhode Island trade, including records from dozens of

speciﬁc voyages.

16 Newport’s duty on slave imports is referenced in

John Russell Bartlett (ed.),

Records of the Colony of Rhode

Island and Providence Plantations, in New England

(Provi-

dence: A.C. Greene and Brothers,

1865), vol. 4, p. 191.

On the rum trade, see James B. Hedges,

The Browns of

Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years

(Providence:

Brown University Press,

1968, orig. pub. 1952), pp. 22-

46; John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution:

The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen

Continental Colonies

(New York: Garland Publishing,

1989); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An

Economic History of the British West Indies,

1623-1775

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); and

Hawes,

Off Soundings, pp. 116-120.

17 Filmmaker Katrina Browne, a descendant of the

D’Wolf family and one of the speakers hosted by the

steering committee, is currently completing a documen-

tary ﬁlm exploring her family’s history and its meaning

today; see http://www.tracesofthetrade.org.

18 Rachel Chernos Lin, “The Rhode Island Slave

Traders: Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick Makers,”

Slavery and Abolition 23, 3 (2002), pp. 21-38.

19 On the West Indian provisioning trade, see Richard

Pares,

Yankees and Creoles: The Trade Between North Amer-

ica and the West Indies Before the American Revolution

(Lon-

don: Longmans, Green and Co.,

1956); and Robert

Grieve,

The Sea Trade and its Development in Rhode Island

and Providence Plantations

(Providence: n.p., 1902). For

representative provisioning voyages, see John Carter

Brown Library, Brown Family Papers (hereafter BFP),

Box

469/f2, Box 469/f10-f11, and Box 681/f3. For a refer-

ence to “Jamaica ﬁsh,” see John Brown to Nicholas,

Joseph, and Moses Brown, June

15, 1764, in BFP Box

356/f10. See also Robert W. Kenny, “Sea Captains

Carousing in Surinam,”

Rhode Island History 36, 4 (1977),

pp.

106-117.

20 “Remonstrance of the Colony of Rhode Island to

the Board of Trade,

1764,” in Donnan, Documents Illustra-

tive of the History of the Slave Trade

, vol. III, pp. 203-205.

21 Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of Colonies Examined

(Providence: The Rhode Island Bicentennial Foundation,

1974, orig. pub. 1764). Hopkins expanded the argument

in two other pamphlets,

An Essay on the Trade of the North-

ern Colonies of Great Britain in North America

(London: T.

Becket & P.A. de Hondt,

1764), and The Grievances of the

American Colonies Candidly Examined. Printed by Authority

at Providence, in Rhode-Island

(London: J. Almon, 1766).

89 endnotes

See also Nicholas Brown and Co. to Esek Hopkins,

December

30, 1764, BFP Box 643/f6.

22 For a roster of Rhode Island slave ship owners and

captains, including many with ties to Brown University,

see David Eltis et. al. (eds.),

The Transatlantic Slave Trade:

A Database on CD-ROM

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press,

1999). On the history of the University, see

Reuben Aldridge Guild,

History of Brown University, with

Illustrative Documents

(Providence: Providence Press Co.,

1867); Aldridge, Early History of Brown University, Includ-

ing the Life, Times, and Correspondence of President Manning,

1756-1791 (Providence: Snow & Farnham, 1897); Walter

C. Bronson,

The History of Brown University, 1764-1914

(Boston: D.B. Updike, 1914); and The Sesquicentennial of

Brown University,

1764-1914, op. cit. The currently avail-

able history of the University, Janet M. Phillips,

Brown

University: A Short History

(Providence: Brown University,

2000), says virtually nothing about slavery or the slave trade.

23 “The College to Nicholas Brown and Co., 1770-71,

Full & minute list of all supplies and moneys expended by

the Building Committee for the construction of the Col-

lege Ediﬁce and the President’s house,” Brown University

Archives, Miscellaneous Papers Concerning Rhode Island

College,

1763-1804, MS-1E-1. On the contribution of

Lopez and Rivera, see Nicholas Brown and Co. to Aaron

Lopez, March

15, 1770, and Lopez to Nicholas Brown

and Co., March

27, 1770, both in BFP Box 34/f2; and

Jacob Rivera to Nicholas Brown and Co., March

21, 1770,

BFP Box

6/f7. On Lopez and the slave trade, see Virginia

Bever Platt, “’And Don’t Forget the Guinea Voyage’: The

Slave Trade of Aaron Lopez of Newport,”

William and

Mary Quarterly

32, 4 (1975), pp. 601-618, and Stanley F.

Cheyt,

Lopez of Newport: Colonial American Merchant Prince

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).

24 The original subscription books from the endow-

ment campaign are deposited in the Rhode Island History

Society, Brown University Collection, MSS

317. The

accounts are reprinted, along with Smith’s and Edward’s

letters and diaries, in Guild,

History of Brown University,

with Illustrative Documents

, pp. 148-171, 212-226.

25 Guild, History of Brown University, pp. 212-226.

For black life on the Manigault plantation, see William

Dusinberre,

Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice

Swamps

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On

Laurens, see James A. Rawley, “Henry Laurens and the

Atlantic Slave Trade,” in

London: Metropolis of the Slave

Trade

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp.

82-97. Laurens became the primary Charleston agent for

Rhode Island slave traders after Manigault withdrew from

the business; see Donnan,

Documents Illustrative of the

History of the Slave Trade

, vol. III, pp. 150-164.

26 Six generations of Brown family business activities,

including the family’s role in the founding of the College

of Rhode Island, are recounted in James B. Hedges two-

volume history,

The Browns of Providence Plantations: The

Colonial Years

(Providence: Brown University Press, 1968,

orig. pub.

1952) and The Browns of Providence Plantations:

The Nineteenth Century

(Providence: Brown University

Press,

1968). The brothers’ role in relocating the college

to Providence is discussed in Mack Thompson,

Moses

Brown: Reluctant Reformer

(Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press,

1962), pp. 51-69.

27 On the conﬂict between the brothers, see Charles

Rappleye,

Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave

Trade, and the American Revolution

(New York: Simon and

Schuster,

2006), and below.

28 Rhode Island General Assembly, Census of the Inhabi-

tants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations

(Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1969, orig.

pub.

1774), pp. 38-39. References to slaves are scattered

throughout the Brown Family Papers in the John Carter

Brown Library. On James Brown’s

1728 purchase, see

BFP Box

1076/f1; on the use of family-owned slaves in the

Brown’s spermaceti candleworks, see BFP Box

338/f11.

29 On the Speedwell, see BFP Box 466/f5. On the

voyage of the

Mary, see Donnan, Documents Illustrative of

the History of the Slave Trade

, vol. III, pp. 132-133, and

Hedges,

The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial

Years

, pp. 6, 54-57, 70-71.

30 Papers relating to the Wheel of Fortune, including

the original bill of lading for the ship, are in BFP Box

707/f2. Obadiah Brown noted the taking of the ship in

his insurance book; see Rhode Island Historical Society,

Obadiah Brown Papers, MSS

315, Insurance ledger,

Box

2/f32, p. 18.

31 See Carter Braxton to Nicholas Brown and Co.,

February

1, 1763, Browns to Braxton, September 5, 1763,

and Braxton to Browns, October

16, 1763, all in BFP

Box

356/f8, and Braxton to Browns, June 1, 1763, BFP

Box

5/f9.

32 Records of the Sally’s voyage are scattered through

the Brown Family Papers, including BFP Box

339/f4, Box

340/f11, Box 468/f5, Box 469/f10, Box 643/f 5-7, Box

674/f3, Box 680/f7-8, Box 681/f3, and Box 707/f6. Addi-

tional documents can be found in Donnan,

Documents Illus-

trative of the History of the Slave Trade

, vol. III, pp. 194-195,

206-207, 210-211. The voyage has been recounted most

recently in Rappleye,

Sons of Providence, pp. 53-74. See

also Darold D. Wax, “The Browns of Providence and the

Slaving Voyage of the Brig

Sally, 1764-1765,” American

Neptune

32, 3 (1972), pp. 171-179, and Hedges, The Browns

of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years

, pp. 74-81.

90 endnotes

33 For Hopkins’s trade book, including all his transac-

tions on the coast of Africa, see BFP Box

643/f7.

34 Alex Millock to Nicholas Brown and Co., Novem-

ber

25, 1765, BFP Box 674/f3; Nicholas Brown and Co.

to Captains Whipple, Power, and Hopkins, November

15,

1765, BFP Box 536/f3.

35 Nicholas Brown and Co. to Esek Hopkins, Novem-

ber

16, 1765, BFP Box 29/f6.

