By Carolyn Thompson, AP News — BUFFALO, N.Y. — The promise of reparations to atone for historical ties to slavery has opened new territory in a reckoning at U.S. colleges, which until now have responded with monuments, building name changes and public apologies. Georgetown University and two theological seminaries have announced funding commitments to benefit descendants of the enslaved people who were sold or toiled to benefit the institutions. While…
When Purdue’s president said this, I had to respond because this myth is so pervasive. By G. Gabrielle Starr, The New York Times — In late November, the president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, told students that he will soon “be recruiting one of the rarest creatures in America — a leading, I mean a really leading, African-American scholar.” “Creatures?” a student asked. “Come on.” “It’s a figure of speech. You must have taken some literature,”…
By Sara Weissman, Diverse — Georgetown University recently announced that it would fundraise $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of 247 slaves sold by the school’s Jesuit founders in…
By Ryan Born, The Daily Princetonian — I. “Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.” ― Edward…
By Kelly Heyboer — Princeton Theological Seminary pledged last week to use $27.6 million of its endowment to pay reparations for the school’s historic ties to slavery, believed to be the…
A growing number of schools have started to look into reparations and restitution for descendants of the enslaved. But most of these schools have stopped short of supporting actual funds…
By LaMont Jones, Diverse: Issues In Higher Education — It makes sense that African-American students at Princeton Theological Seminary have issued reparatory requests based on research tying much of the…
By Alex Carp — According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee…