The new book Ebony and Ivy uncovers the shocking truth about a history that none of America’s universities want to admit being connected to.
Image: Bloomsbury Press via Alternet
The following is an introduction by author Craig Steven Wilder to an excerpt from his new book Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities:
It is difficult to imagine college campuses as sites for exploring the lives of enslaved people in colonial America; however, early campuses were spaces in which faculty and students routinely interacted with slaves. The commoditization of African people through the Atlantic slave trade produced the wealth that subsidized the rise of the colonial academy, and it also supplied laborers who served the students, faculty, and governors of colonial schools. Slaves worked in the houses of many of the presidents and faculty, some students brought slaves to campus as personal servants, unfree people maintained college buildings, and college boys often used enslaved people for entertainment, including boxing and dancing. The historical and archival records reveal quite a bit about the very intimate ways in which enslaved people shaped the day-to-day experience of higher education in colonial America.
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