36 On John’s 1769 return to the African trade, and on

his brothers’ role in helping to outﬁt him for the venture,

see Nicholas Brown and Co. to Benjamin Mason, Decem-

ber

12, 1769, BFP Box 234/f6. On John’s subsequent

involvement in the slave trade, see Eltis et al. (eds.),

The

Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database

, which lists him as a

primary sponsor of four more slaving voyages: the

Sutton

(1769, Ref. # 36397); the Providence (1785, Ref. # 36520);

the

Providence (1786, Ref. # 36532); and the Hope (1795,

Ref. #

36630). The database lists three other ships dis-

patched from Rhode Island in the

1790s by a group of

investors including Benjamin and John Brown, but this

appears to be an unrelated family with the same surname;

see Refs. #

36657, #36625, and #36661. None of the other

brothers appears to have invested directly in transatlantic

slaving voyages after the

Sally. The database does list one

slave ship, the

Fame (Ref. #25643), as having been owned

by Brown and Benson, the successor company to Nicholas

Brown and Co., but this is erroneous. The

Fame, which

sailed from Boston in

1796, was not owned by George

Benson, Nicholas Brown’s partner, but by his half-brother

Martin.

37 On the Quakers and antislavery, see Jean R. Soder-

lund,

Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton:

Princeton University Press,

1985); David B. Davis, The

Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

(Ithaca: Cornell

University Press,

1975); and Thomas E. Dixon, Quakers

and Slavery in America

(New Haven: Yale University Press,

1950). The 1760 resolution is quoted in W.D. Johnston,

Slavery in Rhode Island (Providence: Rhode Island Histori-

cal Society,

1894), pp. 146-147.

38 Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,

48. The origins and character of the anti-slavery move-

ment have been intensively debated by historians. For a

survey of the debate, see Thomas Bender (ed.),

The Anti-

slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in

Historical Interpretation

(Berkeley: University of California

Press,

1992)

39 The 1773 pamphlet is reprinted in Herbert

Aptheker (ed.),

A Documentary History of the Negro People

in the United States,

vol. 1 (Secaucus: The Citadel Press,

1951), pp. 7-8. On Newport’s Free African Union Society,

see William H. Robinson (ed.),

The Proceedings of the Free

African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society,

Newport, Rhode Island,

1780-1824 (Providence: The Urban

League of Rhode Island,

1976). Much of the intellectual

and political impetus of the growing anti-slavery move-

ment, in England as well as the United States, was sup-

plied by Africans and African Americans; see Vincent Car-

retta (ed.),

Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery

and Other Writings by Ottobah Cugoano

(New York: Pen-

guin Books,

1999); Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices: An

Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of

the Eighteenth Century

(Lexington: University of Kentucky

Press,

1996); and Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)

40 Providence Gazette, October 22, 1774. For the full

text, see John Wesley,

Thoughts Upon Slavery (Philadel-

phia: Joseph Crukshank,

1774).

41 On Brown’s conversion to the anti-slavery cause, see

James Francis Reilly, “Moses Brown and the Rhode Island

Antislavery Movement,” M.A. thesis in history, Brown

University,

1951. (The quotation is on p. 22.) See also

Thompson,

Moses Brown: Reluctant Reformer, pp. 70-91;

and Rappleye,

Sons of Providence, pp. 127-149.

42 Moses Brown to Clark and Nightingale, August 26,

1783, Rhode Island Historical Society, Moses Brown

Papers, MSS

313 [hereafter MBP], Box 3c/f63. The letter

is reprinted in Donnan,

Documents Illustrative of the History

of the Slave Trade

, vol. III, pp. 334-335.

43 Moses Brown to Samuel Hopkins, March 3, 1784,

MBP Box

4/f72. The texts of the 1774 and 1787 slave

trade acts are reprinted in Donnan,

Documents Illustrative of

the History of the Slave Trade,

vol. III, pp. 289-290, 343-344.

For the political struggles around the bills, see Thompson

Moses Brown: Reluctant Reformer

, pp. 92-106, 175-202; and

Rappleye,

Sons of Providence, pp. 127-149, 223-271.

44 Rappleye, Sons of Providence, pp. 294-300.

45 John Brown to Moses Brown, November 27, 1786,

MBP Box

4c/f84. On the voyage of the Providence, see Eltis,

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Record #36352.

