Yale Black Alumni Network (YBAN)

YBAN launches survey on race & slavery

Dear Black Alumni,

Our membership has an imperative duty to voice our concerns, particularly in light of events in the recent past that have occurred at Yale including the David Lee campaign controversy, the series of racially-motivated incidents on campus, significant changes to PROP/Cultural Connections, the anti-Affirmative Action protests, and the national publicity surrounding the Yale & Slavery report, and universities' varying degrees of complicity in the slave trade within and beyond the Ivy League.

As a virtual, fast-growing organization, YBAN must find creative methods of sharing its concerns within the group and with the broader Yale community. It is our hope that the results of this survey will be informative and useful, both for our members and others.

To take this anonymous, 28-question survey, please click here. It is important that you complete the entire survey, and knowing that by so doing, future alumni surveys will be significantly shorter and of an increasingly higher quality, based on your candid, constructive criticisms.

You are also invited to suggest other creative methods of sharing our concern within and outside of YBAN by e-mailing us.

Thank you for your involvement and continued support!

Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade

By Pam Belluck
The Washington Post
WashingtonPost.com

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - When Ruth J. Simmons became the president of Brown University nearly three years ago, one striking fact could not be overlooked.

A great-granddaughter of slaves, Dr. Simmons was the first African-American president of an Ivy League university. But the 240-year-old university she was chosen to lead had early links to slavery, with major benefactors and officers of it having owned and traded slaves.

"It certainly didn't escape me, my own past in relationship to that,'' Dr. Simmons said. "I sit here in my office beneath the portrait of people who lived at a different time and who saw the ownership of people in a different way. You can't sit in an office and face that every day unless you really want to know, unless you really want to understand this dichotomy.''

Now, Dr. Simmons, whose office is in a building constructed by laborers who included slaves, has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.

Dr. Simmons has appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice, which will spend two years investigating Brown's historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.

Dr. Simmons, one of 12 children of an East Texas tenant farmer and a house cleaner, said she was motivated by a sense that the multifaceted subject of reparations had too often been reduced to simplistic and superficial squabbles.

``How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies,'' she said, ``so that society learns from it, acknowledges what has taken place and then moves on. What I'm trying to do, you see, in a country that wants to move on, I'm trying to understand as a descendant of slaves how to feel good about moving on.''

Dr. Simmons does not believe that her history will sway the inquiry's results. ``I don't think there can be a person with a better background for dealing with this issue than me,'' she said. ``If I have something to teach our students, if I have something to offer Brown, it's the fact that I am a descendant of slaves.''

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Reparations scholars may name Princeton in lawsuit

By Andrew Bosse
The Daily Princetonian

Reparations scholars may name Princeton in lawsuit

(U-WIRE) PRINCETON, NJ -- When John Witherspoon moved from Scotland in 1768 to assume the presidency of Princeton University, then known as the College of New Jersey, he brought his wife, a 300-book collection and an invigorating leadership style. At the time of his death in 1794, he had listed among his possessions another piece of property: two slaves, each worth $100.

Though slave ownership was legal at the time, a group of lawyers and academics may attempt to file a major reparations lawsuit against the University later this spring for its early ties to slavery. In addition to
Witherspoon, numerous trustees and antebellum-era graduates owned slaves.

In an article published Feb. 21, USA Today reported the Reparations Coordinating Committee -- which includes leading scholars and activist lawyers led by Randall Robinson and Harvard University Law School professor Charles Ogletree -- will file suit against major insurance, railroad and newspaper companies and universities with ties to slavery.

The universities named include Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Brown universities and University of Virginia. The committee, however, has maintained strict secrecy about the exact timing and nature of the lawsuit.

University spokeswoman Marilyn Marks and Peter McDonough, general counsel
for the University, said they knew nothing about the potential lawsuit.

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