The Money Behind College Hill

College Hill rises steeply from the Providence waterfront, and at its crown sits one of the oldest universities in the United States. Brown University was chartered in seventeen sixty-four, the seventh college founded in the American colonies, and it arrived in Providence in seventeen seventy when the Brown family, and their brothers, who purchased a four-acre lot and laid the cornerstone of what became University Hall.

The family for whom the university is named was divided on the question of slavery. Moses Brown became an abolitionist. John Brown did not. John Brown was one of the leading slave traders in Rhode Island, and he helped finance the construction of the college on the same wealth he accumulated from the transatlantic trade in human beings. In seventeen ninety-seven, he became the first American tried under the federal Slave Trade Act of seventeen ninety-four, ordered to forfeit his ship, the Hope. He was acquitted but never recovered the vessel.

The institution's full entanglement with the slave trade was formally examined in two thousand and six, when President Ruth Simmons, herself the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, released a document called the Slavery and Justice report. The report documented how Brown had benefited both directly and indirectly from slavery. In response, the university established a Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, built a slavery memorial on campus, and funded a ten-million-dollar endowment for Providence public schools.

The report did not erase the history. It named it. That is a harder thing to do than erasing, and considerably rarer in American higher education.