46 For a sampling of the debate, see Providence Gazette

and Country Journal

, February 14, 1789; February 21,

1789; and March 14, 1789; and United States Chronicle,

February

26, 1789; February 28, 1789; and March 26,

1789. For the Abolition Society’s roster, as well as minutes

of early meetings, see Rhode Island Historical Society,

Papers of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends,

“Abolition Society Book, January

29, 1789 to February 16,

1827.” See also James F. Reilly, “The Providence Aboli-

tion Society,”

Rhode Island History 21,2 (1962), pp. 33-48.

47 The transcript of the case, involving a ship called

the

Hope, is reprinted in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of

91 endnotes

the History of the Slave Trade, vol. III, pp. 352-358. See also

Coughtry,

Notorious Triangle, pp. 206-212.

48 For prosecutions under the federal anti-slave trade

law, including the cases against Cyprian Sterry and John

Brown, see Coughtry,

Notorious Triangle, pp. 212-224; and

Rappleye,

Sons of Providence, pp. 301-312.

49 The brothers debated the prosecution for much of

1797. See Moses Brown to John Brown, March 15, 1797,

MBP Box

7c/f146; John Brown to Moses Brown, July 29,

1797, MBP Box 7c/f149; and John Brown to Moses

Brown, November

17, 1797, MBP Box 7c/f151.

50 Moses Brown to Dwight Foster, January 30, 1800,

MBP Box

7c/160. Following the judgment, John wrote a

gleeful letter to his son, James, hailing his victory over

“this Wicked and Abominable Combination[,] I mean the

Abolition Society.” Quoted in Hawes,

Off Soundings, pp.

194-195. Although the trial transcript does not survive,

the records of the earlier libel hearing, in which the

offending ship was conﬁscated, are housed in the Federal

Records Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, Papers of the

U.S. District Court (Rhode Island), Case Books, I:

72-73.

51 The episode is recounted in George L. Howe,

Mount Hope: A New England Chronicle (New York: Viking

Press, pp.

107-108, and Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, pp.

216-218. On slave ship clearances from Rhode Island after

1800, see Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, pp. 274-285; Don-

nan,

Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade,

vol. III, pp.

383-404; and James A. McMillin, The Final

Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America,

1783-1810

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

52 See Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, pp. 218-237.

53 Quoted in Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, pp. 228-

229. In the space of just six months, from late 1805 to

early

1806, the Mount Hope Insurance Company issued

policies on nearly ﬁfty Africa-bound Rhode Island ships,

the majority of them from Bristol. The company’s policy

book, deposited in the Bristol Historical Society, has sev-

eral pages ripped from it, perhaps indicating that the com-

pany continued to issue policies even after the

1807 Con-

gressional ban on slave trading. The apprehension of a

slave ship at Bristol in

1819 is recorded in the Rhode

Island Historical Society, Channing-Ellery Papers, MSS

341, September 15, 1819.

54 Brown University Archives, James Manning Papers,

MS-

1C-1, Moses Brown to James Manning, January 30,

1786. Moses Brown to James Manning, January 30, 1786.

See also Moses Brown to Samuel Hopkins, January

20,

1786, MPB Box 4c/f79, and Samuel Hopkins to Moses

Brown, March

7, 1787, MBP Box 4c/f85. On Thomas

Clarkson and the rise of the British abolition movement,

see Adam Hochschild,

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels

in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

(Boston: Houghton

Mifﬂin,

2005).

55 James Tallmadge, “An oration upon the infringe-

ment of the rights of man, to be delivered at the com-

mencement of Rhode Island College, September

5th,

1790,” Brown University Archives, Collection of Student

Essays, MS-

1N-1.

56 Tallmadge, “An oration upon the infringement of

the rights of man . . . ”

57 The correspondence between Manning and Carter

is in the Brown University Archives, James Manning

Papers, MS-

1C-1, Series 5. See also Andrew Levy, First

Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the

Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves

(New York: Random

House,

2005).

58 Charles Hoffmann and Tess Hoffmann, North by

South: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold

(Athens: Uni-

versity of Georgia Press,

1988). On Brown-trained clergy-

men in the South, see Larry E. Tise,

Proslavery: A History

of the Defense of Slavery in America,

1701-1840 (Athens:

University of Georgia Press,

1987), p. 142.

