For Sale a sober honest, and healthy Negro Girl of twenty one years, well acquainted with country work, and having fourteen years to serve. To prevent unnecessary trouble, the price is 150 dollars.” William Duer placed that ad in 1814, just a few years before he became president of Columbia College, now Columbia University. The notice is flagged in a new report from Columbia about the school’s long and extensive ties with slavery.
Columbia now joins Brown, Harvard, Georgetown and plenty of other elite institutions in uncovering this checkered past. “I do believe any institution has to face its truth,” Columbia President Lee Bollinger said last year when the project launched. “It’s always shocking when you look back and realize things we think of as deeply immoral were taken for granted as a part of life.”