By the year 2021 — 15 years after Brown’s watershed 2006 Slavery and Justice Report — more than 80 universities in the United States, Canada and Great Britain had embarked on investigations into their ties with racial slavery. 

The President’s Commission on Slavery and the University at the University of Virginia is one of many dozens of similar college and university initiatives that have been created in the wake of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report. Brown, one of the first universities to commit to understanding and grappling with its historical ties to racial slavery and the slave trade, not only sparked a national discussion across higher education, but also provided a rigorous blueprint with which to begin the process. A passage on a University of Virginia website reads, “Frankly, Brown was the institution that inspired all of us to begin our work.”

Guided by Brown’s example, institutions large and small, within and outside the United States, also are using the Slavery and Justice Report to guide explorations of such issues as Indigenous rights, gentrification, displacement and a range of issues based in race.