Afro-Netizen: Bravo to Brown University

Friday, October 20, 2006

Bravo to Brown University

A Brown University committee has recommended the Boston school open a center for the study of slavery and injustice.

The Committee on Slavery and Justice, which was formed to analyze the schools` 18th century ties to slavery, also recommended Brown build a memorial and step up efforts to recruit minority students from Africa and the West Indies.

Acknowledging that these recommendations are not an attempt to "change the past", the chairperson of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Professor James Campbell, stated that "'we`re not making a claim that somehow Brown is uniquely guilty". This statement is, no doubt, an augur foreshadowing other elite institutions -- educational and otherwise -- internal and public grappling with this centuries-long blight of institutional racism and the poisoned fruit (i.e., ill-gotten and still accumulating wealth) it has produced and so unequitably distributed.

One is left to ask the question: Will it take a person of African descent to ascend to the office of chief executive of any and all institutions that have been financially enriched by their direct and substantive involvement in the U.S. slave trade in the past to provide appropriate reparations to their respective communities and society at large? Or can we hope that any leader in that position who embraces truth, light and reconciliation will have the moral courage to rise to President Ruth Simmons' level of vision and commitment to justice.

To download a PDF of the Committee's full report on this matter, please click here.

To read related new items, please click.

Afro-Netizen on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 10:21 AM in Publisher's blog | Permalink

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Comments

Brown is in Boston? No Providence. before wasting scarce resources on a ridiculous guilt trip, the morons who write this blog should go back to elementary school and learn US geography. You know the USA. Your country, since you haven't moved back to a paradise like Sierra Leone or Liberia. Slavers did blacks a huge favor by removing them from anthole nations in West Africa. But if you don't think so, you can always leave.

Posted by: shull f | Tuesday, November 07, 2006 at 08:49 AM