Posted on 06/22/2020 10:32:53 AM PDT by FLT-bird
So as everybody knows now Yale's founder was a slave trader and the family that Brown was named after were slave traders. What about Harvard? What about the others?
P.S. New York is named after James Duke of York...a MASSIVE slave trader.
Harvard is Built on Slavery
Last fall, I took a history seminar entitled Harvard and Slavery. My classmates and I became intimately familiar with the moments in which Harvard could have acknowledged its ties to slavery, but instead remained silent. I was reminded of these moments in light of University President Lawrence S. Bacow’s comments last week, which are part of Harvard’s legacy of racism.
In his biographical portraits, Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley explained “the frequency of slaveholding officers and alumni” by “reminding readers that owning black people was a habit of ‘most prosperous men.’” University President Increase Mather owned an enslaved individual, and often made him run errands for the college. University President Benjamin Wadsworth “owned an enslaved black man named Titus.”
.......This is all to say: Many individuals affiliated with Harvard have connections to slavery and were complicit in its perpetuation.......... Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba will forever be known by the names given to them by an enslaver — they are remembered only by a plaque that remains unnoticed and neglected by Harvard students: a small plaque on the side of Wadsworth House. Do Harvard students even know which building that is?
Harvard has yet to apologize for or even address its perpetuation of slavery and scientific racism, and the fact that through these actions it has perpetuated the idea that black people should be seen as objects.
But wait! There's MOAR!
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2017/09/04/shackled-legacy
Profits from slavery and related industries helped fund some of the most prestigious schools in the Northeast, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.
Early benefactors who gave money to Brown and Harvard, for instance, made their fortunes running slave ships to Africa.......Georgetown could afford to offer free tuition to its earliest students by virtue of the unpaid labor of Jesuit-owned slaves on plantations in Maryland.
"Yale inherited a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships," Wilder says. "It aggressively sought out opportunities to benefit from the slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world."
Harvard was the first institution of higher learning in America, founded in 1636. Slavery and the slave economy thread through the first 150 years of its history. Slaves made beds and meals for Harvard presidents. And many of the school's major donors in its first centuries made their fortunes in industries either based on, or connected to, slavery.
Harvard's ties to slavery were never a secret. Today, however, they're hardly common knowledge on campus and they're generally not reflected in official histories of the university.
That started to change in 2007, when Sven Beckert, a professor of American history, taught a seminar with four Harvard undergraduates. Their mission: dig into the school's archival records to see what traces of slavery they could find. Beckert had been inspired by Simmons' commitment at Brown.
They soon discovered that prominent Harvard figures — including the Puritan Minister Cotton Mather and the Declaration of Independence signatory John Hancock — were slave owners. "In some ways we were surprised by what we found," Beckert says. "Of course, it was ridiculous that we were surprised, because clearly the economy of New England was deeply engaged with the slave economy."
Two things......John Hancock was not merely "a slave owner". He was THE largest slave trader in Massachussetts (and later its governor). Odd how y'all were "surprised". Gee....Southerners have only been telling you for at least 175 years how you were implicated up to your eyeballs in slavery. They knew damned well who they bought those slaves from - and who pocketed all those profits from it.
In fact, Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery, in 1641.
Over time, cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean and the American South entered the mix. Cotton fed the great textile mills owned by the Lowell family of Boston, which had extensive ties to Harvard, including a Harvard president and a prominent professor. Banks in Boston and New York supplied loans to southern plantation owners to buy slaves and seed; northern insurance companies underwrote slave voyages to Africa and the lives of enslaved people.
Enslavement and the slave economy was the road for upward mobility for a lot of white Bostonians in the colonial era, and then the antebellum era. And part of becoming respectable is donating to a place like Harvard.
Scientific racism is another of Harvard's legacies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some Harvard professors proposed scientific theories they said proved the inherent inferiority of black people. Chief among them was Louis Agassiz, the geologist and zoologist often described as one of the "founding fathers" of American science.
Agassiz promoted the idea of polygenism — that the different races descended from different species. Other Harvard scientists propagating scientific theories of white superiority were Nathanial Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and anthropology professor Earnest Hooton.
The work they did contributed greatly to legitimizing slavery in the 19th century and to the discrimination that followed. Harvard really acted as a pioneer and champion of the field of race science.
