by Mildred Europa Taylor, Face2FaceAfrica.com
Genealogist Chris Rabb is now the first living descendant of enslaved people connected to Columbia University’s founding families to be formally identified by university researchers.
This is the first time students have identified a living descendant of someone enslaved by a Columbia affiliate since the Columbia University and Slavery seminar began in 2014.
The finding followed a group research initiative this fall to trace descendants of people enslaved by families linked to the University’s founding and early history.
The research, which was led by six students, five of whom are in the seminar, found that Rabb is a direct descendant of people who were enslaved by the prominent Livingston family in New York. The Livingstons played huge roles in the founding and early administration of King’s College, which later became Columbia College. Livingston family members mainly served as governors, regents, trustees, and administrators of the College in the 18th century.
On April 29, an event was held for the student researchers to present their findings. At the event, professor Karl Jacoby, who is part of the faculty collective that teaches the seminar each fall, introduced Rabb, according to the Spectator.
The Columbia University and Slavery seminar is a public history initiative in which students research Columbia’s connections to slavery. According to Jacoby, the April 29 event served to “break loose the discussion about Columbia and its relationship to slavery, from where it’s often confined to this imagined, very remote past, and propels it to the present day, forcing us to engage with actual living and breathing people.”
This year’s research team included Isabel Iino, BC ’26; Ray Knapick, CC ’27; Ava Lozner, CC ’27; and three Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students — Tia Abdul-Wasi, Truman Williams, and Seth Cannon.
They began their research after listening to a 2025 talk from Richard Cellini, the founding director of Harvard’s slavery remembrance program, who spoke at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race on a subject titled “Northern Profits and Southern Plantations: Telling the Truth about Harvard Slavery.”
After Cellini shared his experience tracing descendants of Harvard affiliates, the student researchers decided to do something similar at Columbia.
“Where did Columbia come from, and on whose blood, sweat, and tears was Columbia built?” Cannon wondered while speaking with Spectator.
Last October, Cannon and the rest of the group started the research by reviewing past research papers from the seminar in search of names that appeared frequently across projects.
“We had the hard task of deciding who we were going to focus on,” Abdul-Wasi said.
He and the group decided to focus on the Jays, Schuylers, Morrises, Beekmans, Livingstons, and Johnsons, who are all founding and affiliated families of the University, according to the Spectator. Each researcher focused on one family, going through treasury, birth, baptism and census records to identify the people enslaved by each family and track likely descendants.
Many of the archives they searched usually had details about the enslavers and nothing much about the people they enslaved.
Iino, who researched the Livingstons, uncovered Rabb’s links to the family on November 12, 2025, after about 40 hours of research. Rabb had already been researching his own genealogical history in his early 20s after he graduated from Yale University and had traced his roots back to the Livingstons. He, however, didn’t know the Livingston’s connection to Columbia.
“Chris is someone who’s been wrestling with the question about the relationship between universities and slavery for a very long time,” Jacoby said.
Rabb successfully campaigned to remove an image of a shackled, kneeling enslaved African American from the central room of his residential college while he was an undergraduate student at Yale, the Spectator said.
He sees descendant research as a struggle over memory and narrative.
“This is rooted in narrative—the stories we tell and the stories we obscure—and so whenever I can show up and tell my story, it’s a political act,” Rabb said. “It’s important who controls the story lines.”
He is a sixth-generation college-educated, which is rare for a Black person in the United States, he said. He therefore wonders why his family lacks generational wealth.
“Could there be a white person my age—I’m 56—who is six generations college educated who is not fabulously wealthy?” Rabb questioned. “How is it that you do everything right and the disparities are still so vast?”
The educator and author said that it is important to connect the dots between “the rich traditions that are cultivated in elite institutions” such as Columbia and the sources of wealth that make such spaces possible. Failure to do so, he warned, could make one “fall complicit to the systems of oppression that have allowed this cycle to continue,” the Spectator reported.