[cure-news] Educator and abolitionist, Prudence Crandall

[Ida Hakim]

Educator and abolitionist, Prudence Crandall

September 3

Prudence Crandall
*Prudence Crandall was born on this date in 1803. She was an American
abolitionist.

 From Rhode Island, after being educated at a Society of Friends school in
Plainfield, Connecticut, Crandall established her own private school for
girls at Canterbury. The school was a great success until she decided to
admit a Black girl. Crandall, a committed Quaker refused to change her
policy of educating Black and white children. The result, White parents
began taking their children away from the school. In March 1833 with the
support of William Lloyd Garrison and the Anti-Slavery Society, Crandall
opened a school for Black girls in Canterbury.

Local people were furious at this and many tried to prevent the school
from receiving essential materials. The school persisted and began to
attract girls from Boston and Philadelphia. The local authorities then
began using a vagrancy law that meant the girls could be given ten lashes
for attending the school. In 1834 Connecticut passed a law making it
illegal to provide a free education for Black students. Crandall refused
to obey the law and was imprisoned, but won the case on appeal. When news
of the court decision reached Canterbury, a white mob attacked the school
forcing Crandall to close her school down.

That same year she moved to Illinois and married a Baptist clergyman.
Prudence Crandall died in Elk Falls, Kansas, on January 28, 1890.

Reference:
Prudence Crandall Center, Inc.
P.O. Box 895
New Britain, CT 06050
>From hakimida at reparationsthecure.org  Tue Sep 11 09:18:25 2007
From: hakimida at reparationsthecure.org (Ida Hakim)
Date: Tue Sep 11 08:18:30 2007
Subject: [cure-news] Virginia pardons Gabriel Prosser
Message-ID: <46E6B1C1.8000609 at reparationsthecure.org>

Virginia pardons Gabriel Prosser
By Jeremy M. Lazarus Richmond Free Press

RICHMOND (NNPA) ? He was hanged as a criminal from a Richmond scaffold
for leading the area's biggest slave revolt.

Now 207 years later, Gabriel Prosser has received a full pardon from Gov.
Tim Kaine.

"I recognize Gabriel Prosser for his courage and devotion to the
fundamental Virginia values of freedom and equality," Gov. Kaine wrote in
issuing the pardon, "and I am pleased to restore officially his good
name."

This is apparently the first time the leader of a slave revolt has
received a state pardon.

The state's 70th governor issued Gabriel Prosser's pardon in a June 26
letter to Linda Thomas, president of the state NAACP. He did so in
response to a request from the civil rights group.

The Virginia NAACP released the pardon letter last week as it prepared to
honor Gabriel Prosser and mark the anniversary of the 1800 slave revolt.
It did so at a public reception Aug. 30?the actual date of the revolt?at
its headquarters on the Virginia Union University campus.

Gabriel Prosser, a strapping enslaved blacksmith, organized hundreds of
followers with the goal of seizing Richmond to bargain for slaves'
freedom. The revolt was foiled by betrayal and failed after a major storm
on Aug. 30, 1800, forced postponement. Gabriel was hunted down and hanged
along with 26 of his followers.

Remembered largely in the Black community, he either went unmentioned or
was treated as a footnote in standard Virginia histories. But in the past
few years, he has gained more notice as greater attention has been paid
to Richmond's history as a slavery center. There is now a history marker
near Bryan Park recalling Gabriel and his revolt and last year a Richmond
forum focused on his role.

Gov. Kaine called it timely to issue the pardon. He noted that the
General Assembly this year had expressed "profound regret" for slavery
and that Richmond had dedicated a Slavery Reconciliation statue to atone
for its shameful past.

His pardon essentially reverses the actions of his slavery-supporting
predecessor of 1800, then Governor and later President James Monroe who
made him a criminal.

Gov. Kaine extolled Gabriel Prosser for "his devotion to the ideals of
the American Revolution?it was worth risking death to secure liberty.

"Today we see that Gabriel's quest for freedom was part of a great
American legacy of people striving to secure and protect inalienable
rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," he wrote in the pardon
message.

