Brown University's Inman Page Black Alumni Council - Metro NY Chapter

Congratulations to IPC Philly's President Thierry Fortune, for winning an Alumni Leadership Award. His award is an award for all of us!

Below, is an excellent commentary by IPC President Preston Tisdale on the report from the Slavery And Justice Committee:



January 17, 2007

Ruth J. Simmons
Office of the President
Brown University
Box 1860
Providence, Rhode Island 02912

Re: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Dear President Simmons:

I wish to offer my strongest applause for your exemplary leadership, which has inspired the creation and the productivity of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice! The Steering Committee has answered your call in a commendable manner and deserves high praise for its groundbreaking deliberations and report. Your leadership has spurred members of the Brown community and beyond to begin to acquire a more truthful understanding of slavery in America. The long-term health of Brown and the nation is dependent on the acquisition of this understanding in conjunction with the necessary follow-up, which must engender commitments by those communities to successfully address the multifaceted configurations and ramifications of this American legacy.

Slavery in America is the most significant aspect of this country’s history to have eluded an appropriate and proper level of widespread scrutiny. Consequently, neither the magnitude of African American contributions toward the prosperity and strength of this nation nor the profundity of the monstrous horrors, inflicted upon African Americans, have been adequately examined and communicated.


The structure of the early European settlements in America was such that their very survival was dependent on the institution of slavery. The Slavery and Justice Report cogently highlights this fact in its discussion of communications between Stephen Hopkins (the person, who served, both, as Governor of the Rhode Island colony and Chancellor of the College of Rhode Island) and British government officials. In his correspondence, Governor Hopkins objected to the imposition of an anticipated duty on imported sugar and molasses. According to the Slavery and Justice Report, he complained that the proposed tax would cripple the Rhode Island economy and destroy the Caribbean provisioning trade and the African slave trade. He warned that “[W]ithout this trade, it would have been and will always be, utterly impossible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist. . .”

The book, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, was an outgrowth of a special slavery edition that appeared in Northeast, the Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant. The special-edition publication was written by veteran journalists, who focused on Connecticut’s slave legacy. However, upon writing the book, they expanded their focus to include slavery, throughout the North, including Rhode Island. In Complicity’s Introduction, authors Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jennifer Frank provided an insight that also resonates, throughout the Slavery and Justice Report:

The history of the United States is typically told backwards, as a means of explaining to members of the current generation how their country grew to be the way it is. In such an account, slavery is a single chapter, a background event limited to one region of the country and overwhelmed by the more recent events of pioneers moving west, railroads spanning the continent, and the great cities growing up around stockyards and steel mills.

A history told frontwards, however, pushes slavery into the foreground, inserting it into nearly every chapter.

The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created, and in the oppression it required.

While it may seem incredible that the depth of the North’s role in slavery is largely unknown to the general public, only since the civil rights movement have many historians themselves begun to recognize how central slavery was to our history.

Filmmaker, Spike Lee and George Washington University Professor James O. Horton have been quoted as saying that slavery in America was not an historical sideshow, it was the main event. One staggering revelation by Professor Horton, which has underscored this fact is that, during the decades, prior to the Civil War, seven-eighths of the world’s cotton was produced by slave labor in the American South. The character of this all-pervasive legacy comes into sharper focus, once the horrors, endured by African Americans, are more closely examined. Page seven of the Slavery and Justice Report contains a chilling fact that provides a revealing glimpse of the horrifying reality of New World slavery; “The average life expectancy of a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation was less than seven years.”

There is no need to begin to delineate specific horrors in this correspondence. Given the correlative aspects of the viciousness, brutality, savagery and hatefulness that accompanied slavery in America and the Caribbean, it is both miraculous and a testament to the incredible strength of the African slaves that any of their descendants currently exist in America.

There is a need, however, to highlight the “peculiarity” of American slavery. On page eight of the Slavery and Justice Report, the following powerful insight was provided:

If American slavery has any claims to being historically “peculiar,” its peculiarity lay in its rigorous racialism, the systematic way in which racial ideas were used to demean and deny the humanity of people of even partial African descent. This historical legacy would make the process of incorporating the formerly enslaved as citizens far more problematic in the United States than in other New World slave societies.

