Trailblazer Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, the namesake for Brown University's Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, sits down with TODAY's Jenna Bush Hager to talk about her new memoir “Up Home” in which she shares her journey from poverty in the segregated South to becoming the first Black president of an ivy league university.

The stage is set for a historic and controversial vote in the 35th Legislature today, during which lawmakers will consider whether to trade Whistling Cay to the National Park Service in exchange for a parcel of land in Estate Catherineberg for the purpose of building a public K-12 school on St. John. During that session, Hadiya Sewer, University of the Virgin Islands Scholar-In-Residence and Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, made a case for exploring other possibilities and referenced Malcolm X’s assertion that “land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality.”

Arielle Julia Brown, 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and founder and director of Black Spatial Relics, supports performance artists whose art contends with slavery, freedom and justice.

“There was a transnational flow of medical knowledge about how disease spread that increased between 1756 and 1866 and transpired not only at familiar hubs of medical research but also at sites of imperialism, slavery, war, and dispossession.” (Downs, Maladies of Empire, p. 5)

Since March 20, the experiences of five Latinx and Caribbean restaurateurs in Providence have been featured in the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice along with the experiences of four other local restaurant owners. The common thread stringing the stories together: Each restaurant owner migrated to the United States with hopes of bringing a piece of their heritage along with them.

Titled “Serving a Plate Back Home: Migration Stories of Latinx and Caribbean Restauranteurs in Providence, R.I.,” the exhibition consists of an audio interview series and photo collection that “offers a glimpse into the personal journeys and intentions behind five restaurants that function as enclaves for Latinx and Caribbean communities in Providence,” according to the event’s website.

Design, art magazine celebrates South Asian culture, aims to erase barriers to knowledge.

When Brown University released its landmark 2006 report documenting the institution’s historical involvement in slavery, many of its recommendations were one-time fixes: revising the university’s official history, creating memorials, and the like. Some, however, required longer-term engagement, such as the creation of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), a research hub focusing on the history of slavery and its contemporary impacts.

‘Indefinite’ presents Walker’s sociological findings on sleep hygiene, role of racism in jail culture

Book discusses consent, politics, violence of Antebellum era New Orleans

The Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom project tells Black and Indigenous histories through publications, educational programming and exhibitions. Founded in 2021, the initiative is a grant-funded partnership between Williams College, Mystic Seaport Museum and the Brown Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Prof. Anthony Bogues, Director of Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), share about the Global Curatorial Project co-convened by the CSSJ and the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The Global Curatorial Project, which grew out of conversations that came after a conference at the CSSJ, includes the "In Slavery's Wake" exhibition and book project as well as the "Unfinished Conversations" oral histories project.

Policing and criminalization of sex work hurts massage workers, even when they aren’t sex workers.

The shootings of Asian massage workers in Georgia this month have been framed as part of a surge of anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic. But they’re also part of a longstanding problem: the violence against and the surveillance of migrant massage workers.

These women are vulnerable because of their race, their gender, their immigration status — and for the type of work they do. Asian massage parlors have long been a target of law enforcement and anti-trafficking organizations who see “illicit massage businesses” as loci of human trafficking.

Nearly all of these organizations have called for the increased surveillance and policing of massage businesses, and the result has been hundreds of raids across the country which have terrorized and criminalized massage workers. These systemic forms of violence cannot be divorced from the brutal killings of massage parlor workers in the Atlanta area on March 16.