In 2019, Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacchow appointed a panel of professors to investigate the university’s links to slavery and its legacy. Discussions about race intensified throughout the country. The students demanded that the names of people involved in the slave trade be removed from the buildings. Other universities, especially Brown, have already conducted similar excavations of their past.
The 134-page report, plus two appendices, was released on Tuesday, along with a $ 100 million pledge to set up a fund to “correct” past mistakes, one of the largest of its kind.
Here are some of his main findings and excerpts.
Slavery was part of everyday life at the university
The report found that enslaved people live on campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the president’s residence, and are part of the fabric, albeit almost invisible, of everyday life.
“For nearly 150 years, from the founding of the university in 1636 to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, it declared slavery illegal in 1783, and Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom worked on campus. “, The report says. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.
Four Harvard presidents enslaved the people
The committee found at least 41 prominent Harvard-related people enslaving people. These included four Harvard presidents, such as Increes Mater, president of the university from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, clerk of the First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, professor of theology; John Winthrop, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founder of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royal Jr., who funded the first law professor at Harvard.
Recent problems on American college campuses
The university benefits from plantation owners
Although the image of New England is associated in popular culture with abolitionism, the report says that wealthy plantation owners and Harvard are interdependent on their wealth.
“Throughout this period and until the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These lucrative financial relationships included, above all, the benevolence of donors who amassed wealth through the slave trade; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean and the American South; and from the northern textile industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in slavery. The university also benefits from its own financial investments, which include loans to Caribbean sugar factories, rum distillers and plantation suppliers, along with investments in cotton production.
Integration was slow
Early attempts at integration met with strong opposition from Harvard leaders, who saw it as a school for white upper crusts, including wealthy white sons in the South.
“In the years before the Civil War, the color line remained at Harvard, despite a false start to black access,” the report said. “In 1850, Harvard Medical School accepted three black students, but after a group of white students and alumni objected, the dean of the school, Oliver Wendall Holmes Sr., expelled them.
Faculty members spread fake science
Harvard members played a role in spreading false theories about racial differences, which were used to justify racial segregation and to help eradicate “undesirable” populations from Nazi Germany.
“In the 19th century, Harvard began amassing human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, which in the hands of prominent university scholars would become central to the promotion of so-called racial science at Harvard and other American institutions.” report.
The bitter fruit of these racial scientists remains part of Harvard’s living heritage today.
One of these racial scientists was Louis Agassis, a naturalist and professor at Harvard, who commissioned daguerreotype portraits of enslaved people — Delia, Jack, Renty, Drana, Jem, Alfred, and Fassen — in an attempt to prove their inferiority. The report does not mention that Tamara Lanier, a woman who traced her ancestry to Renty, has challenged Harvard’s ownership of the portraits, saying that the images of Renty and his daughter Delia under duress were forcibly stolen.
The legacy of slavery lived on
Until the 1960s, the legacy of slavery lived on in the shortage of black students admitted to Harvard.
“In the five decades between 1890 and 1940, about 160 blacks attended Harvard College, or an average of about three a year, 30 per decade,” the report said. “In 1960, about nine black men were among the 1,212 freshmen at Harvard College, and that figure was a huge improvement over previous decades.”
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