Reparations advocates across the country have applauded the historical value of the final report from the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, but some say the report - especially its recommendations - will not have a significant effect on the descendants of black slaves.
Adjoa Aiyetoro, co-president of the Legal Defense Research and Education Fund of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, said the report's recommendations did not sufficiently focus on black Americans - something she said a targeted scholarship fund, for example, would have accomplished.
In its recommendations, the committee wrote that such a scholarship fund was the most common suggestion it received during nearly three years of research and deliberation. Committee members wrote that a scholarship fund for the descendants of slaves was a "logical suggestion. ... But it is not a recommendation we can make" because of the University's need-blind policy, which accepts students regardless of their ability to pay tuition.
When the committee's formation in the fall of 2003 sparked national media speculation about whether the University might pay such reparations for slavery, President Ruth Simmons dismissed the prospect in a 2004 Boston Globe editorial. She wrote that the committee was not created to discuss "whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome."
Even though the University is need-blind, Aiyetoro said Brown could have called for funds to specifically aid slave descendants from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. She said even though the report recommends increased recruitment of students of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, this does not adequately target black slave descendants.
Though Aiyetoro called the report's effort "commendable," she also said "it could have made a much stronger precedent ... to heal the racial divide."
"I'm concerned that (the report) avoided a discussion of the need to award directly some sort of reparation for (Brown's) historical racism (against blacks)," she said. In addition to her role at NCOBRA, Aiyetoro is also a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and serves as co-chair of the advocacy group Reparations Coordinating Committee.
Deadria Farmer-Paellman, executive director of the Restitution Study Group and an adjunct professor at Southern New England School of Law, agreed that the committee should have recommended scholarships. But unlike Aiyetoro, she said such a fund should be created for any students descended from slaves, regardless of their financial background. The University should increase grants for black students on financial aid rather than requiring them to pay off loans years after they graduate, she added.
The report's recommendation to continue supporting students of color and lower socioeconomic backgrounds is "not (a) significant policy change," said William Darity '74, a professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also serves as the director of the Institute of African American Research.
"I don't see the notion of inclusiveness as some form of compensation for past injustices - those policies adjust problems of exclusivity now," he said.
Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, who serves with Aiyetoro as co-chair of the RCC, said the recommendations were "somewhat underwhelming," though he applauded "the committee's thoroughness."
"(The report) could have gone further," Ogletree said, by formally recommending that other universities follow its lead. As founder and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, Ogletree specializes in civil rights and social justice.
He added that the report's recommendation to further support minority and economically disadvantaged students is "an important start."
Darity agreed that while the report was an important step in the right direction, it does not fully demonstrate how other institutions could analyze their own troubled pasts.
"No single institution like Brown bears isolated responsibility," he said. The report should have made an attempt to create "a national conversation and a national program for compensation," he said, by advocating for House of Representatives Bill 40, sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., which would create a federal commission to study the national legacy of slavery and the possibility of reparations. Conyers has introduced the bill every year since 1989, but it has never left the House Judiciary Committee.
This commitment would have been "relatively painless," but the committee "made a decision that they wanted to steer clear of anything like reparations," Darity said.
But Al Brophy, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and a reparations scholar and advocate, had a far more positive take on the report's potential impact.
"The report itself is a form of reparation," he said, adding that he defined reparations "very broadly."
Several groups will benefit from the report, he said. For one, those who read it will gain a better understanding of Brown's past. Rhode Islanders will gain from Brown's increased commitment to public education. Also, low-income students of color recruited by the University, who otherwise would not have "thought of going to an Ivy League college, or a college at all," will receive access to college education, Brophy said.
He likened the report's potential impact on economically disadvantaged blacks to the GI Bill of Rights, which Brophy said gave thousands of former soldiers college educations after World War II.
But Aiyetoro questioned whether the recommendations miss the target the entire report identifies as most affected by the slave trade - black slaves and their descendants. She said the report's section on the history of reparations is only "trying to placate" reparations activists. Because the report doesn't, in her view, recommend reparations or incorporate the committee's research of the damage done to black slaves, Aiyetoro said the report's discussion of reparations was "gratuitous" and "patronizing."
She especially took issue with the report's expansive view of restorative justice and examination of other ethnic and racial groups.
"They seem to have forgotten (in the recommendations) that the people injured were not white, Latino or Asian," she said, referring to the lack of recommendations specifically targeting blacks.
The report does recommend increased recruitment of students from Africa and the West Indies - areas affected by the transatlantic slave trade. Aiyetoro said that this suggested move was "fine," but the descendants of those most affected by slavery "are here," in the United States.
"Education is important for everyone," but if Brown is to use the report well, it must help the descendants of those who were injured - black slaves, she said.
Despite varying degrees of approval and disappointment, each of the scholars interviewed by The Herald expressed support for the University's endeavor. Their contentions concern its future significance.
"There will always be more left to say," Brophy said. "But I think (the report) is the best work ever written on the issues of reparations of slavery."
Aiyetoro disagreed: "(The report) is an example of how we don't really grab onto the continuing consequences of the past," she said.
