The report, produced by a team of faculty and student researchers led by a senior dean, outlines a variety of links to slavery dating from the university’s founding in the 17th century to its abolition in the 19th century.
The presidents of Harvard, as well as the faculty and staff, owned more than 70 slaves who worked in their homes and on campus, where they fed generations of students, according to the report. The Harvard Corporation, the entity that controls Harvard’s wealth to this day, profited from slavery through loans to Caribbean landowners, whose businesses depended on slave labor, and investments in American textile mills, whose raw material, cotton, was produced by enslaved women and men. In the south.
The wealth produced by slave labor also flowed into the university’s coffers through significant bequests, some of which resulted in lasting legacies, such as an endowed professorship at the law school that until this week was named after the brutal owner of a Caribbean plantation.
Other names linked to slavery still grace the campus. Harvard’s second oldest building, Wadsworth House, was once the home of university president Benjamin Wadsworth. Two enslaved people, Titus and Venus, served the Wadsworth family within the walls of the house. The Perkins Chair in Astronomy and Mathematics is named after James Perkins, a major donor who owned slaves, including an unknown number who were traded in Haiti in the late 19th century.
The university’s ties to slavery are not an entirely new revelation. Previous scholarship, including work published by Harvard historian Sven Beckert in 2011, laid the groundwork for Tuesday’s report.
But this latest work, a 130-page monograph, including 51 pages of endnotes, is sanctioned by the university and strives to document every detectable connection between Harvard and slavery.
The report also goes further than previous work by describing how Harvard perpetuated legacies of slavery, theories of white supremacy, and ongoing racial discrimination, even after emancipation.
Harvard scholars and at least one Harvard president promoted “racial science” – the 19th century practice of creating taxonomies of human beings that placed whites at the top of a hierarchy and blacks at the bottom, it was used in the 20th century to justify the state. -Discrimination sanctioned in the United States. The report it also sheds light on discrimination against Blacks and Native Americans at Harvard, which persisted into the second half of the 20th century in the form of limited admissions of disadvantaged groups and the exclusion of Blacks, Native Americans, and others from housing and other housing characteristics. college life.
“This report is unwavering,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a constitutional law professor and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, who chaired the committee that produced the report.
The committee wrote recommendations on how Harvard can make amends. Among other initiatives, the committee recommended that Harvard fund educational opportunities for communities, such as African Americans in the South, who are descendants of slaves. He also recommended funding additional research on Native American slavery, as well as admitting more students from tribal communities to Harvard. The report also called for the creation of an “imposing physical monument” to those enslaved by men with ties to Harvard on campus.
In his letter Tuesday, Bacow said he had accepted all of the recommendations and promised to allocate $100 million to carry them out. Martha Minow, a Harvard professor and former dean of Harvard Law School, will chair a committee to implement the recommended programs.
Harvard joins a growing list of colleges and universities that acknowledge and seek to mend their ties to slavery.
After the release of a 2006 report detailing its own ties to slavery, Brown University awarded a $10 million grant to support Providence public schools. In 2015, Georgetown University began publicly counting on the sale of 272 slaves down the Mississippi River by Jesuits connected to the university and, in 2019, promised to raise $400,000 annually to benefit the descendants of those slaves.
Harvard Roots report dates back to 2007. That’s when Beckert, a historian of slavery, read the Brown University report report. “I was wondering if there isn’t a similar story to tell about Harvard,” Beckert said in an interview for a documentary, which Harvard also released Tuesday.
Working with student researchers, Beckert published a report, co-authored with graduate student Katherine Stevens, in 2011 detailing many of the links to slavery, which are expanded upon in the current report.
In 2008, Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley published a paper on Isaac Royall, a Caribbean plantation owner and slave owner who donated to Harvard. Halley became interested in Royall because he had given her his own professorship. On Tuesday, Harvard Law School Dean John Manning announced that the Royall chair would be retired.
Halley’s work, which described, among other things, the atrocities committed by Royall’s men in response to a slave revolt, sparked student protests and led Harvard Law School to remove the three sheaves of wheat that Harvard had adopted from the Royall family’s own imprint. .
Former Harvard president Drew Gilpin-Faust was next to take on the task. After establishing a committee to study Harvard’s links to slavery, he said, “Harvard was directly complicit in America’s racial slavery system.” In 2016, she and former congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis unveiled a plaque on the Harvard campus honoring four enslaved people who worked at Harvard.
the harvard report culminates nearly three years of work by dozens of professors and student researchers. It seeks to challenge the “incomplete, yet popular narrative” that Massachusetts was a source of resistance to slavery. While it is true that abolitionism had deep roots here, the report says, it is also true that New England’s economy in the 17th and 18th centuries depended on slave labor through the region’s extensive trading relationship with Caribbean entrepreneurs such as Royall. , who owned a mansion near Harvard.
“This effectively turned Boston into a slave society,” historian Wendy Warren wrote, as quoted in the report, “but one in which most slaves worked elsewhere.”
An ongoing goal, Brown-Nagin said, is to educate Harvard students and the public about slavery and Harvard’s ties to it. On Friday, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute will host a conference titled “Telling the Truth About It All: Considering Slavery and Its Legacies at Harvard and Beyond.””
The truth about Harvard’s history may surprise some. “Growing up, I saw this school as the best of the best,” Harvard student Ben Bryant said in an interview for the documentary. “I didn’t know the stories that were hidden on the walls around this campus.”
Mike Damiano can be reached at [email protected].
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