Ivy League Reparations: Harvard Creates $100M ‘Legacy of Slavery Fund’

Harvard University is committing $100 million to study its ties to slavery and create a “Legacy of Slavery Fund” to explore reparations for the descendants of slaves associated with the Ivy League institution.

The newly created fund will go toward researching and memorializing the university’s history with slavery, as well as working with descendants of black and Native Americans enslaved at Harvard, according to a report by the New York Times.

“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow said in a Tuesday email to the university’s students, faculty, and staff members.

“Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society,” Bacow added.

A Harvard report, commissioned by Bacow in 2019, said that the university owes its immense wealth to patrons of the school whose fortunes were made on the backs of slaves, and noted that dormitories and other buildings are still adorned with slave owners’ names.

While the report did not directly call for financial reparations to descendants of slaves, it did offer recommendations for how the money in the newly created fund should be spent.

Some of those recommendations included the following:

• Working to improve educational opportunities for the descendants of black and Native American slaves.
• Honoring slaves through memorials, research and curriculum.
• Forming partnerships with historically black colleges and universities and tribal colleges.
• Building relationships with the direct descendants of slaves who worked on Harvard’s campus or were enslaved by Harvard’s leadership, faculty or staff.

The report also included an appendix that lists more than 70 black and Native American people enslaved by prominent figures at Harvard — such as presidents, fellows, members of the board of overseers, teaching faculty, staff members, and major donors — in the 17th and 18th centuries, the New York Times reported.

The document reportedly identifies nearly every slave by a first name only — such as Titus, Venus, Juba, and Cato — and the full names of those who enslaved them.

There also exists a separate column that shows how the slave owners are memorialized by buildings, streets, paintings, sculptures, and professorships at Harvard.

Carissa Chen, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, has been tracing the descendants of slaves connected to Harvard, and was reportedly able to find 50 living descendants from her list of 121 names.

“The thing with reparations is that because we haven’t searched for living descendants for so long, it’s been kind of a thing that we think about abstractly,” Chen said. “The descendants themselves should be part of a conversation of what the university owes.”

One of those descendants, 32-year-old Jordan Lloyd — who had worked as a waitress at Harvard’s A.R.T. Theater without realizing her own historical connection to the university — said, “It feels like [Harvard’s] hopping on a bandwagon.”

Lloyd added that she wonders what Harvard owes the descendants of slaves, such as, “Having our kids be allowed to attend some of the summer school” or “working to help people locate who their ancestors were, that feels like reparations.”

“There’s the emotional toll of hearing that your family was enslaved,” she said. “There’s the economic perspective and the loss of capital from their work.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.