Harvard University leaders, faculty and staff members enslaved more than 70 individuals until slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783, according to the “Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery’ report.
Much of Harvard’s record on slavery and racial discrimination has been known for years. The report, made public recently, represents a landmark acknowledgment from one of the world’s most prestigious universities of the breadth of its entanglement with slavery, white supremacy and racial injustice for centuries after its 1636 founding. It also shatters any notion that Harvard, by virtue of its location in New England, was insulated from the evils of economic and social systems based on human bondage. The school pledged $100 million to redress the injustices.
The report chronicles the university’s deep ties to wealth generated from slave labour in the South and Caribbean — and its significant role in the nation’s long history of racial discrimination. The report did not state a precise count but the university said the total appears to be 79, dozens more than previously known.
Harvard has previously acknowledged significant connections to slavery. In 2016, Drew Gilpin Faust, the university’s president, declared that “Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage” from its earliest days until 1783.
Some of the key findings of the report are as follows:
Enslaved persons of indigenous and African descent played an integral role in the Harvard community in its first century and a half. The first Harvard schoolmaster, Nathaniel Eaton, enslaved a man known only as “The Moor,” who served the college’s earliest students. Various Harvard presidents, fellows, overseers, stewards and faculty members enslaved more than 70 persons until slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783.
Five men who made their fortunes from slavery and slave-produced commodities accounted for more than one-third of donations or financial pledges Harvard received from private individuals during the first half of the 19th century. Among them was Benjamin Bussey, a sugar, coffee and cotton merchant who left Harvard an estate of $320,000 when he died in 1842. James Perkins, whose business included Caribbean slave trading, bequeathed $20,000 to Harvard in 1822.
Harvard was home to intellectuals who promoted “race science” and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Their theories and research, including the collection of photographs of enslaved people and nude students, provided crucial support for those seeking to justify white supremacy and other racist ideologies. The university’s museum collections also hold human remains believed to be from indigenous people and enslaved people of African descent.
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The report was produced by a faculty committee convened by Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow in 2019. Many who read the report will find it “disturbing and even shocking,” Bacow said in a statement.
“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow said. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”
Harvard is among the latest major universities to engage in a public reckoning with their role in slavery, a trend that emerged after Brown University published a soul-searching report in 2006 on its ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Georgetown University, the University of Virginia and William & Mary, among others, have also dug deeply into their slavery-stained past in recent years. A consortium called Universities Studying Slavery, based at U-Va., counts about 90 members (including Harvard) in the United States and abroad.
Kirt von Daacke, a professor of History at U-Va. and leader of the consortium, called the Harvard findings unsurprising. But he said it’s great when a place like Harvard comes out and makes such a statement “in really clear and powerful ways” and commits money to the effort. It could give fresh momentum, he said, to racial reckonings that occurred at universities following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Some universities, including Georgetown and William & Mary, have apologized in recent years for their roles in slavery. Others have not. Bacow’s statement stopped short of an apology on behalf of Harvard, and the university declined to comment on that point. But Bacow announced that the university will set aside $100 million for initiatives, including an endowment, to respond to the report’s findings.
The report recommended an expansion of partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Under this plan, Harvard would pay for HBCU faculty members to spend a summer, semester or school year in visiting appointments on the Cambridge campus, and Harvard professors would be able to do the same at HBCUs. The report also envisioned that HBCU students be invited to spend a summer or one or two semesters at Harvard during their junior year — with financial aid from Harvard. Juniors at Harvard could spend time at HBCUs as well. Students in those programmes would be known as Du Bois Scholars, honouring the civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1895 became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, who chaired the committee that produced the report, said many at the university are excited by the proposal to work more with HBCUs. “The nation owes the historically Black schools a debt’, she said.
John K. Pierre, chancellor of the Southern University Law Center, a historically Black institution in Louisiana, said the proposed exchange with HBCUs is “a good idea. It’s just not enough. It’s a beginning.”
The report also proposed that the university take steps to help remedy educational inequities among communities of descendants of enslaved people, including in the South and in the Caribbean, working with schools, community colleges, tribal colleges and other institutions.
