Harvard was originally built as an 'Indian school', to train 'the smartest' Native Americans to become teachers and missionaries in order to infiltrate and destroy traditional Native American cultures, but very few actually graduated because they often died in the dormitories from illness or abuse. Slaves built these early universities, slaves worked there instead of hired administrative assistants, cooks, laborers, and maintenance people.and slaves were abused by the students at these institutions. I thought it would be about contemporary discourse on race and slavery in the United States, but actually it's about how all the founders of North American universities established in colonial times were all New Englanders who were slave traders and slave owners. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.Įbony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders.

Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors.

Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other.

The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Many of America's revered colleges and universities-from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC-were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color.

In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy. But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution's complex and contested involvement in slavery-setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country.

Ebony and ivy by craig steven wilder