Anti-slavery activists on the Harvard campus were pariahs for much of the antebellum period. Harvard professors who spoke openly against slavery invited fierce criticism from Boston newspapers and risked losing their jobs. Harvard was directly complicit in slavery from the college's earliest days.
Under pressure from students, the Harvard Law School in 2016 retired its shield — essentially its logo — because it was based on the family crest of an 18th century slave-holding family of Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the first law professorship at Harvard in 1815, described as the most distinguished chair in American legal education. Royall's father was a Caribbean plantation owner who built the family fortune trading in sugar, rum and slaves.
Georgetown
By the time the Jesuit priests of Maryland founded Georgetown College in 1789, they were among the biggest slave owners in the colony.
With several tobacco plantations scattered across Maryland, the Catholic order owned at least 200 slaves.
Georgetown also directly employed slave labor, says Rothman, citing the school's early ledgers showing rented or hired enslaved people.
By the 1810s, the Jesuits' tobacco plantations failed, and Georgetown was in debt. For some 20 years, the priests debated whether to free their slaves, keep them as part of their religious stewardship or sell them.
The Maryland Jesuits decided to sell 272 men, women and children — virtually their entire slave community — to two planters in Louisiana. They were paid $115,000, roughly $3 million in current dollars. The money helped pay off Georgetown's debts. In 1838, the enslaved people were divided and sent by ship to Louisiana.
Princeton
https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-slavery-holding-the-center
Princeton’s first nine presidents personally owned slaves at some point in their lives; eight of these men lived at the President's House. At least five Princeton presidents who served between 1756 and 1822 owned enslaved people who lived, worked—and on one occasion were auctioned off—at the President’s House on campus. During this period, the President’s House was the center of slavery at Princeton and enslaved people lived at the President’s House until at least 1822. One professor owned a slave as late as 1840.
One of Princeton's Presidents, John Witherspoon, shored up the University’s post-Revolutionary War finances with money from slave interests. New Jersey did not fully abolish slavery until 1865. Connecticut, where Yale is based, did not abolish slavery until 1854.
Columbia
https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/1-kings-college-and-slavery
The fifth college founded in Britain’s North American colonies, King’s College, Columbia’s direct predecessor, opened its doors in July 1754 on a beautiful site in downtown New York City with a view of New York harbor, New Jersey, and Long Island. Not far away, at Wall and Pearl Streets, stood the municipal slave market. But more than geographic proximity linked King’s with slavery. One small indication of the connection appeared in the May 12, 1755 issue of the New-York Post-Boy or Weekly Gazette. The newspaper published an account of the swearing-in ceremony for the college governors, who took oaths of allegiance to the crown administered by Daniel Horsmanden, a justice of the colony’s Supreme Court. The same page carried an advertisement for the sale of “two likely Negro Boys and a Girl."
From the outset, slavery was intertwined with the life of the college. Of the ten men who served as presidents of King’s and Columbia between 1754 and the end of the Civil War, at least half owned slaves at one point in their lives. So did the first four treasurers.
That slavery, from the outset, was a significant feature of the life of King’s College should not occasion surprise. King’s and Columbia have always been powerfully affected by the city around them and slavery had been a presence since the earliest settlement of New Amsterdam. In the eighteenth century, New York, became an important trading center in Britain’s slave-based New World empire.
No social stigma attached to the buying and selling of slaves. Slave auctions took place at many venues in the city, including wharves owned by major merchants, who imported entire shipments from the Caribbean and, beginning in the 1740s, directly from Africa. Lesser traders imported small numbers of slaves along with other goods. Advertisements for the sale of slaves and seeking the capture of slaves who had run away appeared regularly in the city’s newspapers. The export of foodstuffs, livestock, and lumber to the West Indies via New York City and the import and sale of goods produced by slaves in the Caribbean, notably sugar, rum, and molasses, formed the “linchpin” of the colony’s mercantile economy. Prominent New Yorkers, much of whose wealth derived either from slave trading or from commerce in goods produced by slaves, gave crucial financial support.
Penn
https://www.thedp.com/article/2018/06/penn-slavery-update-upenn-philadelphia-trustees
Penn has announced a range of significant findings into the University's history with slavery. In a statement dated June 28, the University wrote that 75 of Penn's former trustees were slave owners, including Penn’s first Provost, William Smith. The University also paid a Penn professor for work done by an enslaved man whom he owned, and sent faculty members to raise money from slave-owning families.
