CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SLAVERY AND JUSTICE
A Place to Learn
SLAVERY MEMORIAL
A direct result of the Slavery and Justice Report, the Slavery Memorial was designed by African American sculptor Martin Puryear and installed on Brown’s campus in 2014. It is located by University Hall and in front of Manning Hall, a building named after Brown’s first president, James Manning, who brought an enslaved person with him when he arrived in Rhode Island. Today, Manning Hall houses the Haffenreffer Museum which holds an extensive collection of sacred Native and African belongings. While there is a significant collection of Indigenous material culture at Brown, the Pokanoket Nation and as well as other Indigenous tribes are actively demanding their rights to land in University possession. In September 2017, Brown University entered into an agreement with members of the Pokanoket Nation to transfer a portion of its Bristol property into a preservation trust to ensure the conservation of the land and sustainable access by Native tribes in the region.
The entire economy of Rhode Island was built upon the forced removal of Native People, the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the labor of enslaved Black and Native People. A number of the buildings and streets located around campus bear the names of prominent Rhode Islanders who owned enslaved People or were directly involved in the slave trade, among them: Brown Street; Waterman Street; Hopkins Street; and Admiral Street. Magee Street, named after William F. Magee, a slave trader, was recently renamed in 2017 to Bannister Street in recognition of two prominent 19th-century local Black activists and artists, Edward and Christiana Bannister. The re-naming of Bannister Street forces us to think about the limitations of changing names to paint a picture of progress without acknowledging the uglier and more complicated legacy of slavery and its legacies that must be grappled with in the present. The creation of this permanent memorial to recognize Brown University's and Rhode Island’s relationship to the trans-Atlantic slave trade was designed to serve as a “living site of memory,” inviting reflection and fresh discovery. However, a number of community members have voiced that the plinth’s text leaves much unsaid. The plinth and the memorial are focused on the economics of the slave trade and ultimately do not do the work of humanizing those most impacted by the trade.
The Plinth reads:
This memorial recognizes Brown University’s connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the work of Africans and African-Americans, enslaved and free, who helped build our university, Rhode Island, and the nation.
In 2003 Brown President Ruth J. Simmons initiated a study of this aspect of the university’s history. In the eighteenth century slavery permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, launching over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1808, and scores of illegal voyages thereafter.
Brown University was a beneficiary of this trade.
REFLECTION ON THE MEMORIAL
The plinth makes no note of the Native People who were forcibly removed from their lands and enslaved. It is important to note how this lack of recognition, this lack of naming the violence also enacted on Native People, contributes to the ongoing erasure of Native nations and Peoples that occurs in the present. Multiple high profile products in Rhode Island bear the name of the Narragansett nation, however, profits from these items are not directed to Narragansett Peoples. This co-opting of the Narragansett name obscures the histories and Peoples of the Narragansett nation who still, alongside many other Native nations and People, demand restitution and recognition from Brown University, Rhode Island and the United States.
"Minimizing Memory: Brown's Slavery Memorial" by Brown alumni Malana Krongelb and Justice Gaines.
