Colleges confront their links to slavery and wrestle with how to atone for past sins - 0 views
theconversation.com/-to-atone-for-past-sins-152308
racism college university USA education slavery georgetown BLM history
![](/images/link.gif)
-
. Back in 2006, Brown University published a report showing that the university – from its construction to its endowment – participated in and benefited from the slave trade and slavery.
-
The revelation sparked an effort to track down descendants of the people and to atone by offering preferential admission – but not scholarships – for them to study at Georgetown.
-
Many universities benefited from slavery, and there has been a growing discussion about what, if anything, universities owe to the descendants of the people they enslaved and what they can do to atone.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Even after slavery, these schools continued to oppress Black people by not allowing them to enroll as students.
-
Even though the nation’s 100 or so HBCUs represent less than 3% of the nation’s 4,360 colleges and universities, they graduated 13% of Black undergraduate college students nationally in the 2017-2018 school year.
-
The disparities transcend higher education. White families, on average, tend to have 10 times the wealth of Black families.
-
Yet scholars and economists studying racial economic inequality, such as William A. Darity Jr., point to the need for federal action. This action could range from economic reparations and endowment-building at HBCUs to debt forgiveness for Black students.