59 Moses Brown to Jedediah Morse, April 23, 1791, in

MBP Box

5c/f112. On the rise of the U.S. textile industry,

including the contribution of Moses Brown, see Caroline

Ware,

The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study

in Industrial Beginnings

(New York: Russell and Russell,

1966); Ronald Bailey, “‘Those Valuable People, the

Africans’: The Economic Impact of the Slave(ry) Trade on

Textile Industrialization in New England,” in David

Roediger and Martin H. Blatt (eds.),

The Meaning of Slav-

ery in the North

(New York: Garland Publishing, 1998);

Thompson,

Moses Brown: Reluctant Reformer, pp. 203-23;

Hedges,

The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Nine-

teenth Century,

pp. 159-185; and James L. Conrad, Between

Revolutions: The Early Rhode Island Cotton Textile Industry,

1788-1800. (Thanks to Professor Conrad for sharing this

unpublished manuscript.)

60 Quoted in Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, p. 231.

John’s taunt appeared in the

Providence Gazette and Country

Journal

, February 28, 1789.

61 Brown and Almy initially relied on long-staple cot-

ton produced by slaves in Surinam (some of it imported

by John Brown), but the ﬁrm soon began to purchase

short-staple cotton from the U.S. South. Indeed, the ﬁrst

cotton ginned by Eli Whitney’s new device was sent to

Moses Brown for test spinning. See Conrad,

Between

Revolutions

, op. cit. On cotton’s importance to the antebel-

lum economy, see Stuart Bruchey,

Cotton and the Growth

of the American Economy,

1790-1860: Sources and Readings

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967).

92 endnotes

62 On the “Negro cloth” industry, see Susan Oba,

“‘Mostly Made, Especially for this Purpose, in Provi-

dence, R.I.’: The Rhode Island Negro Cloth Industry,”

B.A. honors thesis in history, Brown University,

2006.

(The comment of the South Carolina grand jury is quoted

on p.

22.) See also Myron O. Stachiw, “‘For the Sake of

Commerce’: Slavery, Antislavery, and Northern Industry,”

in Roediger and Blatt,

The Meaning of Slavery in the North.

63 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A

Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the Ameri-

can Slave States. Based Upon Three Former Volumes of Jour-

neys and Investigations by the Same Author

, edited and intro-

duced by Arthur Schlesinger (New York: Knopf,

1953),

12. On the Hazards and the Negro cloth industry, see

Oba, “Mostly Made, Especially for this Purpose, in Provi-

dence, R.I.”

64 For a sampling of anti-abolitionist rhetoric, see John

David Smith (ed.),

Anti-Abolition Tracts and Anti-Black

Stereotypes

(New York: Garland Publishing, 1993). On

mobs, see Leonard Richards,

Gentlemen of Property and

Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America

(New

York: Oxford University Press,

1970), and David Grim-

sted,

American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 3-84. On

Garrison, the rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society,

and the

1835 postal campaign, see Henry Mayer, All on

Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery

(New York: St. Martin’s Grifﬁn, 2000); John L. Thomas,

The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison. A Biography (Boston:

Little, Brown,

1963); and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The

Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of

1835,” Journal of Negro

History

50, 4 (1965), pp. 227-238.

65 Newport Mercury, September 19, 1835.

66 “Anti-Abolition Meeting,” Providence Daily Journal,

November

4, 1835.

67 Codicil to Will and Testament, June 25, 1835, MBP

Box

4x/f17.

68 Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser, “Oberlin Col-

lege,” in Paul Finkelman (ed.),

Encyclopedia of African

American History,

1619-1895 (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press,

2006). The episode at Wesleyan was reported

The Liberator, September, 1833.

69 Josiah Quincy, quoted in Ronald Story, The Forging

of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class,

1800-

1870, p. 76. See also Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Cen-

turies of Harvard,

1636-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-

versity Press), p.

254; Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding

Emerson: “The American Scholar” and his Struggle for Self-

Reliance

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.

40; and Judith Ann Schiff, “Pioneers,” Yale Alumni Maga-

zine

69,3 (January-February, 2006). On African Americans

at Harvard Medical School, see Ronald Takaki, “Aescu-

lapius was a White Man: Antebellum Racism and Male

Chauvinism at Harvard Medical School,”

Phylon 39,2

(1978), pp. 129-135; and Nora M. Nercessian, Against All

Odds: The Legacy of Students of African Descent at Harvard

Medical School before Afﬁrmative Action,

1850-1968 (Cam-

bridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College,

2004).

