Confronting Racial Injustice: Slavery, Wealth Creation, and Intergenerational Wealth

Nicole Maskiell, University of South Carolina; Elon Cook Lee, Moderated by Jared Hardesty, Western Washington University

From the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, slavery has been central to creating wealth and generating race-based inequality in Massachusetts. Family fortunes, institutional endowments, and public budgets in the commonwealth have all benefitted from the spoils of slavery. This panel discussion between academic and public historians explores Massachusetts’s connections to slavery and the slave trade, the wealth -- and the poverty -- slavery created and bequeathed, and how the legacies of slavery are reflected in injustices that haunt Massachusetts to this day.