Slavery and bathos at Brown and Yale
/LAST SPRING, Yale finally banished a painting of its 17th Century namesake, Elihu Yale, because it depicted him with a dark-skinned servant who wears a shiny metal collar and kneels before him. The overtones had made the portrait toxic in the 1990s, but for 10 years, Yale resisted sporadic demands to remove it from its corporation room, where trustees meet.
Yale was also getting peppered for having dormitory names - Yale calls them "residential colleges"- honoring slave-owning alumni, John Calhoun, the South's famed orator, for one. The agitation stemmed largely from an unofficial history of Yale slavery ties, written by a trio of Yale graduate students in 2001. It had made Yale - rather than the more likely Brown - the North's restive campus in the long drive for reparations for African-Americans.
Yale's president, Richard Levin, felt the North's slavery involvements were "simply a fact of history" in an American past full of embarrassments, and supporters of keeping the names of the residential colleges included key black alumni: Henry Louis Gates Jr., the writer and Harvard's Africana head, who had lived at Calhoun, and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, then head of the Yale Corporation and now law-school dean at Howard University.
Yale kept the tarnished names, and declined to launch its own official search for whatever entanglements exist.
Brown's entanglement was more provocative - its namesake Browns owned slave ships and slaves - yet its campus remained free of agitation, except once and then in reverse order. David Horowitz, a West Coast conservative gadfly, bought an ad in the Brown Daily Herald in March 2001 citing 10 reasons to oppose reparations. A minority coalition, furious when BDH editors declined to apologize or make amends, then confiscated a BDH press run, intensifying the turmoil. The issues of free speech and minority grievances triggered wide national debate.
Read MoreYale was also getting peppered for having dormitory names - Yale calls them "residential colleges"- honoring slave-owning alumni, John Calhoun, the South's famed orator, for one. The agitation stemmed largely from an unofficial history of Yale slavery ties, written by a trio of Yale graduate students in 2001. It had made Yale - rather than the more likely Brown - the North's restive campus in the long drive for reparations for African-Americans.
Yale's president, Richard Levin, felt the North's slavery involvements were "simply a fact of history" in an American past full of embarrassments, and supporters of keeping the names of the residential colleges included key black alumni: Henry Louis Gates Jr., the writer and Harvard's Africana head, who had lived at Calhoun, and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, then head of the Yale Corporation and now law-school dean at Howard University.
Yale kept the tarnished names, and declined to launch its own official search for whatever entanglements exist.
Brown's entanglement was more provocative - its namesake Browns owned slave ships and slaves - yet its campus remained free of agitation, except once and then in reverse order. David Horowitz, a West Coast conservative gadfly, bought an ad in the Brown Daily Herald in March 2001 citing 10 reasons to oppose reparations. A minority coalition, furious when BDH editors declined to apologize or make amends, then confiscated a BDH press run, intensifying the turmoil. The issues of free speech and minority grievances triggered wide national debate.