70 Francis Wayland to James Hoby, December 25,

1837, quoted in Jeremy Chase, “Francis Wayland: A Unit-

ing Force in an Era of Disunion,” B.A. honors thesis in

history, Brown University,

2006, p. 10. (Emphasis in origi-

nal.) See also Wayland,

The Elements of Moral Science,

Fourth Edition, Revised and Stereotyped

(Boston: Gould,

Kendall, and Lincoln,

1837), and Francis Wayland and

H.L. Wayland,

A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis

Wayland, D.D., L.L.D., Late President of the University:

Including Selections from his Personal Reminiscences and Cor-

respondence

(New York: Sheldon and Company, 1868).

71 Francis Wayland, The Limitations of Human Responsi-

bility

(Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1838). (The

quotation is on p.

81.) See also Francis Wayland and

Richard Fuller,

Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural

Institution: in a correspondence between the Reverend Richard

Fuller and the Reverent Francis Wayland

(Boston: Gould,

Kendall, and Lincoln,

1845). Wayland ﬁnally recanted his

position in

1854, following the passage of the Kansas-

Nebraska Act, which he interpreted as a southern attempt

to nationalize slavery. In a blistering speech at a Provi-

dence rally, he declared, “The question ceases to be

whether black men are forever to be slaves, but whether

the sons of Puritans are to become slaves themselves.”

The speech was widely reprinted in the South, prompting

several southern universities to cease using Wayland’s text

in their courses on moral philosophy. See Chase, “Francis

Wayland,” pp.

111-127.

72 Robert Perkins Brown et al. (eds.), Memories of

Brown: Traditions and Recollections Gathered from Many

Sources

(Providence: Brown Alumni Magazine, 1909), p. 87.

On student debates and orations on slavery and abolition,

see Chase, “Francis Wayland,” pp.

70-80.

73 On Phillips visit, see Brown et al. (eds.), Memories of

Brown

, pp. 80-81. On Brown students in the abolition

movement, see

Proceedings of the Rhode Island anti-slavery

convention held in Providence, on the

2d, 3d, and 4

of Febru-

ary,

1836 (Providence: H.H. Brown, 1836). On Dresser,

see “An Abolitionist Caught,”

Newport Mercury, August

29, 1835.

74 On Brown students and the Civil War, see Henry

S. Burrage,

Brown University in the Civil War: A Memorial

(Providence: Providence Press Company, 1868); Martha

Mitchell (ed.),

Encyclopedia Brunoniana (Providence:

Brown University Library,

1993), pp. 142-144; and Eric

93 endnotes

Stoykovich, “Conceptions of Death During the Civil War

as Seen in the Gravemarkers and Memorials of Brown

University’s Civil War Dead,” undergraduate essay, Brown

University,

2001.

75 See J. Harold Ellers (ed.), The Destructive Power of

Religions: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

vols.) (Westport: Praeger, 2004); Kurt Raaﬂaub and

Nathan Rosenstein (eds.),

War and Society in the Ancient

and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranian, Europe, and

Mesoamerica

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1999); Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and

Mark S. Schulman (eds.),

The Laws of War in the Western

World

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and

Peter Partner,

God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and

Islam

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

76 Classic works on the subject include Hannah

Arendt,

The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Har-

court, Brace,

1951); Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of

Totalitarian Democracy

(New York: Praeger, 1960); Frantz

Fanon,

The Wretched of the Earth, transl. by Robert

Philcox (New York: Grove Press,

2004, orig. pub. 1961);

and Karl Polanyi,

The Great Transformation: The Political

and Economic Origins of Our Time

, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon

Press,

2001). For more recent work, emphasizing a variety

of cases, contexts, and causes, see George L. Mosse,

Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Pat Ship-

man,

The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the

Use and Abuse of Science

(Cambridge: Harvard University

Press,

1994); Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic

Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

(Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press,

2001); Michael Mann, The Darker

Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

(New York:

Cambridge University Press,

2004); Robert Gellately and

Ben Kiernan (eds.),

The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in

Historical Perspective

(New York: Cambridge University

Press,

2003); Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds.), In

God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century

(New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Ervin Staub, The

Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Vio-

lence

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989);

Robert Conquest,

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collec-

tivization and the Terror – Famine

(New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press,

1986); Stephanie Courtois et. al. (eds.), The

Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

(Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press,

1999); Peter Uvin, Aid-

ing Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda

(West

Hartford: Kumarian Press,

1998); Mahmood Mamdani,

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the

Genocide in Rwanda

(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2001); Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonial-

ism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia,

1930-1975,

2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

77 All these cases are discussed in more detail below.

78 See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African

Slave-Trade to the United States of America,

1638-1870

(New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896); Paul

Michael Kielstra,

The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in

Britain and France,

1814-48: Diplomacy, Morality and Eco-

nomics

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); W.E.F. Ward,

The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the

Atlantic Slave Trade

(New York: Pantheon, 1969); and

Eltis,

Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic

Slave Trade

, op. cit.

