Harvard, like Georgetown, Princeton, and Columbia universities, has released a report on the school’s ties to slavery. Here is how the New York Times’ article on the report begins:
“In one column are the names of more than 70 enslaved people at Harvard: Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicely. They are only first names, or sometimes no name at all — “the Moor” or “a little boy” — of people and stories that have been all but forgotten.
In another column are the names of the ministers and presidents and donors of Harvard who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries: Increase Mather, Gov. John Winthrop, William Brattle. These full names are so powerful and revered they still adorn buildings today.”
While Harvard became so identified with anti-slavery politics by the 1800s that Southern planters stopped sending their sons to Cambridge, Mass. to study, a century earlier slave owners from New England were prominent in the school’s life. The report, written by a committee of Harvard faculty, calls for the university to spend $100 million to expose the connections to slavery and take ameliorative steps. According to the New York Times:
The report calls for spending the money in a multitude of tracks: By tracing the modern-day descendants of enslaved people at Harvard. By building memorials and curriculum to honor and expose the past. By creating exchange programs between students and faculty members 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 intertwined fortunes on the backs of the enslaved.
While slaves were not part of university life in the years right before the Civil War, the school continued to profit from slavery until slavery was abolished. According to the New York Times:
Befitting a scholarly institution, Harvard’s 134-page report, which includes two appendices, is dense, detailed and even “shocking,” as the university’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, said in an email announcing the initiative to students, faculty and staff.
It says that enslaved people 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 fabric, almost invisible, of daily life.
“Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students,” the report says.
While New England’s image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, 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 profitable financial relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage.”
In turn, the report said, the university profited from loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers and plantation suppliers, and from investments in cotton manufacturing.
Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders, who prized being a school for the white upper crust, including wealthy white sons of the South, the report recounted.
“In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them,” it said.
Faculty members played a role in disseminating bogus theories of racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.
“In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the university’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said.
You can read the full Harvard Slavery Report here.
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