Nathan News

In one column are the names of more than 70 people enslaved at Harvard: Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicely. These are just first names, or sometimes no names at all – “the Moor” or “a little boy” – of people and stories that have been almost forgotten.

In another column are the names of ministers, presidents, and Harvard donors who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries: Augmentation Mather, Governor John Winthrop, William Brattle. These full names are so powerful and revered that they still adorn buildings today.

The contrasting lists are arguably the most poignant part of a 134-page report on Harvard University’s four centuries of ties to slavery and its legacy.

And they are just an appendage.

The report by a committee of Harvard faculty members, released Tuesday, is Harvard’s effort to begin to right past wrongs, as some other universities have been doing for decades.

As part of this process, the university’s governing body pledged $100 million in part to create a “slavery legacy fund” that would allow scholars and students to shed light on the ties of Harvard with slavery for generations to come.

Experts said the amount of money Harvard is committing to such a project is rare, if not unprecedented for an educational institution. It rivals the $100 million pledged by leaders of the Jesuit Priests’ Conference for racial reconciliation and to benefit descendants of slaves at Georgetown University.

The report calls for spending the money on a multitude of avenues: By tracing the modern descendants of those enslaved at Harvard. By building memorials and programs to honor and display the past. By creating exchange programs between students and faculty at Harvard and those at historically black colleges and universities, and by collaborating with tribal colleges. And by forging partnerships to improve schools in the American South and the West Indies, where plantation owners and Boston Brahmins made their fortunes on the backs of slaves.

The recommendations are somewhat vague, by design, Harvard officials said, so more care can be taken in carrying them out. Some descendants of the slaves said the talks had already begun to figure out how they could work together.

But the report carefully avoided impinging on direct financial reparations for the descendants of slaves.

Reparations “mean different things to different people, so getting fixated on that term, I think, can be counterproductive,” said committee chair Tomiko Brown-Nagin, professor of law and history and dean of Harvard Radcliffe. Institute. a meeting.

She said one of the goals of the new endowment fund was to foster social mobility by filling gaps in educational opportunities. “The university is committed to providing deeply meaningful and sustained remedies that will last in perpetuity,” she said. “These remedies aim to leverage our expertise in education, which is in line with our mission.”

Some descendants of Harvard slaves, like Jordan Lloyd, found the promises of college bittersweet.

Ms. Lloyd grew up in Boston wondering how her black family got there. While working as an actress, she paid her bills as a waitress at the Harvard Repertory Theater, never suspecting that she was walking the same streets as an ancestor she didn’t know, Cuba Vassall.

The Harvard report states that Cuba Vassall was enslaved by Penelope Royall Vassall, sister of Isaac Royall Jr., the enslaving benefactor of Harvard Law School. The Royall family crest, with its sheaves of wheat, was a symbol of the law school until it was removed in 2016, after 80 years, due to student protests. The student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, is now practically making a game of finding the existing Royall crest on university property.

Ms Lloyd, who now lives in Los Angeles and works in film, learned about her ancestor from Carissa Chen, then an undergraduate researching the descendants of slaves under the tutelage of a history professor of Harvard, Sven Beckert.

Dr. Beckert, in turn, had been inspired by an inquiry into slavery at Brown University that was started in 2003 by Ruth Simmons, the first black president of an Ivy League school. Dr. Beckert and his students worked alone for three or four years, he recalls, until the Harvard administration first noticed it around 2010.

Ms Chen, now a Rhodes Scholar, contacted Ms Lloyd in 2020, around the time of protests over the police killing of George Floyd. Ms Lloyd was sickened by the police brutality, she said in an interview. Knowing with such scientific certainty where she came from made her feel better.

“I found a lot of peace and grounding there, and I was incredibly grateful for that,” she said.

But she also felt anger at Harvard for not doing more sooner. “It feels like they’re jumping on a bandwagon,” she said. She tends to favor financial reparations, and says what Harvard is doing will be a “barometer” for others.

His father, Dennis Earl Lloyd, is in touch with Harvard and takes a softer view. He wants Harvard to create educational opportunities for black communities, not hand out money.

“What are you going to do, put a Cadillac in everyone’s garage?” said Mr. Lloyd, developer and landowner.

Befitting an academic institution, Harvard’s 134-page report, which includes two appendices, is dense, detailed and even “shocking,” as university president Lawrence S. Bacow said in an email announcing the initiative to students, faculty and staff.

He says slaves were an integral part of the university in its early days. They lived in the president’s residence on the Cambridge, Mass., campus and were part of the almost invisible fabric of daily life.

“Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students,” the report said.

While the image of New England has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, according to the report, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent.

“Well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These successful financial relationships included, among other things, the benevolence of donors who accumulated their wealth through the slave trade; the work of enslaved people on the plantations of the Caribbean islands and the southern United States; and the northern textile industry, supplied with cotton grown by slaves held in bondage.

In turn, according to the report, the university benefited from loans to sugar planters, rum distillers and Caribbean plantation suppliers, as well as investments in cotton manufacturing.

Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders, who enjoyed being a school for white upper class, including wealthy white sons from the South, the report said.

“In 1850, Harvard Medical School admitted three black students, but after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., kicked out,” he said.

Faculty members were instrumental in spreading false theories about racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to support Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.

“By the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of slaves, which, in the hands of the university’s eminent scientific authorities, would become essential to the promotion of the so-called science of race at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said.

The bitter fruit of these race scientists is still part of Harvard’s living legacy and is still disputed.

Nineteenth-century naturalist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotype portraits of slaves in an attempt to prove their inferiority.

The report does not mention that Tamara Lanier, a woman who traced her ancestry to one of these people, named Renty, had challenged Harvard’s ownership of the portraits, saying the images of Renty and her daughter Delia, taken under constraint, are the spoils of theft and must be returned to him.

Until the 1960s, the report notes, the legacy of slavery lived on in the scarcity of black students admitted to Harvard.

“In the five decades between 1890 and 1940, about 160 black people attended Harvard College, an average of about three per year, 30 per decade,” the report said. “In 1960, some nine black men were among the 1,212 freshmen at Harvard College, and that figure was a great improvement over previous decades.”

In the Class of 2025, 18% of the 1,968 admitted students identified as African American or Black.

Dr. Beckert, a Harvard history professor who served on the committee that produced the report, said it was deeply meaningful to study racism at one’s own institution.

“We cannot move forward on many of the issues that divide the nation today,” he said, “without coming to engage them right where you are.”

Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.