- Published on Thursday, August 30, 2001 in the Toronto Star [here]
Yale's History Tied to Slavery: Study
Paper heats up debate over U.S. reparations
Ceremonies now underway to honor Yale University's 300th
anniversary have instead sparked renewed debate about the most shameful
chapter in American history.
Three Yale PhD students have published a highly praised research paper
explaining how slave-trading profits helped found the university, its
first scholarship, its first professorship and its library. They also
found that eight of Yale's 12 colleges are named after slave owners.
Yale, whose anniversary celebrations end Oct. 5, has in recent years
become a leader among U.S. universities in researching slavery and its
effects, but that hasn't slowed growing debate about slave reparations.
``We were certainly hoping that this essay would put Yale in a
leadership role in the national discussion of reparations and the
history of slavery. We see that happening . . . but the release of the
essay I see as barely stage one,'' co-author Antony Dugdale, who
received a masters degree in religious studies from Montreal's McGill
University in 1993, told The Star.
Some lobbyists for reparations are dismayed that the U.S.'s highest
ranking black political leader, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has
chosen not to attend the United Nations conference on racism which
begins tomorrow in Durban, South Africa.
But Kalonji Olusegun of the National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America said he's not disappointed by the boycott
because the Bush administration is so adamantly opposed to reparations
it has been quietly threatening other countries who raise the issue
with trade retaliation.
``I think it will be a better conference without them (U.S. government
officials). I think it will be less intimidating and countries will
feel more free to speak out about what's happening. . . . We're hoping
for a breakthrough,'' Olusegun said in an interview.
Many believe African-Americans deserve the same model of financial
remuneration that both Canada and the U.S. offered to citizens of
Japanese descent interned during World War II.
Other black activists say reparations funds should not go to individual
descendants but toward government programs aimed at closing the
educational, social and health gaps between blacks and whites in
America.
``African-Americans alive today continue to be victims of enslavement.
It never ended. It only ended in the institution . . . we still have
schools within inner-city communities with ceilings coming down . .
where they have second-class citizenship,'' said Adjoa Aiyetoro, an
American University law professor.
Randall Robinson, president of the TransAfrica Forum and author of the
book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, also argues that the
descendants of slave owners, be they individuals, corporations or
institutions such as Yale, have continued to benefit from slavery and
the racial disadvantages it institutionalized in America.
Still, the idea of cash payments for back wages owed to slave
descendants has become ``so hip, so hot,'' according to Juan Williams,
author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years and a host on
National Public Radio. He argues cash would ``sell out future
generations for a one-time payment that would end all white guilt, all
sense of a common American family dealing with the tragedy of racial
inequality.
``Reparations would make all black people beggars at the American
banquet,'' Williams wrote in an essay in this month's GQ magazine.
Slavery ended in America 138 years ago when Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation.
The study by PhD students Dugdale, J.J. Fueser and J. Celso de Castro
Alves detailed how slave profits first funded Yale, the alma mater of
the 41st and 43rd presidents - the Bushes, father and son.
George Berkeley, for whom Yale's Berkeley College is named, donated a
slave-worked Rhode Island plantation to the school, its profits used to
fund the first Yale scholarship. Yale's Trumbull College, Stiles
College, Silliman College and Calhoun College and other buildings are
named after slave owners.
Dugdale and his fellow Yale students (their essay is at
http://www.yaleslavery.org ) are focused on the school's response to
its history of slave-trade profiteering as a model for a national or
international response.
``What we tried to do with the essay is lay out the historical facts
and hand that over to the community. We want to see how the community
responds.''
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited