Guests
Craig Steven Wilder,
author of the book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Wilder is an MIT professor of American history and has taught at Williams College and Dartmouth College. His previous books include A Covenant with Color and In the Company of Black Men.
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A new book 10 years
in the making examines how many major U.S. universities — Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams and the University of
North Carolina, among others — are drenched in the sweat, and sometimes
the blood, of Africans brought to the United States as slaves. In "Ebony
& Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities," Massachusetts Institute of Technology American history
professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher
education grew up together. "When you think about the colonial world,
until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South,
William & Mary ... The other eight colleges were all Northern
schools, and they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part,
of the merchant economy where the slave traders had come to power and
rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new culture of the
colonies," Wilder says.
Click here to watch part 2 of this interview.
Click here to watch part 2 of this interview.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN:
We turn to a new book 10 years in the making that looks at how some of
the country’s major universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown,
Rutgers, Williams, the University of North Carolina, to name just a
few—are drenched in sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought
here as slaves. The book is called Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. In it, MIT
history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and
higher education grew up together. He writes, "the American campus
stood as a silent monument to slavery." Well, this history is silent no
more. Professor Craig Steven Wilder joins us here in New York.Welcome to Democracy Now!
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about America’s most elite universities. What relation do they have to slavery?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think there are multiple relationships. The first and probably most poignant, most provocative, is the relationship to the slave trade itself. In the middle of the 18th century, from 1746 to 1769—fewer than 25 years, less than a quarter century—the number of colleges in the British colonies triples from three to nine. The original three were Harvard, Yale and William & Mary, and all of a sudden there were nine by 1769. And it triples in that 25-year period. That 25-year period actually coincides with the height of the slave trade. It’s precisely the rise and the elaboration of the Atlantic economy, based on the African slave trade, that allows for this sort of fantastic articulation of new growth of the institutional infrastructure of the colonies.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk specifically about particular universities.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.
DemocracyNow
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