CLENNON KING: A lesson in economics and history

Come this fall, I hope the students of color who were subjected to racist comments during their spring field trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts make a return visit.

Not for a lesson in art, but one in economics and history.

Their return trip would be a primer of sorts in what it means to “follow the money” as a way of them better understanding why they were treated the way they were treated.

Their attention would be focused on a leading Boston arts patron, whose family profited heavily from slavery, who reconstituted that wealth and who redistributed it nationally, here in Greater Boston and, yes, within the walls of the MFA.

For starters and to give them context, the students would be required to return to The Gender Bending Fashion exhibition on the museum’s second-floor West Wing.

That’s where, back in May, a museum member noticed a black female student dancing to the exhibit’s piped-in music, and quipped, “It’s a shame she’s not learning, and instead stripping.”

The sexually- and racially-loaded comment quite aside, these middle-schoolers would be asked to notice the words “Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery” posted on one of the exhibition’s walls.

For the record, Paul, 81, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, while Catherine, 80, spent her career as an early childhood social worker.

But the Buttenwiesers (pronounced ‘button-weezer’) are best known as leading Boston philanthropists, who live in Belmont, across the street from a seven-bedroom mansion that was once home to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

The surname won’t ring a bell for the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy students in Dorchester – or for most Bostonians, for that matter.

But they’d be told that few fortunes derived their wealth more directly from slavery than the family of Paul’s mother, Helen Lehman Buttenwieser.

Helen’s grandfather was a German-born Jew named Mayer Lehman, who in 1850 immigrated stateside – not through New York’s Ellis Island, but to the first capital of the Confederacy, Montgomery, Ala. Mayer teamed up there with his brothers, Henry and Emanuel, going into business, accumulating enormous wealth trading cotton planted and picked by enslaved Africans.

They called their enterprise “Lehman Brothers”.

And Mayer’s exploitation of enslaved Negroes wasn’t at arm’s length either. According to the 1860 Census, he owned three males and four females.

During the Civil War, he supported the Southern cause and served as a high commissioner for the state of Alabama.

After the war, he moved his family operation to Manhattan, co-founding the New York Cotton Exchange, and reinventing Lehman Brothers into what ultimately became one of the largest and oldest investment banks in the nation, before its eventual collapse in 2008.

Despite Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, these students would be reminded this successful Wall Street firm derived its wealth from the stolen labor of enslaved people who looked like them.

It was wealth that helped pay for the very gallery where they were standing. But their field trip wouldn’t end at the MFA either.

The students would be treated to other local examples of this family redistributing and repurposing its fortune.

We’d head out to Cambridge to tour Lehman Hall, situated on Harvard Yard at Harvard University. While there, we would meet renowned music history scholar Carolyn Abbate, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University professor. And at nearby Harvard Business School, we’d view a featured exhibit on the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, on display through October 2019.

The following day, they could take in the stunning Institute of Contemporary Arts overlooking Boston Harbor in the Seaport District. They could go listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Back Bay. And at South Station, they could visit the nearby home of the Family-to-Family Project, a nonprofit fighting to prevent and end family homelessness.

All of these enterprises, the students would be told, have benefited significantly from this family’s inherited intergenerational wealth derived from the blood, sweat and tears of their ancestors, who were the victims of torture, rape and child trafficking under slavery.

Back at school, the students would be encouraged to write Dr. and Mrs. Buttenwieser, inviting them to have a conversation about what they have seen and heard.

And what better time to solicit the couple’s thoughts on reparations? Especially given that it has become a campaign issue, and being debated in the halls of Congress.

These teens would also be referred to reading materials and videos for another important revelation: that more than a century before their ancestors were picking cotton in the South, New England and Boston were distilling, shipping and exchanging rum for enslaved Africans on the world market.

And, finally, they would discover to their amazement a related, well-kept secret: that Massachusetts — not the Carolinas, Virginia or Georgia — was the first colony to legalize slavery.

In the end, I hope these young adults will come away with a renewed sense of self-worth and pride in their ancestors, whose stolen labor made possible so much.

I would want them to never again look at another so-called “white” cultural or educational institution in the same way, out of respect to themselves and their history.

And I pray they will take to heart the words of writer James Baldwin, that remind all who are descendants of enslaved Africans, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All you have to do is wear it.”