'Trashing' Roger Willams

The trashing of Roger Williams by Rhode Island College anthropology professor Julianne Jennings is as intellectually and historically outrageous as the maltreatment of Native Americans and blacks by European colonists and their descendants.

Under the guise of scholarship, she libels the reputation of the man who was not only the greatest Rhode Islander ever but also such a staunch defender of Native American property rights that it contributed to his banishment from Massachusetts Bay.

Does Jennings know that America’s first law banning slavery was passed in 1652 by the Providence and Warwick plantations during the time that William Coddington had separated Aquidneck from these two mainland towns? Does she know that Rhode Island’s Indian prisoners of war who burned Providence (including Williams’s home) were not condemned to permanent slavery as occurred in the neighboring colonies, but rather, to a period of indenture like many white servants? Does she know that Williams’s concept of religious liberty extended to the beliefs of Native Americans, to the extent that he did not support their coerced Christianization?

From what I have read about Ms. Jennings hyperbolic, sensationalistic, and stupefying statements, I wonder if Ms. Jennings knows anything about the real Roger Williams.

The proposed plaque that she advocates to display her warped views would be a monument to error.

PATRICK T. CONLEY

Providence