Please join us this Wednesday — April 22, 10am to noon (EST) — for a public presentation of research findings by the students in this year’s Columbia and Slavery seminar.

Follow this link for Zoom information

Despite the difficulties of the past months in New York City, including losing access to their archival sources, the students in the seminar persevered to create a batch of excellent original research papers that add significantly to our knowledge of the histories of enslavement, Columbia University, and related topics.

The Columbia University and Slavery Project was initiated by Professor Eric Foner in 2015. Since then, Columbia and Barnard undergraduates have participated in annual seminars in which they have conducted their own original research into the historical connections between the university and enslavement. Major research findings have included discoveries about the first college president’s history of slave owning, the broad involvement of early affiliates with enslavement in all of its guises, the significance of Columbia faculty in the creation of racist historical and scientific schools of thought, and the perpetration of a cross-burning on campus in the 1920s as a hate crime against the first African American student to live in a university residence hall.