Brown University’s undergraduates voted to support reparations for descendants of slaves who were once “entangled” with the Ivy League school.
Last week, the students voted in favor of two questions, one calling upon 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” and the second calling for Brown to provide reparations to those descendants of slaves.
Eighty-nine percent of voting students supported the first question, and 85% supported the second, according to an NBC News report. Of the school’s nearly 7,000 undergraduate students, about 2,000 voted.
The Undergraduate Council of Students voted during a general body meeting in February to approve a resolution “calling upon Brown to attempt to identify and reparate the descendants of slaves entangled with the university.”
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The February resolution called upon the university “to examine the reparations plans of Georgetown University, Virginia Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and other higher education institutions formerly entangled in the slave trade when crafting additional aspects of the Brown reparations plan.”
The resolution also called upon the university to provide preferential admissions and to allocate money for scholarship and monetary reparations for any descendants identified, and it urged Brown to consider preferred admission to Native American groups indigenous to the land Brown occupies.
In an Instagram post ahead of the referendum vote, the Undergraduate Council of Students referred to “legacies of systemic anti-blackness” as the context in which the call for reparations is taking place.
“Confronting questions of reparations and institutional reckoning with connections to the transatlantic slave trade has a deep history at Brown,” university spokesman Brian Clark said of the student initiative in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The University interrogated this issue as a full community from 2003 to 2006, and Brown committed to a series of actions whose impact persists in our education, research, engagement with historically underrepresented groups and ongoing work in diversity, equity and inclusion.”
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The statement continued, “The current work of Brown’s Task Force on Anti-Black Racism will make recommendations on more Brown can do to address the legacy of slavery.”
Reparations for descendants of slaves have remained in the news in recent months. Former President Barack Obama recently said they are “justified,” and the city of Evanston, Illinois, became the first city in the United States to pass a reparations program for black residents this month.