"Gabriel's cause?the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality of
all people ? has prevailed in the light of history," he continued.

"This is a momentous occasion," state NAACP Executive Director Salim
Khalfani said in a statement praising the governor for taking such action
in the former capital of the Confederacy, where "monuments to the
traitors of the Union are maintained with tax dollars."

Mr. Khalfani told the Richmond Free Press the NAACP also had asked the
governor to pardon the 26 people who were hanged with him.

"We have to view this pardon as a first step," he said.

The governor has not indicated whether he also would be willing to pardon
other famous leaders of Virginia slave rebellions, such as Nat Turner,
who led an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, or John Brown, who is
remembered for the revolt he sought to ignite at Harper's Ferry in 1859
just before the Civil War.
>From hakimida at reparationsthecure.org  Fri Sep 14 08:26:02 2007
From: hakimida at reparationsthecure.org (Ida Hakim)
Date: Fri Sep 14 07:26:18 2007
Subject: [cure-news] Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University
Message-ID: <46EA99FA.6060007 at reparationsthecure.org>

Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University
(introduction to report)
<www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/report>

Let us begin with a clock. In 2003, Brown University President Ruth J. 
Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to 
investigate and issue a public report on the University's historical 
relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Since that 
time, the committee, which includes faculty, students, and 
administrators, has met periodically in an office on the second floor of 
University Hall, the oldest building on the Brown campus. In the corner 
of the office stands an antique clock.

A silver plaque on the cabinet identifies it as "The Family Clock of 
Admiral Esek Hopkins." Built in the 1750s by a local craftsman, Samuel 
Rockwell, the clock was donated to Brown in the 1850s by Hopkins's 
granddaughter. Such artifacts and heirlooms abound on the campus, and it 
took several months for committee members to notice the clock or to 
recognize its significance.

Though less celebrated than his older brother Stephen, a colonial 
governor and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Esek Hopkins is 
a well-known figure in Rhode Island history. A Providence ship captain, 
he served as the first commander-in-chief of the United States Navy 
during the American Revolution. After the war, he was elected to the 
state legislature. Like his brother, he was a strong supporter of Brown, 
then known as the College of Rhode Island, serving as a member of the 
Board of Trustees from 1782 to 1802. His memory is enshrined today in 
several public sites in Providence, including the Esek Hopkins Middle 
School, Esek Hopkins Park (which includes a statue of him in naval 
uniform), and Admiral Street, where his old house still stands. There is 
another aspect of Esek Hopkins's story, unmentioned on any of the 
existing memorials.

In 1764, the year that the College of Rhode Island was founded, Hopkins 
sailed to West Africa in command of a slave ship, a one-hundred-ton 
brigantine called the Sally.

The Sally was owned by Nicholas Brown and Company, a partnership of four 
brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses Brown. Prominent Providence 
merchants, the Browns were also important benefactors of the college, 
playing a leading role in relocating the school from its original home 
in Warren, Rhode Island, to its current location in Providence. (In 
1804, the College of Rhode Island changed its name to Brown University, 
in recognition of a gift from Nicholas's son, Nicholas Jr.) There was 
nothing unusual about a slave ship departing from Rhode Island. Rhode 
Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, 
mounting over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the 
abolition of the trade in 1807 (and scores more illegal voyages thereafter).

The Sally's voyage was deadlier than most. At least 109 of the 196 
Africans that Hopkins purchased on behalf of the Browns perished, some 
in a failed insurrection, the balance through disease, suicide, and 
starvation. The records of the venture, from the fitting out of the ship 
in August 1764 to the sale of surviving captives on the West Indian 
island of Antigua fifteen months later, are housed in a library on the 
Brown campus, though few have troubled to look at them, at least until 
recently.

We shall return to the voyage of the Sally, an episode of considerable 
significance in the lives of the Brown brothers, three of whom seem 
never again to have invested directly in transatlantic slaving voyages.

But let us return first to the clock.

What should the University do with it, now that we know more about its 
origins? Is it appropriate to display it? Should we remove the plaque 
honoring Esek Hopkins? Attach another plaque? We are obviously speaking 
metaphorically here, but the underlying questions could not be more 
direct. How are we, as members of the Brown community, as Rhode 
Islanders, and as citizens and residents of the United States, to make 
sense of our complex history?

How do we reconcile those elements of our past that are gracious and 
honorable with those that provoke grief and horror? What 
responsibilities, if any, rest upon us in the present as inheritors of 
this mixed legacy? The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery 
and Justice represents one institution's confrontation with these questions.

The president's charge to the steering committee had two dimensions. Our 
primary task was to examine the University's historical entanglement 
with slavery and the slave trade and to report our findings openly and 
truthfully. But we were also asked to reflect on the meaning of this 
history in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and 
moral questions posed by any presentday confrontation with past 
injustice. In particular, the president asked the committee "to organize 
academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown 
community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions 
raised" by the national debate over reparations for slavery.

Reparations, she noted, was a highly controversial subject, presenting 
"problems about which men and women of good will may ultimately 
disagree," but it was also a subject on which Brown, in light of its own 
history, had "a special obligation and a special opportunity to provide 
thoughtful inquiry." In her letter of charge and in a public statement 
following the announcement of the committee's appointment, the president 
stressed that the committee would not determine whether or how

Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor did she expect it to forge a 
consensus on the reparations question. Its object, rather, was "to 
provide factual information and critical perspectives to deepen 
understanding" and enrich debate on an issue that had aroused great 
public passion but little constructive public dialogue.1

The steering committee has endeavored to fulfill this charge. Members of 
the committee, assisted by other Brown faculty as well as by 
undergraduate and graduate student researchers, gathered information 
about Brown's past, drawing on both published sources and various 
historical archives. The committee also sponsored more than thirty 
public programs, including scholarly lectures, panel discussions, 
forums, film screenings, and two international conferences exploring the 
experience of other societies and institutions that have grappled with 
legacies of historical injustice.

In all, we entertained more than a hundred distinguished speakers, 
ranging from Professor John Hope Franklin, who discussed his tenure as 
chairman of One America, President Clinton's short-lived national 
commission on race, to Beatrice Fernando, a slavery survivor from Sri 
Lanka, who spoke on the problem of human trafficking today. The 
committee is currently preparing a selection of these presentations for 
publication in a scholarly anthology.2 The steering committee also 
organized programs and activities beyond the University's gates.

Committee members addressed community groups and participated in 
workshops for local teachers and students. A museum exhibition about the 
Sally, mounted by undergraduate research stu-dents working with the 
committee, is currently touring public libraries across the state. The 
exhibition, "Navigating the Past: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally, 
1764-1765," has also been exhibited at the John Brown House, the 
historic home of one of the ship's owners, and at the Museum of Antigua 
and Barbuda in St. John's, Antigua, the final destination of surviving 
captives from the ship.

Members of the committee also collaborated with the Choices Program, a 
curricular development group affiliated with Brown's Watson Institute 
for International Studies, to write and publish a high school 
curriculum, "A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New 
England." With the support of the office of President Simmons, the 
committee was able to donate copies of the curriculum to every high 
school history and social studies classroom in Rhode Island.3

The report that follows represents the culmination of the committee's 
work. It contains three sections, reflecting the different elements of 
the president's charge. The first focuses on history, exploring 
different aspects of the University's relationship to slavery. This 
section reveals the complicity of many of the University's founders and 
benefactors in slavery and the slave trade, and outlines some of the 
direct benefits that accrued to the University.

Yet it also seeks to do more. Brown's formative decades coincided with 
many of the signal events in America's tortuous racial history: the peak 
of the transatlantic slave trade and the appearance of a popular 
movement decrying the trade as criminal; the birth of a new nation, 
dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal and 
endowed with certain inalienable rights, and the emergence of racist 
ideologies insisting that people were not equally created or endowed; 
the gradual abolition of slavery in the northern states and the rapid 
expansion of the institution in the South.

