Response of Brown University

On April 30, 2003, the University invited 17 members of the Brown community to serve on a steering committee, the purpose of which was to help the campus come to an understanding of the complicated question of the extent to which Brown University benefited from the Rhode Island slave trade. That history, over time, had been clouded by a succession of accounts that gave varying degrees of weight to the founders’ involvement in the trade. As a result, many alumni expressed uncertainty about whether such ties to slavery had actually existed and others asked whether Brown was deliberately concealing its relationship with eighteenth century slave holders and slave traders. The Committee’s charge, then, was to make use of time-honored methods of scholarly inquiry to clarify this history for the benefit of the wider community.