Ebony and Ivy – How Slavery Helped American Universities Grow

A conversation about dirty antebellum secrets in America’s Ivory Towers:

Mr. Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, in the United States of America, has a new book, “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” which argues provocatively that the nation’s early colleges, alongside church and state, were “the third pillar of a civilization based on bondage.”

Gbemela Kobla

It is weird that Mr. Wilder thinks that he belongs to these American Institutions because of the role of slavery in the elite Ivy’s (Ebony and Ivy). He thinks that he being a descendant of slaves makes him have a right to those schools.

But that logic is faulty, the fact that slaves lay at the foundation of these schools does not mean that he or any other black people will be accepted – maybe just tolerated. It is high time we understand that western civilization and African civilization are fundamentally polar opposites. They don’t like us and we will never belong in their hallowed institutions. Period.

Solomon Azumha-Gomez

There is something about this book – Ebony and Ivy- that is a double-edged sword. On one side these universities were partly built on the backs of Negros who are despised by people who think they are white. On the other side, African Americans, are Americans, they are Africans alright, only Africans in America. They feel that their blood was poured to lay down the foundations of America. And that by this token, they have a right to the wealth of America, not matter how it was attained.

But European Americans keep telling them: No you don’t have that right. The fact is that African Americans do have that right and even more. But the pragmatism of this Right is doubtful. There is absolutely no way, like Gbemela Kobla has mentioned, that European Americans would accept African Americans fully into the social, political and economic fabric of America without a fight.

But fight they should if African Americans are in America to stay. For us Africans, in Africa, we must be fully aware in this play. We must insist that Europeans and European Americans stay fully out of the confines of our educational systems in Africa. In fact, we have the right to export a truly African education to the Americas to educate our fellow African Americans and Afro-Brazilians. This is something that has been missing – a concerted African interest in the African peoples of the Americas. We are failing them with our stupidity.

Until then, these Africans in the Diaspora have no choice but to fight for their total emancipation in a land that hates and despise them. They have no place else to go since Africa refuses to wake up. African Americans have a Painful-Given Right to the Institutions of America. That European Americans bars them from it is also the Human Rights issue of the 21st Century.

Narmer Amenuti

The American Imagination almost always excludes the African American – free or painfully enslaved. What I see here in this book – Ebony and Ivy –  is the Hypocrisy of the Millennium. Capitalism which is heralded as the cornerstone of American Exceptionalism, after all, was built on the backs of the Socialism of a brutal slavery of poor Africans.

This is eye-opening since these beacons of Exceptionalism – Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Brown, Yale, etc. – are all just bathed in the Blood and Toil of Africans. Come to think of it, there is something darkly joyous about this revelation – Europeans have never built anything without KILLING, STEALING and LOOTING others!

This is a direct indictment in my opinion. A strong one at that. If there’s anything this research achieves in any shape or form is that it forces away the Names of Plantation owners that adorn the buildings of these college campuses. Symbolically this means something, at least to the Upright. It means, there is no longevity in Evil, plain evil.

There will no longer be any Remembrance of the people who owned slaves. These names on the walls of dormitories, departments, chairs and classrooms face removal forever – wiped out from the Painful Memory of our fellow African Americans.