4 things to know about Brown University’s 2nd Slavery and Justice Report

The findings offer new insights and an “unflinching” assessment of how far Brown has come in implementing recommendations made 15 years ago — and what remains to be accomplished.

Fifteen years after publishing a groundbreaking report on its own historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade, Brown University has released an expanded second edition of the report amid renewed national conversation on slavery. Pictured: Brown University's slavery memorial.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

PROVIDENCE — Brown University on Friday released the second edition of its landmark Slavery and Justice Report, 15 years after the original report documenting the university’s historical relationship to the transatlantic slave trade.

The first report in 2006 sparked national conversations about institutional legacies of racism. The second edition contains new insights on the original report’s national and local impact and offers an “unflinching” assessment of how far Brown has come in implementing the report’s original recommendations — and what remains to be accomplished.

Here are some key things to know about the reports.

1. The reckoning in higher education began before Brown’s 2006 report

After Brown University’s initial report came out in 2006, more than 100 colleges and universities decided to start similar studies. But some institutions had begun untangling their ties to slavery and anti-Black racism before Brown’s report was published.

Graduate students at Yale University authored “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” a pamphlet published in 2002 by New Haven’s Amistad Committee. The pamphlet responded to the university’s establishment of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which had primarily focused on Yale’s connection to the antislavery movement. The graduate students, Antony Dugdale, J. J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, had found evidence of Yale’s proslavery practices and ideologies. They noted that in 1831, university officials had prevented the founding of a “Negro College” in New Haven. And in the 1930s and 1960s, Yale chose to name most of its colleges after former slave owners and pro-slavery leaders.

Two years later, in 2004, the University of Alabama’s faculty senate passed a resolution that had “acknowledged and apologized” for faculty members punishing enslaved people on campus and having pro-slavery ideologies. The action was led by law professor Aldred Brophy, and is said to be the first example of an institution of higher education apologizing for its involvement in slavery.

Dr. Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and current president of Prairie View A&M University, in Texas.Brandon Thibodeaux

2. Former Brown president Dr. Ruth Simmons received backlash over the report

Dr. Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown University, commissioned the initial “Slavery and Justice Report” in 2003. Fifteen years later, in the second edition, Simmons explains that she commissioned the report after being asked a simple question, which sparked her curiosity: “What was the university’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade?”

“And so I dutifully began to look into it to see if I could get some answers. I found no answers. The official histories of the university were silent on this question. When I asked people in public relations to get a statement out about Brown’s relationship to the slave trade, they told me there was no such relationship,” she said. “Given the fact that there was both confusion and obvious discomfort with that question, I thought the only way to address it was to come at it very directly and to find the truth.”

“The way to do that, it seemed, was to use the university’s best resources — scholarship and research,” she said.

Instead of simply appointing a historian to do the work, she set up an institutional steering committee, which included provosts, faculty members, doctoral candidates, and students (including Rhode Island’s current General Treasurer Seth Magaziner, who graduated in 2006).

This second edition documents the opposition that Simmons faced after the initial report came out. She said most of the opposition came from people who were not associated with the university, but wanted to challenge what they were doing, their perspectives, and suggested the process might somehow be “corrupt.”

“I think our work literally frightened these people into assailing the process as illegitimate because it dared to look into the slavery origins of a university,” said Simmons. “We also saw publications that raised questions about whether or not the process might somehow be corrupt, mostly by virtue of the fact that I was African-American, and, therefore, must have certain motives in undertaking this project.”

Simmons, now president emerita, left Brown in 2012 and is now president of Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

Words engraved on a stone block form a component of the Slavery Memorial by sculptor Martin Puryear, erected in 2014, on the Brown University campus in Providence.Steven Senne/Associated Press

3. What about reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans connected to the university?

Simmons has said in previous interviews that answering the question of reparations was never the end goal of the 2006 report, and that stance hasn’t changed with its second edition. But students on campus have long pushed, and even voted for, the awarding of reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans afflicted by the university or the Brown family.

Jason Carroll, who was a Brown senior from Maryland and president of the student body last spring, previously told the Globe that reparations could come in the forms of monetary awards and admissions preferences for descendants.

In late March, undergraduates voted on two ballot questions related to the university’s history with slavery as part of student council elections. One called for the university to make “all possible efforts to identify the descendants of enslaved Africans who were entangled with and/or afflicted by the university and Brown family and their associates.”

The second called for the school to provide “reparations to identified descendants of slaves entangled with and/or afflicted by the university and Brown family in line with reparations plans from other institutions of higher education like Georgetown University.”

The first question received 89 percent support. The second received 85 percent.

But when the Task Force on Anti-Black Racism provided its recommendations to President Christina H. Paxson in April, they did not recommend reparations, but instead, “hinted” that the conversation should continue.

“Several hundred years after the events in question, the need to address the legacy of slavery in America is as important as ever, and I think that’s something that’s become very clear over the last year or so,” Paxson told the Globe on Thursday.

“It’s my belief — and I will change my mind if persuaded to do so — that the work we are doing on education in Providence and in health care in Providence is the best thing an educational institution can do to address this legacy, to reduce disparities, increase economic mobility, and improve educational outcomes,” she said. “We know how to do this well, and I feel like that’s where we should be focusing our efforts.”

A plaque on the left side of the front door of the Market House in Market Square is owned and operated by the Rhode Island School of Design. Until the late 18th century, the Brown family (Brown University) were known slave traders, including Nicholas Brown and Company, and scholars cite Market Square, then the epicenter of Providence's trade and markets, as a site for sales of human cargo from Africa and the West Indies. Matthew J. Lee/Globe staff

4. Brown made good on some of its promises immediately after the initial report came out. Others took years.

Several recommendations made by the steering committee were published in Brown’s initial 2006 report. One was to create a Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice — which the school did in 2012, led by Anthony Bogues, the director and a professor of humanities and of Africana Studies. It continues to be a productive scholarly research center with a public humanities mission. The center has organized hundreds of public programs that examine social justice and racial equality.

Another promise was to create a $10 million endowment for Providence public schools. But from 2007 to 2020, it had only raised $1.9 million for the education fund. Paxson said in an interview Thursday that she isn’t sure why the fund didn’t attract more donors. But last summer, the university took previously undesignated funds from its endowment to fulfill the $10 million pledge.

A year later, Paxson said that fund for Providence schools is worth about $17 million.