The uniquely American versions of extreme degradation and dehumanization were staples of this nation’s slave system. The accompanying lessons of hatred became deeply imbedded within America’s culture and were very effectively passed on from generation to generation. In fact, the lessons were so efficiently transferred that, in conjunction with slavery, they have exerted a momentous level of influence on this country. Consequently, the devastating impact of slavery and its aftermath continue to reverberate, throughout American society.

The Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice has led the way in signaling the development of a hopeful, new opportunity for Brown University and the nation to attend to the health of this nation. Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, the nation has been at an impasse, regarding the desired direction to address its racial woes.

One of the main reasons for this impasse has been that the preponderance of governmental and institutional initiatives has been undertaken in the absence of a thorough examination of the full context within which racial afflictions have thrived. The Slavery and Justice Report has demonstrated that to chart courses out of America’s racial abyss, close scrutiny of the roots of those afflictions must be fully undertaken. Until complete examinations of the circumstances and conditions that underlie ongoing national pathologies have been undertaken, the effective resolution of these illnesses will remain elusive. Without such examinations, the symptoms will remain targeted for treatment, rather than the illnesses.

The ghosts of slavery have never been exorcised. They have endured and continue to mutate into ever-widening variations of societal dysfunction. Heretofore, many flawed conclusions have been fostered by the truncated analyses of underlying circumstances. Incomplete characterizations of slavery and its aftermath have formed the bases for widespread public misconceptions, ineffective interventions and unfulfilled expectations. To progress in the campaign to cure this nation’s racial pathologies, the American populace must receive the complete picture of these phenomena. Brown University has established a valuable template. It should be replicated and expanded upon, throughout the nation.

To date, many American institutions have chosen to avoid any meaningful review of this painful American legacy. Some have followed this path out of ignorance. Others have chosen this strategy to avoid the extraordinarily shameful nature of this subject and in the hope that it will simply disappear from the national consciousness. Another contingent has been motivated by more sinister inclinations. Whatever, the reasons, the strategy of avoidance has been unhealthy, dangerous and ineffective, at best.

Just as slavery permeated virtually every aspect of American life, the legacy of slavery has long outlasted the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation proclamation. Tragically, it continues to exert a significant corrosive influence on modern American society. The legacy of slavery has afflicted the health of this nation – from the mis-education of African American children to rampant criminal injustice – from economic disadvantage to social inequality.

A great need exists for the careful and thorough examination of a national psychosis that was forged in the sickness of a slave milieu - a psychosis from which this country has yet to extricate itself. The wounds of slavery still exist and the crippling effects of their poisons continue to debilitate American society. They have so contributed to the elevated levels of societal toxicity that it would be unwise to not consider the influence of slavery’s legacy of hatred on a diverse array of national afflictions, including the murderous rampages by white school children, who had been full beneficiaries of the “American Dream”. By now, it should have become painfully clear to most Americans that the truthful, thorough and public examination of their slave legacy is vital to the well-being of all Americans.

It is a credit to Brown University’s and your strong commitments to intellectual honesty that the Slavery and Justice initiative has been undertaken. Through your efforts, a pathway to a new era of hope in America has been identified. A method has been highlighted by which this nation can regain its footing in the quest to overcome its racial dysfunction. A plan of action has been provided that can serve as a prerequisite to the development and implementation of truly effective, curative measures. In this manner, the many permutations of the American slave legacy can finally be neutralized.

The impetus that has been provided by Brown’s Slavery and Justice initiative, has begun to percolate, throughout the nation. This has been an encouraging development, because it signals the possibility of true healing within America. In furtherance of the movement to advance that healing process, I fully support the Steering Committee’s Slavery and Justice Report and I offer the following additional recommendations:

1. The commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade with the launch of a Brown sponsored annual conference on slavery and justice;

2. The full utilization of the alumni network for the presentation of symposia, forums and panel discussions on all aspects of slavery and justice;

3. The establishment of collaborative ventures with other institutions, throughout the nation to advance the quality of discourse and the level of consciousness on all aspects of slavery and justice.

The work of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice has presented the Brown community and the nation with a golden opportunity to take momentous strides towards the attainment of an era, during which the wounds and illnesses, engendered by slavery, can truly begin to heal. To this end, the Inman Page Black Alumni Council and I wish to offer you, the University and the Steering Committee our unwavering support.

Sincerely,



Preston Tisdale
President
Inman Page Black Alumni Council

PT/kar
Cc: Mary-Kim Arnold