Friday, November 29, 2013

Ebony and Ivy: University Slavery (video)

Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow.org
This shocking conversation with Prof. Wilder continues in Part II. The extended interview with the MIT American history professor examines slaves in the nation’s elite schools.

Elite universities in America were built on slaves? An MIT professor and author of a new book, which has been 10 years in the making, examines how many major U.S. universities -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams, and UNC, among others -- are drenched in the blood and sweat of Africans forcibly brought to the United States as slaves.

 
In Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities," Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) American history Professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher education grew up together. 
 
"When you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South, William & Mary... The other eight colleges were all Northern schools. And they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy where the slave traders had come to power and rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new culture of the colonies," Wilder says. More


Continuing the conversation on slavery, Democracy Now! is joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne documented her roots in the film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North."

It reveals how her family, the DeWolfs based in Rhode Island, was once the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. And it continued even after slavery was abolished by furnishing human slaves offshore, where it remained legal.

After the film aired on PBS in 2008, Browne went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery. More

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