The Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice: Challenging Legacies, Renewing a Tradition

When the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice was formally launched in 2012, no one imagined the extent of its impact today. Within eight years of its founding, the Simmons Center is leading an international curatorial project with the National Museum of African American History and Culture on racial slavery and the making of the modern world and is conducting research, led by Brown undergraduate students, for a PBS documentary on the Atlantic slave trade. Recently, the Simmons Center undertook a major collaborative project with Williams College and the Mystic Seaport Museum that will use maritime history as a basis for studying historical injustices and generating new insights on the relationship between European colonization, the dispossession of Native American land, and racial slavery in New England, troubling the founding narrative of New England as a ‘city on the hill,’ a place founded on the idea of liberty for all. Additionally, the Simmons Center spearheads an international African and African Diaspora Arts Initiative. The Simmons Center has also collaborated with graduate and undergraduate students in the creation of a Carceral State Reading Group and has worked with its faculty fellows to develop research clusters on topics such as Race, Medicine, and Social Justice; Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America; and Human Trafficking. Other the Simmons Center-sponsored projects include a faculty-led examination of the history of Indigenous slavery, a history generated by 17th-century American settler colonialism; and, beyond campus, a youth program involving students from Providence public schools. These are just a few of the pathbreaking projects undertaken by the Simmons Center since its founding, all driven by an ethos that directs critical attention to historical forms of racial slavery as well as the structural legacies of racism that continue to shape America.

The establishment of the Simmons Center was one of many recommendations to have emerged from the Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The Report — commissioned in 2003 by Dr. Ruth Simmons, the first African American president of an Ivy League university — was a pioneering document. No other university had the courage to investigate its historical linkages to the Atlantic slave trade and the founding of America. Today, many universities around the world have followed Brown’s lead. The Report is historic in two senses: as the final product of students, faculty, and staff engaged in three years of study, discussion, and debate; and as a historical document itself, detailing the history of Brown, the State of Rhode Island, and the United States in relation to the Atlantic slave trade. This trade of ‘commerce in human flesh’ laid the foundations for the remarkable wealth of America. It was an inhumane system built upon violence and systematic, structural anti-Black racism. Slavery and anti-Black racism were two sides of the same coin.

Racial slavery was ended in the U.S. by a civil war. However, its structural legacies lived on in systems of formal segregation (Jim Crow); disenfranchisement of political rights; active racial discrimination in housing, education, employment; and, especially, violence against Black bodies by both the police and the American justice system. This history is often elided. As recent events have demonstrated, however, only by confronting what is wrong in our society can we address injustice. Silence, elision, and avoidance do not erase wrongs, they only allow them to fester. Research and scholarship are tools of change and knowledge. The Simmons Center, building upon a University tradition that seeks to deploy knowledge in order to make a difference, opens its doors and welcomes you to Brown. As you read this Report and think about its meanings, keep in mind that this is a university where exploration of ideas, commitment to research, and deep engagement in debate and democratic argument are the underlying ethos. We at the Simmons Center are committed to these values, and we invite you to join us in continuing the traditions that make Brown such a special place.

Anthony Bogues
Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and Professor of Africana Studies
Inaugural Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice