Harvard, the oldest college in America, has made another effort to redress its ugly past. The ivy league institution has set up a multimillion-dollar fund to finance a study of the school’s lengthy connection to slavery.
The new endowment called the “Legacy of Slavery Fund” was created to give scholars and students access to Harvard’s historical records, in an effort to fully unpack the university’s connection to the institution of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The fund will be financed by the president and the university’s governing corporation, which has already pledged $100 million, a commitment that mirrors a donation of the same amount by the leaders of the Jesuit Conference of priests in May 2021 to Georgetown University for racial reconciliation and to benefit descendants of enslaved Africans.
The act was initiated after the school released the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report, a study that detailed the intertwining of slavery with the school’s inception, starting in the Colonial era.
It also revealed how 70 people of African descent were enslaved by Harvard presidents and other leaders, faculty, and staff. At least five Harvard presidents owned slaves. Those that are known, according to the report are as follows: Benjamin Wadsworth, Nathaniel Eaton, Increase Mather, Joseph Willard, and Edward Holyoke.
“Over nearly 150 years, from the University’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful, Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom labored on campus,” the report states.
These individuals were caretakers for the students and faculty, according to the study.
According to Craig Steven Wilder, the author of the book “Ebony & Ivy,” Harvard would have failed if it were not for one African known in the records as “The Moor.”
“Harvard, actually, from its very beginnings in 1636, the college, by 1638, actually had an enslaved man living on campus, who’s referred to as ‘the Moor,’” he said. “And that actually is directly related to two slave trades. I imagine it’s how he gets to Cambridge.”
“One is right after the Pequot War, the war in which the Puritans defeat the Indians of southern Connecticut. There’s a Pequot slave trade into the West Indies. The captive Pequot are actually sold into the West Indies. That ship actually returns with enslaved Africans. And it’s right after that moment that the Moor appears on campus and becomes part of the sort of legend of early Harvard,” he explains.
The book “A State-by-State History of Race and Racism in the United States,” lists The Moor as the first documented enslaved person of African descent in the colony.
Several tracks have been identified to support this scholarship. One suggestion is to trace the living descendants of those who were enslaved on the campus. Another option is to erect memorials and design a curriculum around the school’s connection to the institution of slavery.
The final track proposed is to implement an exchange program between Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Tribal Colleges and those attending as students and working as faculty at Harvard, forging partnerships to enhance schools in the American South and the West Indies, the very places where plantation owners and Boston Brahmins profited from the forced labor of enslaved people.
Harvard President Larry Bacow accepted the recommendation and said, “Veritas [which means truth in Latin) is more than our motto.”
“It’s our reason for being,” he continued. “We’re committed to truth for the sake of our community and for the sake of our nation. The truth is that slavery played a significant part in our institutional history.”
One truth is that Harvard benefited greatly from its dabbling in human bondage, even after slavery was abolished in the 18th century in Massachusetts. While not always directly, many benefactors who amassed wealth from slavery, contributed to the financing of the school well into the 19th century.
In the early 1800s, the study reports, over one-third of the money donated or pledged to Harvard was by private individuals “came from just five men who made their fortunes from slavery and slave-produced commodities.”
“Harvard’s donors in this period — and their wealth — were vital to the University’s growth,” the report stated. “They allowed the University to hire faculty, support students, develop its infrastructure, and, ultimately, begin to establish itself as a national institution.”
“For roughly a century, Harvard had operated as a lender and derived a substantial portion of its income from investments that included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers,” the report continued. “After 1830, the University shifted its investments into cotton manufacturing, before diversifying its portfolio to include real estate and railroad stocks — all industries that were, in this era, dependent on the labor of enslaved people and the expropriation of land.”
Another truth is that two of the undergraduate dormitories on the school’s campus were named after slave owners, Winthrop House, and Mather House. Both Gov. John Winthrop (Class of 1732) and former Harvard President Increase Mather (Class of 1656) owned human beings.
Separate from the slavery conversation, the report talked about the school’s investment in “race science” and eugenics, promoting the debunked scholarship of Harvard professors including Louis Agassiz, John Collins Warren, and Jeffries Wyman.
The report said, “From the mid-19th century well into the 20th, Harvard presidents and several prominent professors, including Louis Agassiz, promoted ‘race science’ and eugenics and conducted abusive ‘research,’ including the photographing of enslaved and subjugated human beings.”
“These theories and practices were rooted in racial hierarchies of the sort marshaled by proponents of slavery and would produce devastating consequences in the 19th and 20th centuries,” it read. “Records and artifacts documenting many of these activities remain among the University’s collections.”
One thing the report did not unpack is the conversation about financial reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the committee chair, a professor of both law and history, and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said the word “reparations” is a distraction for many and that the fund as it is presented can be seen as a tool for social mobility and the closing of educational gaps.
“The university is committed to deeply meaningful and sustained remedies that will endure in perpetuity,” Brown-Nagin said. “Those remedies are focused on leveraging our expertise in education, which is consistent with our mission.”
Jordan Lloyd, a descendant of the enslaved at Harvard, is not as optimistic.
She told the Times while she received “a lot of peace and groundedness” in the report and “was incredibly grateful,” she also feels like it’s not a sincere effort.
“It feels like they’re hopping on a bandwagon,” she said. For her, she wants reparations for the exploitation of labor her ancestors endured.
Especially since some of those slave owners’ families are still benefiting from the unpaid workforce of the enslaved.
The report says, “Still today, early Harvard benefactors who accumulated their wealth through slavery are memorialized throughout campus in statues, buildings, student houses, and endowed professorships — and indeed in other educational, civic, and cultural organizations across Massachusetts.”
