Harvard releases legacy of slavery report

[Professor Emeritus]

I'm selectively quoting from the article.

Harvard commits $100M to redress its complicity with slavery - CNN

Harvard University is dedicating $100 million to create a fund to research and redress its “extensive entanglements with slavery,” university President Lawrence Bacow said Tuesday.

The university’s attempt to reckon with its past is detailed in a report titled “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” which documents how the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries “comprised a vital part of the New England economy, and powerfully shaped Harvard University.”

“The report makes plain that slavery in America was by no means confined to the South,” Bacow said in a message to members of the Harvard community.

“It was embedded in the fabric and the institutions of the North, and it remained legal in Massachusetts until the Supreme Judicial Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1783.”

Bacow said slavery and racism played a significant part in Harvard’s institutional history and enslaved people worked on campus and supported students, faculty, staff and university presidents. Their labor “enriched numerous donors and, ultimately, the institution.”

For nearly 150 years – from the founding of the university in 1636 until Massachusetts abolished slavery – Harvard presidents and others enslaved more than 70 people, according to the report, which lists the names of some in an appendix.

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

The university and its donors benefited from the slave trade into the 19th century, 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.”

The report said Harvard’s financial investments included “loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.”

University presidents and professors also promoted “race science” and eugenics and carried out abusive “research” on enslaved people, the report said.

The report includes recommendations to redress that legacy “through teaching, research, and service” and the commitment of $100 million for the creation of a legacy of slavery fund.

“Some of these funds will be available for current use, while the balance will be held in an endowment to support this work over time,” Bacow said.

The fund is intended to support the implementation of the report’s recommendations, including the expansion of educational opportunities for the descendants of enslaved people in the Southern US and the Caribbean, establishing partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and identifying and building relationships with the direct descendants of enslaved people who labored at Harvard.

I'm of mixed feelings about this. $100 million is real money. But considering the size of their endowment, Harvard could have given more. I'm not sure how the $100 million figure was arrived at or calculated.

I think that considering Harvard's position as an educational institution, the ways in which they're going to use the money are decent. Some for the direct descendants of those Black folk who were most directly impacted, some for educational opportunities for all black folk in general, and some to empower Black institutions of higher learning. We'll see how it actually gets spent though.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The more I think about it the more insufficient that $100 million total is.


"Harvard presidents and others enslaved more than 70 people"


Median lifetime earnings in the USA in 2021 dollars are $1.7 million. Including other damages you could easily bump that up to at least $2 million, and another $2 million for pain and suffering puts you at $4 million a head. Multiply by "more than 70 people" and you're looking at ~$300 million directly for enslaved persons alone, to be paid to their living descendants. That's before accounting for the donations from slave earnings, investments in slave enterprises, and race science and other bullshyt.

I guess one could technically say the Harvard presidents/others were private individuals and Harvard wasn't "fully" responsible for their reparation debts, but still....




Not that you could really make that calculation for all reparations (I doubt enough money exists in the entire US system), but since Harvard easily has the money to do it, why not?

 

[ORDER_66]

 

[Yinny]

My friend helped work on that report, let me see what they’re talking about but $100M whoo