7 Things Connected To Slavery: Businesses, Schools, Brands, National Blgds., Prominent Figures
"Here are 7 things you probably didn't know were connected to slavery." By Amir Vera, CNN, July 19, 2020. EXCERPTS:
(CNN) As protesters across the United States continue calling for an end to police brutality and racial injustice, organizations are coming to terms with their racist histories. Throughout the South, monuments and flags celebrating the Confederacy are being taken down. Companies like Mars and Quaker Oats are planning to change or retire racist brand characters like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. And popular music groups such as Lady Antebellum and The Dixie Chicks -- now Lady A and The Chicks -- have changed their names.
But in a country where enslaved Black people were so essential in its rise to global power, it's impossible to stamp out every link to its painful history. Slavery has marked everything from the US Capitol to the alcohol Americans consume. *Here are seven institutions that many people may not know are linked to slavery:
1. NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY: One of the largest life insurance companies in the US has admitted that their predecessor company insured the lives of enslaved people for their owners. In 2001 New York Life provided the New York Public Library its archival records containing insurance policies sold to slave owners. "Our predecessor company, Nautilus Insurance Company, sold policies on the lives of enslaved persons between 1846-1848," the company said on its website. "We have been open and transparent about this brief and regrettable period of our history, with the Nautilus sale of slave policies covered in news accounts and books dating back to 1895."
Nautilus insured more than 500 people "either identified as enslaved persons or from the records are likely to have been enslaved" and paid the claims of 15 of those who died, according New York Life. "We have made clear through our words and our actions for many years that our predecessor company's involvement with slavery is a stain on our history that we can never forget. We are committed to fostering a greater understanding of slavery in America and supporting the Black community," New York Life said on its website. A company spokesperson told CNN that while New York Life cannot change its history, its long-standing recognition of that history has helped shape its commitment to the Black community.
2. YALE UNIVERSITY: Yale University is named after Elihu Yale, a former slave trader. Amid racial injustice protests across the country, the hashtag #CancelYale began trending in June. It began with a bulletin on 4chan- the online message board that frequently features extremist content- according to the Yale Daily News. It then gained steam after Jesse Kelly, host of a nationally syndicated show tweeted that Yale University was named after slave trader Elihu Yale..While the motivation behind the hashtag may have been to troll liberals and cancel culture, there is some truth behind Yale's namesake. Elihu Yale was a slave trader who profited from the sale of human lives. The school's president told the Yale Daily News in June that there has been no consideration in changing the school's name...
Yale has also addressed a building named after a leader who supported slavery. In 2017, after months of campus protests, the school changed the name of one of its undergraduate residential colleges to Grace Hopper College from Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun, a white supremacist who called slavery a "positive good."
Many US universities also have ties to slavery. Harvard and Princeton had presidents who owned enslaved people. At public universities like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, enslaved people worked on campus or helped build campuses. Some schools, like Georgetown University, sold enslaved people to pay off debts and keep the school running.
3. CSX TRANSPORTATION:...Read More, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/us/us-slavery-connections-trnd/index.html
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* RELATED: "Ebony and Ivy" Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities.' By Craig Steven Wilder. Book Review by Manisha Sinha, Winter 2013-14, Columbia Magazine. - Excerpts:
The connection between slavery and the early histories of some of America’s most elite colleges and universities has long been known, and came to particular prominence after 2003, when Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, commissioned a committee to pursue the subject. But the general public has largely remained in the dark. With his eye-opening book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, MIT history professor Craig Steven Wilder ’94GSAS seeks to change that. He argues that some of the nation’s oldest institutions, Columbia included, played a major role in the extermination of indigenous populations and the enslavement of people of African descent from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Furthermore, the establishment and growth of these institutions were dependent on wealth accrued from the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, while their professoriates and administrations provided intellectual cover. This book is nothing short of an exposé of what we would today call higher education’s historical crimes against humanity.
Some of the earliest colleges in the British American colonies- Harvard, the College of William and Mary, Yale, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and Codrington in Barbados- were, in Wilder’s words, “instruments of Christian expansionism” and British imperialism. While these colleges and their promoters used the promise of educating and Christianizing the native population to fundraise at home and abroad, in fact, they contributed to the decimation of Native American nations and the aggrandizement of their lands for profit, with some colleges, such as Trinity and Williams, receiving substantial chunks themselves.
John Eliot’s “praying towns” in Massachusetts, designed to convert Native Americans to Christianity, were rapidly replaced by university buildings dedicated as “Indian colleges,” where a handful of native students were consigned to elementary education. Indian missionary the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth, was one who followed this path of tokenism..
The expansion of American higher education in the 18th century, Wilder argues, coincided with an economic boom in merchant capitalism, which rested on the twin pillars of the slave trade and slave labor. King’s College (Columbia), Queen’s College (Rutgers), Brown, and Princeton were all established with the profits of human bondage. Slave traders financed endowed chairs and became trustees, and colleges made a special effort to recruit the sons of a wealthy slaveholding colonial elite. Colleges such as Washington College (Washington and Lee) and William and Mary even held slaves and advertised them for sale or hire; one particularly disturbing trend that Wilder uncovers was the abuse of these college slaves in undergraduate pranks.
Just as damning, Wilder writes, was the indispensable place of American academics and intellectuals in the development of the pseudoscience of race. The new science of man and the Enlightenment mania for cataloging the human species in a hierarchical scale of beauty, intelligence, and nature fed on the raw material provided by colonial scholars. The scalps, skulls, and skeletons of Native Americans and African slaves became “human curios” collected and displayed by museums and scientists in Europe. Their bodies also proved to be ready and easily exploitable sources for the study of anatomy and medicine at the new medical schools at Columbia, Penn, and Dartmouth..
As science displaced religion as the arbiter of universal truths, American universities became bastions of scientific racism. Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, among many others less famous, speculated in theories of racial inferiority that provided a seemingly objective defense of slavery against abolitionists and other alleged extremists. Nor was this a regional issue, as later historical accounts might have us believe. Southern pro-slavery race theorists were trained in Northern academies, and in the North itself a slew of scientific racists contributed to the intellectual defense of slavery...Read More, https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/book-review-ebony-and-ivy