79 On atrocities in the Congo Free State, see Adam

Hochschild,

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and

Heroism in Colonial Africa

(Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1998).

80 See American National Association of the Red

Cross,

The Red Cross of the Geneva Convention: What It Is,

Its Origins and History

(Washington: Rufus H. Darby,

1878); International Committee of the Red Cross, Basic

Rules of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols

(Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross,

1983); and Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Mod-

ern History of the International Law of Armed Conﬂicts

(Lon-

don: Weidenﬁeld and Nicoloson,

1980). On recent Amer-

ican debates over the status of the Geneva conventions

and protocols, see Karen J. Greenberg,

The Torture Debate

in America

(New York: Cambridge University Press,

2006).

81 See A. Pearse Higgins, The Hague Peace Conferences

and Other International Conferences Covering the Laws and

Usage of War: Texts of Conventions with Commentaries

(Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press,

1909); U.S. Depart-

ment of the Navy,

Hague and Geneva Conventions (Wash-

ington: U.S. General Printing Ofﬁce,

1911); and Best,

Humanity in War, op. cit. On the Leipzig trials, see Gary

Jonathan Bass,

Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of

War Crimes Tribunals

(Princeton: Princeton University

Press,

2000), pp. 58-105. See also John Horne and Alan

Kramer,

German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New

Haven: Yale University Press,

2001). On the debate over

bombing civilian targets during World War II, at the time

and since, see Conrad C. Crane,

Bombs, Cities, and Civil-

ians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Crane,

“‘Contrary to Our National Ideals’: American Strategic

Bombing of Civilians in World War II,” in Mark Grims-

ley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds.),

Civilians in the Path of

War

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and

Michael J. Hogan (ed.),

Hiroshima in History and Memory

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

82 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws

of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress

(Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International

94 endnotes

Peace, 1944); and Lemkin, “The Crime of Genocide,”

American Scholar 15,2 (1946), pp. 227-230. On genocide as

a world historical phenomenon, see Ben Kiernan,

Blood

and Soil: Genocidal Violence in World History

(New Haven:

Yale University Press, forthcoming); Mark Cocker,

Rivers

of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peo-

ples

(New York: Grove Press, 2000); and Gellately and

Kiernan,

The Specter of Genocide, op. cit. On the Pequot

War, see Jill Lepore,

The Name of War: King Philip’s War

and the Origins of American Identity

(New York: Knopf,

1998). On the Herero genocide, see Isabel V. Hull,

Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of

War in Imperial Germany

(Ithaca: Cornell University

Press,

2005); Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-

Political History of the Herero of Namibia,

1890-1923

(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Tilman Dedering,

“‘A Certain Rigorous Treatment of All Parts of the

Nation’: The Annihilation of the Herero in German

South West Africa,

1904,” in Mark Levene and Penny

Roberts (eds.),

The Massacre in History (New York:

Berghahn Books,

1999); and Helmut Bley, Namibia under

German Rule

(Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 1996). On the

Congo, see Hochschild,

King Leopold’s Ghost, op. cit.

83 On the Armenian genocide, including the effort to

bring perpetrators to justice, see Vahakn N. Dadrian,

The

History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conﬂict from the

Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus

, 4th ed. (New York:

Berghahn Books,

2003). (Hitler’s remark, perhaps apoc-

ryphal, is quoted on p.

403.) See also Richard G. Hovan-

nisian (ed.),

The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Robert F. Melson,

Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian

Genocide and the Holocaust

(Chicago: University of Chicago

Press,

1992); Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Pre-

cursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” in

Alan S. Rosenbaum,

Is the Holocaust Unique: Perspectives on

Comparative Genocide

(Boulder: Westview Press, 2001);

Naimark,

Fires of Hatred, pp. 17-56; and Bass, Stay the

Hand of Vengeance

, pp. 106-146.

84 See Howard Ball, Prosecuting War Crimes and Geno-

cide: The Twentieth-Century Experience

(Lawrence: Univer-

sity Press of Kansas,

1999); Aleksander Jokic (ed.), War

Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing: A Reader

(Oxford: Black-

well,

2001); and Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, op. cit.

