How slavery helped universities grow

When Craig Steven Wilder first began digging around in university archives in 2002 for material linking universities to slavery, he recalled recently, he was “a little bashful” about what he was looking for, writes Jennifer Schuessler for The New York Times.

Now, more than a decade later, Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a new book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities, which argues provocatively that the nation’s early colleges, alongside church and state, were “the third pillar of a civilisation based on bondage”.

He also has a lot more company in the archives. Since 2003, when Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown University, announced a headline-grabbing initiative to investigate that university’s ties to slavery, scholars at William and Mary, Harvard, Emory, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and elsewhere have completed their own studies.
Full report on The New York Times site