From Professor Alan Gilbert's Blog | Democratic Individuality | The Pequot Massacre | Child Slaves and Harvard
Craig Stephen Wilder’s fine Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of American Universities has followed, with deeper historical research, a path blazed by Ruth Simmons, the first African-American president of Brown, in investigating the origins in slavery and the slave trade of the Ivy League Schools. Wilder discusses 8 Northern schools, and only William and Mary from Virginia as institutions built from and devoted to slaveholding/slave-trading, for instance, merchants composed the Board of Trustees, the colleges avidly recruited wealthy students from the Caribbean, and the like. When Wilder began his research 10 years ago, he found University archivists who had been waiting for someone to ask them. They pushed materials they had long brooded over into his hands...
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