On the Tokyo Tribunal, see Chihiro Hosoya et al. (eds.),

The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: An International Symposium

(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1986). On Nuremberg, see Michael R.

Marrus (ed.),

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-1946:

A Documentary History

(Boston: Bedford Books, 1997);

Lawrence Douglas,

The Memory of Judgment: Making Law

and History in the Trials of the Holocaust

(New Haven: Yale

University Press,

1997); and Telford Taylor, The Anatomy

of the Nuremberg Trials

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1992). For contemporary debates about the nature and

signiﬁcance of the postwar tribunals, see Hans Kelsen,

“Will the Judgment in the Nuremberg Trial Constitute a

Precedent in International Law?”

International Law Quar-

terly

1, 2 (1947), pp. 153-171; and Francis Biddle, “The

Nuremberg Trial,”

Virginia Law Review 33, 6 (1947),

pp.

679-696.

85 For the text of the convention, see http://www.

unhchr.ch/html/menu

3/b/p_genoci.htm. On the compar-

ative and conceptual relationship of the slave trade and

genocide, see Seymour Drescher, “The Atlantic Slave

Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis,” in

Rosenbaum (ed.),

Is the Holocaust Unique?, op. cit.

86 For deﬁnitions in international law of crimes against

humanity, genocide, and war crimes, see Roy Gutman and

David Rieff (eds.),

Crimes of War: What the Public Should

Know

(New York: Norton, 1999). On the relationship of

the United States to the international regime, see Saman-

tha Power,

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of

Genocide

(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

87 On tribunals in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, see Aryeh

Neier,

War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the

Struggle for Justice

(New York: Crown Publishers, 1998).

On the Rome Statute and the International Criminal

Court, see http://www.un.org/law/icc/index.html. On

U.S. opposition to the court, see Neil A. Lewis, “U.S.

Rejects All Support for New Court on Atrocities,”

New

York Times

, May 7, 2002.

88 On broad patterns of complicity in the Holocaust,

see Frank Bajohn,

“Aryanisation” in Hamburg: The Eco-

nomic Exclusion of Jews and the Conﬁscation of Their Property

in Nazi Germany

(New York: Berghahn Books, 2002);

Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel (eds.),

Networks

of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business, and the Organiza-

tion of the Holocaust

(New York: Berghahn Books, 2005);

and Robert Gellately,

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion

in Nazi Germany

(New York: Oxford University Press,

2001). On subsequent Holocaust trials, see Rebecca

Wittmann,

Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press,

2005); Devin O. Pendas, The

Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial,

1963-1965: Genocide, History,

and the Limit of the Law

(New York: Cambridge University

Press,

2006); Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The

Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity

(New

York: Columbia University Press,

1992); and Hannah

Arendt,

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of

Evil

(New York: Viking Press, 1963).

89 For an introduction to these issues, see Martha

Minow,

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History

after Genocide and Mass Violence

(Boston: Beacon Press,

1998); Minow (ed.), Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory,

Law, and Repair

(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

95 endnotes

2002); Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and

Negotiating Historical Injustices

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press,

2000); John Torpey (ed.), Politics and the

Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices

(Lanham: Rowman

& Littleﬁeld,

2003); Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Janna

Thompson,

Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and

Historical Injustice

(Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002);

and Nigel Biggar (ed.),

Burying the Past: Making Peace and

Doing Justice After Civil Conﬂict

(Washington: Georgetown

University Press,

2001).

90 United Nations High Commission on Human

Rights,

Draft Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to

a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Violations of Interna-

tional Human Rights and Humanitarian Law

, 2003. On the

historical sources of the recent rise of reparations demands

around the world, see Torpey,

Making Whole What Has

Been Smashed

, pp. 1-41.

91 Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint: The Fray-

ing of America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

For a defense of retrospective justice, see Roy L. Brooks,

Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Repara-

tions

(Berkeley: University of California, 2004). For analy-

ses of the historical circumstances giving rise to the current

concern with past injustice, see Charles Maier, “A Surfeit

of Memory? Reﬂections on History, Melancholy, and

Denial,”

History and Memory 5, 2 (1993), pp. 13-51; and

Torpey,

Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, op. cit.

92 For a reader on several recent cases, see Roy L.

Brooks (ed.),

When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy

Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice

(New

York: New York University Press,

1999). The Japanese

American internment case is discussed below.

93 Christian Pross, Paying for the Past: The Struggle

Over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).