The main findings of Harvard’s report on its ties to slavery

In 2019, Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow appointed a committee of school members to analyze the college’s ties to slavery, in addition to its legacy. Discussions about race had been intensifying throughout the nation. Students had been demanding that the names of individuals concerned within the slave commerce be faraway from buildings. Other universities, notably Brown, had already performed comparable excavations of their previous.

The ensuing 134-page report plus two appendices was launched Tuesday, together with a promise of $100 million, to create an endowed fund to “redress” previous wrongs, one of many greatest funds of its type.

Here are a few of its key findings and excerpts.

Slavery was a part of each day life on the University

The report discovered that enslaved folks lived on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, within the president’s residence, and had been a part of the material, albeit virtually invisible, of each day life.

“Over nearly 150 years, from the university’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful in 1783, 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 mentioned. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.”

Four Harvard Presidents enslaved folks

The committee discovered no less than 41 distinguished folks related to Harvard who enslaved folks. They included 4 Harvard presidents, corresponding to Increase Mather, president of the college from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, minister of First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, a professor of divinity; John Winthrop, professor of arithmetic and pure philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founding father of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royall Jr., who funded the primary professorship of regulation at Harvard.

The University benefited from plantation homeowners

While New England’s picture has been linked in standard tradition to abolitionism, the report mentioned, rich plantation homeowners and Harvard had been mutually dependent for his or her wealth.

“Throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report mentioned. “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. The university also profited from its own financial investments, which included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.”

Integration was accepted slowly

Early makes an attempt at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders who prized being a college for a white higher crust, together with rich white sons of the South.

“In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access,” the report mentioned. “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.”

Faculty members unfold bogus science

Harvard college members performed a task in disseminating bogus theories of racial variations that had been 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 mentioned.

The bitter fruit of these race scientists stays a part of Harvard’s residing legacy right this moment.

One of these race scientists was naturalist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who commissioned daguerreotype portraits of enslaved folks — Delia, Jack, Renty, Drana, Jem, Alfred and Fassen — in an try and show their inferiority. The report doesn’t point out that Tamara Lanier, a lady who has traced her ancestry to Renty, had challenged Harvard’s possession of the portraits, saying that the photographs of Renty and his daughter Delia, taken below duress, are the spoils of theft.

The legacy of slavery lived on

Until as lately because the Nineteen Sixties, the legacy of slavery lived on within the paucity of Black college students admitted to Harvard.

“During the five decades between 1890 and 1940, approximately 160 Blacks attended Harvard College, or an average of about three per year, 30 per decade,” the report mentioned. “In 1960, some nine Black men numbered among the 1,212 freshman matriculants to Harvard College, and that figure represented a vast improvement over the prior decades.”

This article initially appeared in The New York Times.