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| Location | Brown University |
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| Designer | Martin Puryear |
| Weight | 4.5 short tons (4.1 t) |
| Dedicated date | 2014 |
The Slavery Memorial is a sculptural memorial on the campus of Brown University that recognizes the institution's 18th century connections to chattel slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Designed by sculptor Martin Puryear and dedicated in 2014, the memorial stands on the university's Front Green, adjacent to University Hall. [1] [2]
Constructed of ductile cast iron, the Slavery Memorial depicts a cast-iron ball and chain partially buried underground; the third link of the chain is broken in two. [3] [4] [5]
A granite plaque in front of the memorial reads:
This memorial recognizes Brown University’s connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the work of Africans and African-Americans, enslaved and free, who helped build our university, Rhode Island, and the nation.
In 2003 Brown President Ruth J. Simmons initiated a study of this aspect of the university’s history. In the eighteenth century slavery permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, launching over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1808, and scores of illegal voyages thereafter.
Brown University was a beneficiary of this trade.
In 2003, then-university president Ruth Simmons launched a steering committee to research Brown's 18th century ties to slavery. In October 2006, the committee released a report documenting its findings. [6] [7] The university established a commission in July of the following year to consider how best to fulfill the report's recommendation of creating a "living site of memory." [8] The commission studied a number of existing memorials including the Civil Rights Memorial, African Burial Ground National Monument, and Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery. [9] In 2012, the university's governing body voted unanimously to award Martin Puryear the commission to design a sculptural memorial on Brown's campus. [10]
The university originally considered placing the memorial in the Jewelry District, adjacent to Brown's then-planned medical campus. [11] A university committee ultimately chose to locate the memorial on the Front Green of Brown's main campus given its highly visible location and proximity to University Hall, which was constructed in part by enslaved laborers. [1]
The memorial was installed in the summer of 2014 and dedicated by president Christina Paxson on September 27 of the same year. [1]
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa who had been sold by West African slave traders to mainly Portuguese, British, Spanish, Dutch, and French slave traders. while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade.
Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. It has been used to offset trade imbalances between different regions.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Ruth Simmons is an American professor and academic administrator. Simmons served as the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University, a HBCU, from 2017 until 2023. From 2001 to 2012, she served as the 18th president of Brown University, where she was the first African American president of an Ivy League institution. Before Brown University, she headed Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters and the largest women's college in the United States, beginning in 1995.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard colonizing Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in violation of European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes bought 53 captives in Havana, Cuba, including four children, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. Three Africans were also killed in the melee.
The International Slavery Museum is a museum located in Liverpool, UK, that focuses on the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The museum which forms part of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, consists of three main galleries which focus on the lives of people in West Africa, their eventual enslavement, and their continued fight for freedom. Additionally the museum discusses slavery in the modern day as well as topics on racism and discrimination.
Slavery was practiced in Massachusetts bay by Native Americans before European settlement, and continued until its abolition in the 1700s. Although slavery in the United States is typically associated with the Caribbean and the Antebellum American South, enslaved people existed to a lesser extent in New England: historians estimate that between 1755 and 1764, the Massachusetts enslaved population was approximately 2.2 percent of the total population; the slave population was generally concentrated in the industrial and coastal towns. Unlike in the American South, enslaved people in Massachusetts had legal rights, including the ability to file legal suits in court.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation and until the 11th century, when the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom, and all slaves were no longer recognised separately in English law or custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Market Square is a market square in Providence, Rhode Island. It is located at the intersection of present-day North Main Street and College Street at the base of College Hill. Market Square has historically functioned as a commercial, civic, and cultural locus of Providence.
The history of Brown University spans 259 years. Founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and the third-oldest institution of higher education in New England. At its foundation, the university was the first in the U.S. to accept students regardless of their religious affiliation. Brown's medical program is the third-oldest in New England while its engineering program is the oldest in the Ivy League.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The Free African Union Society, founded in 1780 in Newport, Rhode Island, was America's first African benevolent society. Founders and early members included Prince Amy, Lincoln Elliot, Bristol Yamma, Zingo Stevens and Newport Gardner.
The role of slavery at American colleges and universities has been a focus of historical investigation and controversy. Enslaved Africans labored to build institutions of higher learning in the United States, and the slave economy was involved in funding many universities. People, forced to labor and seen as less than human, were used to build academic buildings and residential halls. Though slavery has long been presented as a uniquely Southern institution, colleges and universities in Northern states benefited from the labor of slaves. The economics of slavery brought some slave owners great wealth, enabling them to become major donors to fledgling colleges. Many colleges founded in states with legalized slavery utilized enslaved people and benefited from the slavocracy. Slaves were also sold by university administrators to generate capital. In some parts of the nation it was also not uncommon for wealthy students to bring an enslaved person with them to college. Ending almost 250 years of slavocracy did not end white supremacy, structural racism, or other forms of oppression at American colleges and the legacy of slavery still persists in many establishments.
Slavery existed in Morocco since antiquity. Morocco was a center of the Trans-Saharan slave trade route of enslaved Black Africans from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a center of the slave trade of Barbary slave trade of Europeans captured by the barbary pirates. The slave trade was suppressed in Morocco in the 20th-century.
Gradual emancipation was a legal mechanism used by some states to abolish slavery over some time, such as An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780 in Pennsylvania.
William Gregson was a British slave trader. He was responsible for at least 152 slave voyages, and his slave ships are recorded as having carried 58,201 Africans, of whom 9,148 died. Gregson was the co-owner of a ship called the Zong, whose crew perpetrated the Zong massacre.
From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, various states of the United States of America allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were their descendants. The institution of slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish colonization, British colonization, French colonization, and Dutch colonization.
The Sally (1764) was an 18th century Rhode Island brigantine slave ship launched from Providence and destined for the western-most coast of Africa. Like many voyages from the state at this time, the ship was charted by Nicholas Brown and Company, a merchant firm founded by the prominent Brown family. This same company, and the successful mercantile family, was the main benefactor in the foundation of Brown University in 1764. The story of The Sally rose to infamy upon return – and for centuries, thereafter – due to high mortality rates following a slave revolt and widespread health issues. Of the 196 captives on board, more than 109 were either murdered by captain, Esek Hopkins, and crew, died from diseases and starvation, or took their own lives. Within the state of Rhode Island, The Sally serves an important historical symbol of the atrocities of northern slavery, as well as the legacy of slave labor within prominent American institutions, namely Brown University.
