A year and four months after learning the truth about Capt. William J. Rysam’s role in slave trading in the founding days of this community, the East Hampton Town Trustees on Monday voted unanimously to drop his name from the scholarship they award annually to a graduating senior from East Hampton High School.
The trustees were informed in October 2021 by David E. Rattray, editor in chief of The Star, that Captain Rysam was not just “a successful ship builder” and “commercial businessman in trading,” as he had been described for many years. Mr. Rattray and Donnamarie Barnes are co-founders of the Plain Sight Project, which researches the history of slavery on the East End.
The captain was “almost certainly involved in the West Indies trade . . . where slavery was the basis of sugar production and the creation of wealth,” the Plain Sight Project writes on its website. The organization has found evidence that Rysam captained a slaving voyage from Barbados to Hampton, Va., in 1772, and that upon his death, his estate included two enslaved people.
The trustees’ education committee spent the better part of a year working to rename the annual scholarship. The change was formalized on Monday. Susan McGraw Keber, a take-charge member of that committee, noted that helpful input was received from Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor, which was home to a multiethnic population of free Blacks, European immigrants, and Native Americans in the 19th century.
“It’s a long time coming, but thanks to David, Donnamarie, and Dr. Grier-Key, we got enough information,” Ms. McGraw Keber said on Tuesday. The trustees, she said, “don’t want to be associated with” an enslaver; certainly not in a community that is home to many students of color. “We don’t want to be under that cloud. We want to move with the times. This fellow does not represent who we are.”
A new bank account will be set up in the name of the East Hampton Town Trustees Scholarship Fund, with money from the sale of dredge spoils at Georgica Pond — plus the possible inclusion of new funding from the town’s South Fork Wind Farm operating agreement — as the source of the scholarship money. The role that wind-farm money may play was the topic of a lively debate Monday, but it was ultimately tabled.
“Most profoundly,” the trustees’ official resolution states, they “do not believe it is in the interest of our community to continue to herald the name of one who engaged in the sale and trade of human beings for the purpose of slavery.”
The resolution also reflects the trustees’ conclusion that Captain Rysam’s name “is neither relevant nor reflective of the intended purpose of the scholarship.”
Ms. Barnes, who is president of the board of the Plain Sight Project, said the trustees’ decision “will benefit us all.”
“This is a really great step forward and exactly what we strive for at the Plain Sight Project,” she said. “We do this history, uncover this information, and present it to the public as narrative stories, but it’s up to the community as a whole to decide what steps get taken from this new knowledge. The trustees did the right thing. They heard us — they understood the implications.”
In other town trustee news this week, Francis Bock was re-elected as the group’s clerk, and Jim Grimes and Bill Taylor were re-elected to the position of deputy clerk.
The trustees also voted to hire an accounting firm, Nawrocki and Smith, to perform a routine audit of their finances as directed by the East Hampton Town Board. In an updated version of an annual resolution that insures the trustees’ finances, they voted to increase the usual bonding amount from $350,000 to $1.4 million, which corresponds to the current balance of the trustees’ bank accounts.
