• Published on Thursday, August 30, 2001 in the Toronto Star [here]

Yale's History Tied to Slavery: Study
Paper heats up debate over U.S. reparations

 Ceremonies now underway to honor Yale University's 300th anniversary have instead sparked renewed debate about the most shameful chapter in American history.

Three Yale PhD students have published a highly praised research paper explaining how slave-trading profits helped found the university, its first scholarship, its first professorship and its library. They also found that eight of Yale's 12 colleges are named after slave owners.

Yale, whose anniversary celebrations end Oct. 5, has in recent years become a leader among U.S. universities in researching slavery and its effects, but that hasn't slowed growing debate about slave reparations.

``We were certainly hoping that this essay would put Yale in a leadership role in the national discussion of reparations and the history of slavery. We see that happening . . . but the release of the essay I see as barely stage one,'' co-author Antony Dugdale, who received a masters degree in religious studies from Montreal's McGill University in 1993, told The Star.

Some lobbyists for reparations are dismayed that the U.S.'s highest ranking black political leader, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has chosen not to attend the United Nations conference on racism which begins tomorrow in Durban, South Africa.

But Kalonji Olusegun of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America said he's not disappointed by the boycott because the Bush administration is so adamantly opposed to reparations it has been quietly threatening other countries who raise the issue with trade retaliation.

``I think it will be a better conference without them (U.S. government officials). I think it will be less intimidating and countries will feel more free to speak out about what's happening. . . . We're hoping for a breakthrough,'' Olusegun said in an interview.

Many believe African-Americans deserve the same model of financial remuneration that both Canada and the U.S. offered to citizens of Japanese descent interned during World War II.

Other black activists say reparations funds should not go to individual descendants but toward government programs aimed at closing the educational, social and health gaps between blacks and whites in America.

``African-Americans alive today continue to be victims of enslavement. It never ended. It only ended in the institution . . . we still have schools within inner-city communities with ceilings coming down . . where they have second-class citizenship,'' said Adjoa Aiyetoro, an American University law professor.

Randall Robinson, president of the TransAfrica Forum and author of the book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, also argues that the descendants of slave owners, be they individuals, corporations or institutions such as Yale, have continued to benefit from slavery and the racial disadvantages it institutionalized in America.

Still, the idea of cash payments for back wages owed to slave descendants has become ``so hip, so hot,'' according to Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years and a host on National Public Radio. He argues cash would ``sell out future generations for a one-time payment that would end all white guilt, all sense of a common American family dealing with the tragedy of racial inequality.

``Reparations would make all black people beggars at the American banquet,'' Williams wrote in an essay in this month's GQ magazine.

Slavery ended in America 138 years ago when Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation.

The study by PhD students Dugdale, J.J. Fueser and J. Celso de Castro Alves detailed how slave profits first funded Yale, the alma mater of the 41st and 43rd presidents - the Bushes, father and son.

George Berkeley, for whom Yale's Berkeley College is named, donated a slave-worked Rhode Island plantation to the school, its profits used to fund the first Yale scholarship. Yale's Trumbull College, Stiles College, Silliman College and Calhoun College and other buildings are named after slave owners.

Dugdale and his fellow Yale students (their essay is at http://www.yaleslavery.org ) are focused on the school's response to its history of slave-trade profiteering as a model for a national or international response.

``What we tried to do with the essay is lay out the historical facts and hand that over to the community. We want to see how the community responds.''

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