Harvard pledges $100m to redress its ties to slavery

Harvard University has pledged $100 million to make reparations for the "extensive entanglements'' that slavery has played in the school's history, its president announced Tuesday.

"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," Lawrence Bacow wrote in a letter addressed to the community at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university.

The money would be used to fund implementations recommended by a 134-page report, which Harvard released along with the announcement. It includes offering educational support for marginalized youth, partnering with historically black colleges and universities, honoring enslaved people through memorials, research and curriculums and improving educational opportunities for descendants of enslaved individuals who worked on Harvard's campus.

The report's authors also acknowledge the enslavement of Native Americans and recommended the university recruit more students from tribal communities. It called for the formation of an endowed Legacy of Slavery Fund to support the university's reparative works. The report stops short of recommending direct financial reparations, however.

According to Bacow, some of the $100 million will be immediately available; the rest will be held in an endowment to support the work over time.

Harvard's endowment rose to $53 billion in the 2021 fiscal year, an increase of 27 percent from the year before, and it had a $283 million operating surplus despite the COVID-19 pandemic, The New York Times reported.

The report built on previous research by scholars from Harvard and other universities. It outlined the extensive relationship that Harvard has had with slavery and its legacies.

Slavery was "integral to Harvard", the report noted. Harvard presidents, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom worked on campus from the university's founding in 1636 until slavery became outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783, according to the report.

Some of the enslaved workers, whose names were listed in the report's appendix, lived on campus and cared for the university's presidents, faculty and students.

The university and its donors also benefited from slave trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The university itself invested in sugar plantations and rum industries in the Caribbean, as well as the cotton and railroad industries in the US.

Its benefactors, some of whom are memorialized across the campus, accumulated their wealth "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", researchers found.

From the mid-19th century and well into the 20th century, the school's leaders and professors engaged in research to enhance the theory of racial superiority. Those theories and practices would go on to produce "devastating consequences in the 19th and 20th centuries", the report found.

"As the committee's report powerfully documents, Harvard's history includes extensive entanglements with slavery. The report makes plain that slavery in America was by no means confined to the South," Bacow said.

He noted that Harvard has made progress in recent decades to counteract discrimination, but its works shouldn't "obscure the reality of our past", Bacow said, adding that "Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral".

With the announcement, Harvard joined a consortium of 80 other US higher education institutions, including the University of Virginia, Brown University, Georgetown University, Columbia University and John Hopkins University, which seek to evaluate their connection to slavery.