University of Virginia Archives - Institute of the Black World 21st Century

Exploring Haitian Independence, the original ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement

By IBW21News & Current Affairs

By Sam Bojarski— For more than 200 years, Haiti’s independence story has inspired African-Americans, from Frederick Douglas to Langston Hughes and the Rev. Al Sharpton. “The Haitian Revolution is the original…

February 1, 2021

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American slavery: Separating fact from myth

By IBW21Reparations

By Daina Ramey Berry — People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was all a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Slavery has been in the…

July 8, 2020

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Jesuit statue - Georgetown University campus in Washington.

Reparations mark new front for US colleges tied to slavery

By IBW21Reparations

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…

December 16, 2019

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Virginia Theological Seminary’s reparations effort is part of a larger movement in higher education

By IBW21News & Current Affairs, Reparations

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…

September 17, 2019

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“Halting at Noon,” a wood engraving showing a slave drive through Virginia in the early nineteenth century, 1864

Slavery and the American University

By IBW21Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

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…

February 13, 2018

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