CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SLAVERY AND JUSTICE
A Place to Learn
UNIVERSITY HALL
University Hall is the oldest building on campus, constructed on land belonging to Narragansett and Wampanoag Peoples. There has yet to be a significant undertaking from Brown University concerning the history of its role in Native land dispossession and its part in excluding and harming the Native nations of this area. Confronting the legacies of racial slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade require addressing the simultaneous processes of settler-colonization, genocide, displacement, and erasure that continue well into the present.
There is documented evidence that enslaved labor was used to build University Hall. The building records list the names of enslaved People such as Pero and Abraham who built University Hall. Job, a Native man, and Mingow, a free African, are also listed in the building records. While we do not know their status of enslavement at the time that University Hall was built, if these two men were “free,” what does it mean for them to contribute their labor to a building that they would not have been allowed to enter?
The permanent exhibition, Hidden in Plain Sight: American Slavery & the University, housed within University Hall details the Brown family’s and Brown University’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This exhibition is part of a larger exhibition curated by the Center in 2016 titled Black Mechanics: The Making of an American University and a Nation.
To see the Hidden in Plain Sight catalogue please visit the exhibition’s page on the CSSJ website or pick up a copy of the brochure during your stop at University Hall to learn more.
THE SALLY
In 1764, the year of Brown’s founding, the Brown Brothers sponsored a slaving voyage to the coast of West Africa. Esek Hopkins, the first Commander in Chief of the Continental (eventually the U.S.) Navy, was chosen to command the voyage on the ship Sally. Out of 196 enslaved Africans captured during the voyage, 109 died.
After the disastrous voyage of the Sally, John Brown would continue sponsoring other slaving voyages, even after the federal government outlawed Americans from trafficking enslaved people to ports outside the United States. While his brother Moses would become a public activist against the trade, Moses Brown invested heavily in the creation of local textile mills, which relied on the cotton picked by enslaved people. These textile mills helped spur the Industrial Revolution in Rhode Island, and many would manufacture “Negro Cloth” a rough material sold to plantation owners to clothe enslaved people.
THE HOPKINS BROTHERS
Esek Hopkins, the slave ship captain hired by the Brown brothers, and his brother Stephen Hopkins, a multi-time governor of Rhode Island, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Brown University's first chancellor, both owned enslaved people—Esek forced an indentured man, Edward Abbey, to work for him on his slaving voyages. Today, the legacies of the Hopkins brothers are woven into the landscape of the city of Providence. Within the city, Hopkins and Admiral Street named for each brother and both a park and a school that serves predominantly Black and brown youth, bear the name of Esek Hopkins.
On June 18, 2020, the Providence School Board passed a resolution calling on the Providence City Council to change the name of Esek Hopkins Middle School.