The University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice continues its program tonight with a lecture by Edward Ball '82, the National Book Award-winning author of "Slaves in the Family." Ball's memoir, published in 1998, recounts the writer's experience of searching for both the black and white descendants of his family's antebellum plantation.
Ball left his career as a journalist in New York City to move to Charleston, S.C., where he researched his family history. His work took him as far afield as the western coast of Africa, where Ball investigated the slave trade, and the Oprah Winfrey show, where he made a formal apology to Charlotte Dunne and Katie Roper, two descendants of slaves owned by his own ancestors.
Ball's name came up early in discussions of possible speakers for the committee's program, which focuses on historical inquiry this semester, said Slavery and Justice Committee member and Associate Professor of Political Science Ross Cheit.
"His quest is a lot like what this committee is doing," Cheit said, pointing out that just as Ball sought to explore his ancestors' direct complicity with slavery, Brown, through the work of the committee, is attempting to deal with the implications of its own relationship to slavery and the slave trade.
The committee and the undergraduates enrolled in the affiliated Group Research Project can learn from the scholarly methodology Ball used to tell his personal story, Cheit said.
"I think there is a role for this Slavery and Justice Committee to promote and then to publish various kinds of oral history, which I think he did so remarkably in this book," Cheit said. "He tried to talk to people on both sides."
Committee members and GRP students could complete an oral history project in which they speak to both the descendants of slaveholding families associated with the University and the descendants of those slaves, Cheit suggested.
"I don't know how much of that has been done in Rhode Island, but I think that's something our committee has to ask," he said.
