9 Big Name Colleges You Didn’t Know Benefited From Slavery

Brown University — Rhode Island The Rhode Island university benefited significantly from slavery during its early years. Rhode Island served as a major hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to a report by The Committee on Slavery and Justice. The report revealed that at least 30 members of Brown’s governing board owned or captained slave ships, and many donors would lend enslaved people to help with construction. Dartmouth College — New Hampshire Dartmouth College is the home of a rather gruesome tale of how enslaved people were used as experimental tools for universities. Craig Steven Wilder, the author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities, sat down with Democracy Now back in 2013 to discuss some of his own findings of how universities benefited from slavery. During the interview, Steven tells the story of Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock, who dragged "the body of an enslaved black man, who is deceased, named Cato, to the back of his house and boils that body in an enormous pot to free up the skeleton, to wire it up for instruction." Harvard — Massachusetts Much like many of the schools on the list, Harvard was established on land that was left to the school by a wealthy plantation owner. Early in the school’s history, enslaved people were used to serve the children of other wealthy white people while they were on campus. Yale — Connecticut While the university celebrates what it has deemed a “long history of activism in the face of slavery,” three scholars at the school wanted to draw attention to the not-so-pretty past. Despite past faculty members being known abolitionists, the school relied heavily on slave-trading money for its first scholarships and library endowment, the scholars discovered, according to The New York Times. Princeton — New Jersey Princeton raised money and recruited students for the school through rich families who owned enslaved people in the South and throughout the Caribbean. Rutgers University — New Jersey Much like Princeton, Rutgers relied heavily on the families of slave owners when it came time to recruit students for the school while also funding several projects through donations from the same wealthy families. University of Delaware When trying to fill its halls with students, the University of Delaware followed the example set by other universities. The school moved to recruit the children of wealthy slave owners, which also gave them the financial backing they needed to support the school's expansion. University of Pennsylvania Access to corpses and people to experiment on for scientific purposes was essential to a university's success, especially during its early stages. For many schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, enslaved people were the primary sources of corpses and were often forced to participate in scientific studies. Columbia University — New York Columbia University, named the King's College at the time, published an announcement of the swearing in of its first trustees and paid for the printed announcement with the money it obtained through just one advertisement—an ad promoting a slave auction in Lower Manhattan.

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