A RESOLUTION CALLING UPON BROWN TO ATTEMPT TO IDENTIFY AND REPARATE THE DESCENDANTS OF SLAVES ENTANGLED WITH THE UNIVERSITY

Author: Jason Carroll, UCS President

Cosponsors: Jai’el Toussaint, Zanagee Artis, Samra Beyene, Ana Boyd, Renee White, Zane Ruzicka

WHEREAS in 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice charged to investigate and prepare a report about the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade;

WHEREAS, the final report by the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, presented to President Simmons in October of 2006, found that:

I. University Hall, Brown University’s oldest building, according to construction records, was built by enslaved workers (13)1;

II. the school’s first president, Rev. James Manning, arrived in Rhode Island accompanied by a personal slave (12);

III. “many of the assets that underwrote the University’s creation and growth derived, directly and indirectly, from slavery and the slave trade” (13);

IV. the Brown family of Providence, the University’s namesakes, were slave owners (14);

V. in 1736, James Brown sent the first ever slave ship to sail from Providence, the Mary, to Africa, which carried a cargo of enslaved Africans to the West Indies before returning to Rhode Island with slaves for the Brown family’s own use (15);

VI. the Brown family actively participated in the purchasing and selling of captives individually and in small lots, usually in the context of provisioning voyages (15);

VII. in 1759, Obadiah Brown, Nicholas Brown, and John Brown, along with a handful of smaller investors, dispatched another ship to Africa which trafficked enslaved Africans before being captured by the French (15)

1 All numbered references are to the 2006 Slavery and Justice report by the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. VIII. in 1764, the year of Brown’s founding, the Sally was commissioned by Nicholas Brown and Company, a business controlled by all four Brown brothers, Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses. The Sally was to “make passage to the Windward Coast of Africa, to exchange goods for slaves, and to sell those slaves to best advantage in the West Indies;” (16)

IX. the Brown brothers additionally asked the captain of the Sally to bring “four likely young slaves,” boys of fifteen years or younger, back to Providence for the family’s own use (16);

X. the Brown family’s commissioned ship “acquired a cargo of 196 Africans” of which dozens of enslaved Africans were murdered (16);

XI. Nicholas Brown, Joseph Brown, and Moses Brown maintained trade in slave produced goods and supplied other Rhode Island merchants mounting African slaving voyages (16);

XII. begining in 1769, John Brown sponsored at least four African slaving voyages over the course of a quarter century, trafficking hundreds of Africans into slavery (17);

XIII. John Brown was a “furious” proponent of slavery in public forums, fought against abolition movements, and successfully lobbied Congress for pro-slavery legislation (21, 23) ;

XIV. John Brown was the first Rhode Islander and first American prosecuted in federal court for illegal slave trading (22)

XV. John Brown was acquitted in a trial in which the presiding judge, Benjamin Bourn, and the federal prosecutor, Ray Greene, were both members of the University Corporation and allies of Brown (22);

XVI. as the nation’s first Baptist college, Brown’s student population included a large number of southern students, many of whom came from prominent slaveholding families (25);

BE IT RESOLVED the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) calls upon the University to make all possible efforts to identify the descendants of enslaved Africans who were entangled with and/or afflicted by the University; BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED UCS calls upon the University to include in this search both the descendants of slaves who built the University, descendants of slaves owned, trafficked, or sold by the Brown family, and descendants of slaves of University administrators and benefactors;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED UCS calls upon the University to provide preferential admissions to any identified descendants;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED UCS calls upon the University to examine the reparations plans of Georgetown University, Virginia Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and other higher education institutions formerly entangled in the slave trade when crafting additional aspects of the Brown reparations plan;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED UCS calls upon the University to allocate monies for scholarship and monetary reparations for any descendants identified;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED UCS calls upon the University to additionally consider obligations, such as preferred admission, to Native American groups indigenous to the land Brown occupies such as the Narragansett.

Introduced and adopted by the UCS General Body on the week of February 24th, 2021.