Harvard University is committing $100 million to study and redress its ties to slavery, the university’s president announced Tuesday, and with that money will create an endowed “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” which will continue researching and memorializing that history, working with descendants of Black and Native American people enslaved at Harvard, as well as their broader communities.
With the announcement, Harvard joins many other universities — including Brown, Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary — that are not just grappling with their complicity in the institution of slavery but also putting financial resources behind efforts to make amends.
Harvard’s financial commitment rivals the $100 million pledged by the leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests in March 2021 to be used for racial reconciliation and to benefit the descendants of 272 enslaved people sold in 1838 to pay off the debts of Georgetown University.
A report released with Harvard’s announcement said that at its roots, the university, which was founded in 1636, owed its immense wealth to patrons of the university whose fortunes were made on the backs of enslaved people, and whose names still festoon dormitories and other buildings that students walk in and out of every day.
“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Lawrence S. Bacow, Harvard’s president, said in an 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.”
