The connections of universities to slavery and why it matters. Along with the Report on Lord Dalhousie's History on Race and Slavery, the first Canadian research! #Halifax! @Tim_Bousquet
A second thread (and a link to the first)
A second thread (and a link to the first)
Nova Scotia King’s was connected to the slave economy of the West Indies in another way, too. Between 1825 and 1846, King’s was kept afloat financially by funding from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG).
An Anglican missionary organization, the SPG owned plantations in Barbados and in 1836 collected a small fortune in gov’t compensation for having been forced to free 410 African people enslaved on those plantations.
As Smardz-Frost and States show in detail, in Nova Scotia, the Anglican clergy who were the mainstay of King’s as governors and staff (or parents of students) were paid SPG missionaries.
ukings.ca/administration…
ukings.ca/administration…
One, Rev. T. Cochran, the first principal, was (perhaps surprisingly!) an abolitionist; others (including Bishop Charles Inglis, as David States discovered) had had enslaved people as servants before fleeing the revolted colonies.
These facts about the connections of King’s to slavery are not unique to King’s. They are part of the history of the colony of Nova Scotia and the Church of England.
They matter because institutions that depended on slavery defended the system of slavery and all its evils. Among those evils was the belief that Black Africans were inferior to white Europeans.
E.g. a man in charge of the SPG plantations defended cruel discipline by saying that the enslaved Africans had to be kept in “subordination” because they were “a most inconsiderate and thoughtless race of mortals.”
That, my friends, is the language of white supremacy. And in Nova Scotia, learned and Christian white clergy taught that language and kept it alive, even after slavery ceased to be legal in the British empire.
When you hear people talk about the legacies of slavery, they are talking about (among other things) the survival and persistance of that language.
In African Heritage Month, we especially remember the roots of that language in slavery (whether plantation or household), and also the way slavery was built into the economic foundations of our present day world.
And we who have benefitted from the legacies of that system undertake to repair the harms that have arisen from that past.
I end with thanks to Afua Cooper, David States, Norma Williams, Amani Whitfield, Francoise Bayliss, Sylvia Hamilton, Melissa Shaw, Claudine Bonner, & Doug Ruck, friends and colleagues of African descent who have taught me about how the past looks seen from their experience.
And thanks to the scholarship of @craigswilder, whose Ebony and Ivy is foundational to the study of universities and slavery. (Even though of course I insist that there are distinct Canadian stories!)
