USEM HIST 21791/AFST 13184: Slavery and Freedom in the United States

In 2003, Brown University embarked on a deep investigation into its historical relationship to racial slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Brown released its groundbreaking Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2006, confronting and publicly documenting the University’s complex history with the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies of anti-Black racism, racial domination and injustice.

The Columbia University and Slavery project is a research and justice initiative examining Columbia’s connections to the history and legacies of enslavement. The ongoing work aims to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of Columbia’s past, while also helping to inform conversations about the university’s role in the present.

The Georgetown Slavery Archive is a repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery. This project was initiated in February 2016 by the Archives Subgroup of the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation and is part of Georgetown University's Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation initiative. Our research is ongoing.

In the fall of 2007, four Harvard undergraduate students came together in a seminar room to solve a local, but nonetheless significant historical mystery: to research the historical connections between Harvard University and slavery. The findings show that the history of slavery is also local history: Harvard, like most institutions in the United States whose history stretches back to before 1865, had the labor, products, and profits of slavery woven into its very fabric.

As an American institution that is 319 years old, Yale has a complex past that includes associations, many of them formative, with individuals who actively promoted slavery, anti-Black racism, and other forms of exploitation. We have a responsibility to explore this history, including its most difficult aspects; we cannot ignore our institution’s own ties to slavery and racism, and we should take this opportunity to research, understand, analyze, and communicate that history.”

Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of over ninety institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. These schools are focused on sharing best practices and guiding principles as they engage in truth-telling educational projects focused on human bondage and the legacies of racism in their histories.