Slavery and Justice: Report on the Brown University Committee on Slavery and Justice: My Perspective

In 2003 Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons and the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice took a monumental step in the University’s history. That year, President Simmons chartered the Steering Committee that began investigating Brown’s historical relationship to slavery in the Americas. However, the scope of the investigation encompassed more than just identifying Brown’s direct or indirect ties to slavery; the investigation also pondered the meaning of repairing the legacy of hatred, inequality, and “dark liberty”, produced by slavery, as a University and as a nation. The Brown Report lays out a clear and concise argument for some form of reparations due in the United States and begins the dialogue the United States needs in order to tend its wounds from slavery.
The first section of the Brown Reports elucidates Brown’s direct profit from slavery. The connection to slavery courses so deep as to be bound to the University’s namesake, Nicholas Brown. The Steering Committee’s continuous emphasis on Rhode Island’s direct role in the Triangle Slave Trade and indirect profit from textile manufacturing reinforces a motive for the investigation. The emphasis also serves to dampen arguments against investigations, arguments founded on the façade that slavery was not a Northern problem.
While establishing the historical context, the Steering Committee does not fail to omit the contradictions in Rhode Island’s position on slavery. The Report examines the robust profits and, direct or indirect, perpetuation of slavery and the contradicting abolitionist movement. The contradictions explicated during this section of the report are important because they become the microcosm of nation’s schizophrenia and contradictory position on the slavery.
The nation’s schizophrenia towards liberty persisted long after January 1, 1863. Since that date, although terribly slow moving and often incomplete, the nation has taken a number of steps forward to its creed “liberty and justice for all.” Arguably the most controversial step involves the reparations question. The Steering Committee keenly addresses the meaning of reparations and reparative justice in a global perspective as well as within the United States. The global perspective of the Report allows readers to see more clearly the United State’s indecisiveness and failure to come to terms with its past. The Report highlights numerous cases, including the perpetual push for an apology from the Japanese government to Korean “comfort women”, where the United States urged foreign nations to offer some form of reparation. However, no president of the United States nor body of Congress has delivered a formal apology, in the United States, for the sins of slavery. This speaks to the problems the United States faces today with copious injustices faced by millions; the Steering Committee deserves commendation for including this in their official Report.
In balance, the Steering Committee Report was protracted in its lead up to Affirmative Action, one of the most controversial forms of reparation. In truth, the Report lacked a comprehensive discussion of Affirmative Action. Understandably the Report is restricted in what it can cover in only 82 pages, however, the nature of Affirmative Action as a staple political, judicial, and social concern in the United States, it merited more than a single line mention in the Report. Preferably, the Steering Committee can amend the Report to include a brief history of the origin of Affirmative Action and the implications today, notably in the judicial arena.
A second topic the Steering Committee failed to expound upon are the injustices today that have a direct link to slavery. If the Steering Committee examined and discussed these links in the Report from Brown, a prestigious University, the force and credibility of the University would be thrown behind this acknowledgement. People around the nation would see, hear, read and be encouraged to examine and repair those links.
The Steering Committee organized the “Concluding Thoughts” and “Recommendation” sections of the well. Readers access the Committee’s finial ideas without having to wade through cumbersome rhetoric. Likewise, the “Recommendations” section details the steps Brown can take for reparative justice in clear succinct language. Furthermore, the Committee’s recommendations are achievable and lie within the values espoused by the institution. The Steering Committee recommendations are simple, yet complex. For example, the recommendations for” acknowledgement” and to “tell the truth in all its complexity” are easily said and possibly easily done, however, the emotions and expectations of the University that come after those actions are more difficult to deal with. Other recommendations such as “memorialization” and “create a center for continuing research on slavery and justice” are more tangible but no less provocative in what they symbolize or the conversations they generate.
Finally, the “single theme [that] runs through this report…is education”. Education is also the theme of this internship. The motto of the Sunflower County Freedom Project sums up the theme in the report and in the United States, “Education is the seed of freedom”. For hundreds of years in the United States Whites kept education, and thus power, away from Blacks. Even today Blacks continue to be disadvantaged in access to quality education; poverty perpetuates the problem of access but does not rely on race alone as a standard. The best means to repair injustice is to keep it from haunting future generations. Let the skeletons in the closet see light, let the history be written and transferred between generations, and let the posterity have to suffer less than each generation before it.

-Radical.

Click the photo to access the Brown Report