In one column are the names of more than 70 people enslaved at Harvard: Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicery. They are just the names of people and stories that are almost forgotten, or sometimes at all — “Moore” or “little boys”.
In another column are the names of Harvard ministers, presidents and donors who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries: Increase Mather, Governor John Winthrop, and William Brattle. These full names are very powerful and respected and still decorate the building today.
The contrasting list is arguably the most inspirational part of the 134-page report on Harvard’s four-century link to slavery and its heritage.
And they are just appendices.
A report by the Harvard Board of Education, released Tuesday, is Harvard’s efforts to begin correcting past mistakes, as several other universities have done for decades.
As part of the process, the university’s governing body will create a donated “Slavery Heritage Fund” that will allow scholars and students to uncover Harvard’s connection to slavery for the next generation. Promised $ 100 million for.
Experts said the amount Harvard committed for such a project is rare, if not unprecedented, for educational institutions. This is comparable to the $ 100 million promised by Jesuit priesthood leaders to benefit racial reconciliation and the descendants of enslaved people at Georgetown University.
The report demands spending money on many trucks: by tracking the modern descendants of those enslaved at Harvard. By building a monument and curriculum to honor and publish the past. By creating an exchange program between students and faculty at Harvard University and the Historically Black College and working with tribal colleges. And by building a partnership to improve schools in the Southern and West Indies, where plantation owners and Boston Bramins created intertwined property behind slaves.
According to Harvard officials, the recommendations are somewhat vague and deliberately so that more attention can be paid to achieving them. Some of the slave’s descendants said the discussion had already begun to understand how they could work together.
However, the report carefully avoided trampling on direct monetary damages for the descendants of enslaved people.
Recent issues with American university campuses
- Registration crisis: According to new data, the number of students enrolled in undergraduate courses in the spring of 2022 was 662,000 less than the previous year, a decrease of 4.7%.
- Harvard University President: Lawrence S. Bakou, who piloted the university through attacks on pandemics and admissions policies, announced that he would resign in 2023.
- Affirmative action: As the Supreme Court prepares to determine the legality of two race-aware abortion programs, lawyers who helped draft a Texas abortion ban offer critics of affirmative action a new path. Did.
- Freedom of speech: Legal scholars who wrote that President Biden would nominate a “black woman” to the Supreme Court were allowed to take on a new job in Georgetown after an investigation. He decided to resign anyway.
Compensation “I think sticking to that word is counterproductive because people have different meanings,” said Tomiko Brown Nagin, a professor of both law and history and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Technology. He said: interview.
She said one goal of the new donation fund is to promote social mobility by bridging the gap in educational opportunities. “The university is working on a lasting, deeply meaningful and lasting remedy,” she said. “These remedies focus on leveraging educational expertise that is in line with our mission.”
Some of Harvard’s enslaved descendants, like Jordan Lloyd, found the college promise bittersweet.
Lloyd grew up in Boston and wondered how a black family got there. While working as her actress, she was a waitress at Harvard’s Repertory Theater and paid her bills. She never thought she was walking on the same street as her ancestor, Cuba Vassar, which she did not know.
Harvard reports that Cuba Wassal was enslaved by Penelope Royal Wassal, a sister of Isaac Royal Jr., a slave-owning benefactor of Harvard Law School. The Royal family crest, with a bunch of wheat, was a symbol of the law school until it withdrew in 2016, 80 years after student protests. The student dissertation, The Harvard Crimson, is currently creating a game to find an extant Royal Crest on university grounds.
Lloyd, who currently lives in Los Angeles and works in the film, learned about her ancestors from Carissa Chen, who is studying the descendants of slaves under the guidance of Sven Beckert, a professor of history at Harvard University.
Dr. Beckert was inspired by an investigation into slavery at Brown University initiated by Ruth Simmons, the first black president of the Ivy League in 2003. Dr. Beckert and his students remembered working alone for three to four years before Harvard’s first attention around 2010.
Chen, now a Rhodes Scholar, contacted Lloyd in 2020 during a protest against George Floyd’s police killing. Lloyd was fed up with police atrocities, she said in an interview. Knowing where she came from with such academic conviction made her feel better.
“I found a lot of peace and grounds there, and I was incredibly grateful,” she said.
But she also felt angry at Harvard for not doing it any faster. “I feel like they’re on the move,” she said. She tends to prefer monetary damages, and what Harvard does will be a “barometer” for others, she says.
Her father, Dennis Earl Lloyd, is in contact with Harvard and has a more calm view. He wants Harvard to create educational opportunities for the black community rather than giving out money.
“What are you going to do, do you want to put a Cadillac in everyone’s garage?” Said developer and real estate owner Lloyd.
Harvard’s 134-page report, which contains two appendices, is worthy of an academic institution, as Harvard’s 134-page report, as stated in an email by University President Lawrence S. Bakou announcing the initiative to students and faculty, is detailed and detailed. Is “shocking”.
The enslaved people are said to have been an “essential” part of the early colleges. They lived in the presidential residence on the campus of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and were part of an almost invisible structure of everyday life.
“The enslaved men and women served the president and professor of Harvard University, feeding and caring for Harvard students,” the report said.
The image of New England is associated with the abolitionist movement in popular culture, but reports show that wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were interdependent.
“In the 19th century, universities and their donors benefited from widespread financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These beneficial economic relationships included, among other things, the benefits of donors who accumulated wealth through the slave trade, from the labor of enslaved people on the Caribbean islands and plantations in the southern United States. From the northern textile manufacturing industry, fed cotton raised by slaves detained in bondage. “
Next, according to the report, the university benefited from financing and investment in cotton production for Caribbean sugar planters, rum distilleries, plantation suppliers.
Early attempts at integration encountered severe resistance from Harvard leaders who praised the school for the white upper crust, including a wealthy white son in the South, the report said.
“In 1850, Harvard Medical School accepted three black students, but after opposition from a group of white students and alumni, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.” I am.
Teachers played a role in justifying racial segregation and spreading false theories about racial differences used to support the eradication of the “undesirable” population in Nazi Germany.
“In the 19th century, Harvard began collecting human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, which were so-called races at Harvard and other universities by the hands of prominent university scientific authorities. It will be central to the promotion of science. American institutions, “said the report.
The bitter fruit of those racial scientists continues to be part of Harvard’s living heritage and is still in conflict.
A 19th-century naturalist and professor at Harvard University, Louis Agassiz asked for daguerreotype portraits of enslaved people to prove their inferiority complex.
The report does not say that Tamara Lanier, a woman who traced her ancestors to one of those people called Lenti, challenged the ownership of Harvard’s portrait. Her theft should be ruined and handed over to her.
Until the 1960s, the report stated that the legacy of slavery lived in a shortage of black students enrolled in Harvard.
“During the 50 years from 1890 to 1940, about 160 blacks attended Harvard University, with an average of about 3 per year and 30 in 10 years,” the report said. “In 1960, of the 1,212 freshmen at Harvard University, about nine black men were counted, which has shown significant improvements over the last few decades.”
In the 2025 class, 18% of the 1,968 enrolled students were identified as African-American or Black.
Dr. Beckart, a professor of history at Harvard University, who attended the committee that produced the report, said it was very meaningful to study racism at his institution.
“Today we can’t move forward on many of the issues that divide the country,” he said.
Kitty Bennett Contributed to the research.