Ebony and Ivy with Dr. Craig Steven Wilder

Rebroadcast

Join author Craig Steven Wilder for a discussion of his research and book - Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's University. Craig Steven Wilder is a professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at Wiliams College and Dartmouth College.

Many of America's revered colleges and universities - from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC - were soaked in the sweat and the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.

Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.