This is the title of the Prologue of a book I learned about this morning. I recommend everybody to read it.
The books's author is Craig Steven Wilder and the title is "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities"
The interview of the author I listened to an hour ago, fascinated me a lot in its complexity with which he covered the subject of the slave trade being a financier of the Ivy League schools. I hope someone will write a review about it, once you have read it in full.
I think it's extremely eye-opening.
Here a summary description of the book from Amazon:
A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution’s complex and contested involvement in slavery—setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown’s troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy.
Many of America’s revered colleges and universities—from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC—were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.
Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.
And here the first paragraphs of the Prologue to the book by the author:
Prologue: A Connecticut Yankee at an Ancient Indian Mound
“Remember me to all my friends and relations — I wish you and others of the family as many as can write to write to me often and tell me about everything and anything,” Henry Watson begged his father, “about everybody and thing I care anything about.” Written from New York in November 1830, where the young man had booked passage on the schooner Isabella to Mobile, Alabama, the letter mixed a premature homesickness with a sense of youthful expectation. Watson was from East Windsor, Connecticut, just north of Hartford, and he was heading south to find work as a teacher in an academy or on a plantation. He carried a packet of introductory letters from his professors at Washington College (Trinity) in Hartford and Harvard College in Cambridge, family friends including Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale College, and his father’s business acquaintances. After graduating from Yale, Silliman had considered a job in the South, and his brother Selleck did leave Yale to become a tutor in Charleston, South Carolina.
College initiated Henry Watson into the slave regimes of the Atlantic world. The founding, financing, and development of higher education in the colonies were thoroughly intertwined with the economic and social forces that transformed West and Central Africa through the slave trade and devastated indigenous nations in the Americas. The academy was a beneficiary and defender of these processes. ......
Here is the interview of the author I heard this morning:
Interview Craig Steven Wilder starts at TC 28:20
Hope someone more appropriate than me would pick up to review this book.