Brown University was shaped by all of these developments, and members of 
the campus community, including students, vigorously debated their 
meaning and significance. We are not the first members of the Brown 
community to confront our University's historical complicity in slavery 
and the slave trade or to debate our own responsibilities in light of 
it. The second section looks beyond Brown to the problem of 
retrospective justice around the world.

How have other institutions and societies dealt with the legacies of 
gross injustice ? not only of slavery, but also of genocide, "ethnic 
cleansing," and other crimes against humanity? One of the signature 
developments of the last sixty years, and of the last twenty years in 
particular, has been the emergence of an international consensus on the 
importance of confronting traumatic histories, as well as the 
development of a variety of mechanisms for doing so, including 
international tribunals, truth commissions, national apologies, the 
erection of public memorials, and a wide array of monetary and 
non-monetary reparations programs.

While this history has spawned a voluminous scholarly literature, it has 
had relatively little bearing on the slavery reparations debate in the 
United States, which has, at least in recent years, focused narrowly on 
the issue of monetary reparations. Our object in this section of the 
report is to bring this comparative, global experience to bear on the 
American case, and on the predicament of our University in particular. 
What is a crime against humanity?

Where does the concept come from, and what does it entail? What legacies 
do such crimes leave, and what mechanisms exist to redress them? Do all 
historical injuries merit remedy? When does it become too late to 
redress an injustice? The section includes extensive notes for 
individuals interested in pursuing particular issues and questions in 
greater detail.

In the final section, we turn to the slavery reparations debate in the 
United States, examining the contours of the current controversy as well 
as the issue's deeper historical roots.

In keeping with the president's charge, our object is not to resolve the 
reparations debate but rather to illuminate questions and contexts that 
are often overlooked in public discussion today. What actually happened 
when slavery was abolished, first in northern states like Rhode Island, 
and later in the South? What legacies did slavery bequeath to the 
nation, and what attempts were made to redress those legacies, both in 
the immediate aftermath of abolition and subsequently?

What forms has the movement for slave redress taken at different 
historical moments, with what results? In short, where did the current 
reparations movement come from? This section too contains extensive 
notes, elaborating particular issues and offering suggestions for 
further reading.

As should by now be clear, the steering committee does not intend this 
report as the last word on the subject, but rather as the first words in 
a dialogue that we hope will continue on our campus and in our nation. 
Yet in the course of our research, we also reached certain conclusions. 
We share these at the end of the report, accompanied by a series of 
recommendations directed specifically at Brown University.

One of the committee's first actions was to invite anyone interested in 
our efforts to submit questions, comments, and criticisms. Hundreds of 
individuals availed themselves of the opportunity, some of them members 
of the Brown community, most of them not. The temper of the letters 
varied widely, but one question arose again and again.

Why would Brown launch such an undertaking? Why risk opening chapters of 
the past that are, inevitably, controversial and painful? We hope that 
the committee's work ? the programs we organized and the report that 
follows ? will suffice as an answer. But there is an even simpler 
answer: Brown is a university. Universities are dedicated to the 
discovery and dissemination of knowledge. They are conservators of 
humanity's past. They cherish their own pasts, honoring forbears with 
statues and portraits and in the names of buildings.

To study or teach at a place like Brown is to be a member of a community 
that exists across time, a participant in a procession that began 
centuries ago and that will continue long after we are gone. If an 
institution professing these principles cannot squarely face its own 
history, it is hard to imagine how any other institution, let alone our 
nation, might do so.4

As it happens, one of the most eloquent expositions of the idea of the 
university came from a Brown president, Rev. William Faunce, in a 1914 
sermon celebrating the University's sesquicentennial. "Are we wrong, are 
we merely superstitious, if we hold that those early leaders, passing 
through our American colleges, have left a portion of themselves 
behind?" Faunce asked. "It is not only ivy that clings to ancient walls 
? it is memories, echoes, inspirations. The very stones cry out a 
summons...." He continued: "Have we entered so new a world that we have 
no further connection with the generation in which these colleges were 
born? To think so would be to show ourselves without the sense of either 
historic continuity or moral obligation." It is in that spirit, and with 
a deep sense of historic continuity and moral obligation, that we offer 
this report.5