As the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice prepares to submit its findings almost three years after receiving its charge from President Ruth Simmons, the influence of the committee's work is being felt at other institutions undertaking similar projects across the country.
Brown's slavery and justice committee began its work during a key historical moment when "there was general sense that discussion of race had stalled and individuals were looking for a new way to have some dialogue," said Catherine Manegold, professor of journalism at Emory University and a founder of the university's Transforming Community Project. The TCP aims to look into the history of race at Emory and re-examine the school's current racial climate.
According to Manegold, Brown's example served as a framing tool when Emory decided to start the TCP. Manegold also linked the roots of the TCP to a 2001 symposium at the University of California, Los Angelos in which academics from across the country began to address the contentious issue of reparations.
"It is a question of how to re-initiate responsible conversation on this topic," Manegold said, "and the beauty of Brown's example was the language of needing fact-based dialogue ... around such an emotional subject."
Manegold said she believes the full involvement of Emory's administrators and staff, in addition to faculty, is a key difference from Brown's program. Gary Hauk, vice president and deputy to the president at Emory, described the TCP's first year of programming as a series of "community dialogues," usually centered on an assigned text and designed to "unearth and discuss underlying experiences of race around the campus," usually centered on an assigned text. Hauk projected that over the next year of the plan, participants will be trained in archival research and oral history techniques so they can research the history of race and slavery at Emory.
In the last year of the TCP, participants will use the research to "develop new curricular offerings and to shape our future," Hauk said. The final phase of the project will involve a look at Emory's campus today, including "hiring practices (and) avenues for complaint," Manegold said. Hauk also noted that the connection to Brown's work continues, as Simmons will give an address titled "The University Between Past and Future" as part of this week's "Founder's Week Festival" at Emory.
Financial institutions have also been influenced by Brown's "moral courage and leadership," according to Roy Brooks, professor of law at the University of San Diego. Brooks cited Chase Manhattan Bank and Bank of America as banks that have researched their own ties to slavery, including the use of slaves as collateral for client loans. They have also taken steps to provide reparations in the form of scholarship funds for descendants of slaves. But Brooks called Bank of America's actions "less heartfelt" because the company has not acknowledged that it profited from slavery, only that its original owners owned slaves.
Brown's leadership role in slavery and justice research emerged from necessity and academic duty, said James Campbell, associate professor of history at Brown and chair of the slavery and justice committee. Campbell described universities as ideal settings for "sustained research, contextualization (and) deep immersion in fact and reflection" about the history of race in America.
Campbell also noted that Brown was implicated in the reparations movement by Randall Robinson's book "The Debt," which outlined the University's ties to the slave trade and described Brown as a possible target for a class-action lawsuit.
This development made researching Brown's past a more pressing concern even before Simmons' created the slavery and justice committee, Campbell said.
The Herald reported in November that the committee will likely submit a final report this spring.
"As a university, we purport to be truth-seeking and to draw strings from our pasts and find ourselves participants in communities that exist across time," he said. "We cherish our legacies and seek to hand them down to those who will inhabit this institution after us. Therefore, how could we say 'we'd rather not talk about this?'"
Campbell said he hoped the slavery and justice committee's work would reverberate at other universities, "but it would be presumptuous of us to prescribe to other universities what to do."
Campbell stressed that the intentions of the committee were to attack the "problem of scholarship" spelled out by Simmons in her official charge to the committee, adding that he personally believed that was the best way to go about it.
"People wanted to jump right to the reparations debate without knowing the history," Campbell said, "but with this knowledge (collected by the committee), we can help transform the ground on which political debate takes place."
Brooks praised Brown for "giving the perpetrator of an atrocity an opportunity to reclaim its moral character ... and giving the perpetrator and the surviving victims the opportunity to repair a broken relationship that comes out of the atrocity" - what he called a "forward-looking attitude toward reparations."
Brooks also stressed that he hopes that Brown's next step will include some form of financial reparations and the development of a special admissions programs for students, regardless of color, who commit to working with the black communities of Rhode Island after graduation.