"In this and other ways, the labor of enslaved people was used to support and care for Penn faculty and students," the statement read.
In 2016, after Georgetown University publicly acknowledged the university's own connection to the slave trade, Penn Director of Media Relations Ron Ozio told The Philadelphia Tribune that “Penn has explored this issue several times over the past few decades and found no direct University involvement with slavery or the slave trade."
Earlier this year, an undergraduate student research study supported by Penn's History Department found that many of the University's founding trustees had substantial connections to the slave trade. In this "Penn Slavery Project," the students, led by Penn History Professor Kathleen Brown, found that out of the 28 trustees they investigated, 20 of them owned slaves.
Penn president Amy Gutmann said in a statement that "no fewer than 75 of the university's early trustees owned at least one enslaved person" and that the work of slaves was used to support Penn faculty and students. Its medical school faculty engaged in "racial pseudoscience," she said, citing findings from a university committee. This was a profoundly painful and odious part of our nation's history," Gutmann said. "No segment of American society or institution founded during the 18th century, including the University of Pennsylvania, escaped its scourge. Far from it."
Included in the findings was that Penn's first provost, William Smith, was among the 75 early trustees (out of 121) who owned slaves. But the ties ran deeper.
"For 13 years, from 1757 to 1770, the university's trustees reimbursed Ebenezer Kinnersley, Penn's first professor of English and oratory, who also was a dormitory steward, for the work of an enslaved man that he owned," Gutmann said. "In this and other ways, the labor of enslaved people was used to support and care for Penn faculty and students.
One medical school faculty member, John Morgan, owned at least one slave and traveled to Jamaica to seek funds from families who owned slaves, the report found. Medical school faculty, under dean William Horner, were instrumental in promoting "racial pseudoscience," she said.
Hey congrats y'all! It only took you 175 years to finally come clean and admit that what Southerners had been saying about how YOU profited directly from slavery was true. Isn't it time for these Yankee institutions to disgorge some of their unjust enrichment from slavery?
Harvard's endowment is worth $40 billion.
Yale's endowment is worth $29 billion.
Princeton's endowment is worth $25 billion
Penn's endowment is worth $14 billion.
Columbia's endowment is worth $11 billion
Their endowments should be confiscated and handed over to BLM.
Nothing is untouched. Sell all names to the highest corporate bidder.
There's your reparations, right there.
And change the name of the town that Princeton is in named after King William III, Prince William of Orange of the House of Nassau. Both the Dutch and the British were involved in the slave trade.
Never happen.
The ONLY liberal standard is a double one.
This will not be solved until CW-II gets hot and we end it one way or the other. Sorry, but dat’z da truth.
You can be sure BLM, Inc. is getting a share of that loot.
That just gives the money to the Rats. Give it to Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army. Or better, turn it into vouchers for private school education.
Don’t forget Stanford!
But, I'm sure Stanford is on board with BLM, Inc., so, yes, its endowment (if it has one) should go to reparations.
Disestablish Georgetown and use the assets to pay reparations. Do you have any idea how much better of the nation will be without graduates of Georgetown with masters degrees in foreign policy and public administration. These guys are just greased and ready to slide into the swamp writing white papers in defense of swamp activities.
Their endowments should be turned into cash and burned in a bonfire—because of all the white guys on the currency!
This sort of thing will backfire as patently cheap shots eventually do. It will be seen by the students for what it is.
Why smear a foe with a faux argument, when you can answer a present day foe with an argument based on their totally flawed contemporary argument?!!
Let’s See:
Change Harvard’s name to Obama College
Change Yale’s name to Web DuBois
Change Princeton’s name to MLK Boulevard
Change Columbia’s name to Jemima University
Change Georgetown’s name to College of the Wheat
Change Penn’s name to Snoop William William
I’m a Southerner. What do you think Leftists have been doing for the last 30 years?
We had several decades of reconciliation after the War with Spain, and then the hate mongers began the build up to the present hysteria.
Do you really want to change the discussion to cancel the movement for genuine good will instead of mutual demonization?
Who is putting Georgetown into the Ivy League? And what about Dartmouth (Indians), Brown and Cornell?
I’m a Hobart grad, Cornell is already beneath my dignity
I said what I meant....
Stanford in California..( I didn’t say anything about Ivy League)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.