Christopher Newman remembers seeing campus police officers as he walked into a human resources office at Harvard University, but he didn’t imagine that they were there for him.
It was July 2024, and Newman had just turned in the results of a two-month-long internship with the Harvard University Archives: an annotated bibliography for the landmark 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative report, which detailed the university’s ties to slavery across three centuries. He completed his project on Friday, 26 July, and on Monday, he said he received an email that HR wanted to meet with him.
After that meeting, the officers escorted Newman out of the building, told him he was banned from campus and denied his request to collect his belongings from his office, he told the Guardian. He said he was told that a flight back home was booked for that afternoon. “I was asking too many questions,” Newman said, “veering off of the proverbial beaten path”.
Newman knew he had ruffled some feathers during his internship. At an event at a local history museum, he had met members of the Lloyd family – descendants of people enslaved by a Harvard benefactor and trafficked from Antigua to Cambridge, Massachusetts – and struck up an acquaintance. Over the course of several meetings with library staff and other interns after meeting the Lloyds, Newman said he brought up the island of Antigua multiple times.
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Still, the school’s’s $100m investment in reparations-related programs in 2022 seemed to usher in an era of openness and accountability within the university about its legacy of slavery. Yet academics involved in the project and related research initiatives allege otherwise. Three Harvard-affiliated academics stepped down from their posts with the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, alleging the university was getting in the way of their work. The former executive director of the initiative stepped down for “personal reasons”, and 11 researchers who had been working on projects related to the initiative had been fired. Two professors wrote in a letter published by the Harvard Crimson that the university had tried to “delay and dilute” efforts to connect with descendant communities while designing a memorial on campus. In a statement made to the student newspaper at the time, a university spokesperson said it would “take seriously the co-chairs’ concerns about the importance of community involvement”.
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A spokesperson for the university said they did not comment on personnel matters yet added “this individual was an intern at Harvard Library, and not with the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, which is the only group at the University authorized to engage in descendant research, descendant outreach, or additional research on behalf of the University.” Newman doesn’t contest that his research interests were expanding past the original job description, but he said he thought his curiosity about living descendants and the university’s ties to the Caribbean would have been encouraged. To be fired for a set of allegations after he tried to defend and explain himself, he said, was painful.
The ties between Harvard University and the Caribbean are myriad and consist of densely layered networks of wealthy families, trade, political power and violence. Dozens of university presidents, overseers (governing officials), donors and staff grew their wealth off of enslaved labor and the transatlantic slave trade. Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections – and potential obligations – to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. Officials in Antigua have tried to engage in a dialogue with the university about reparations for nearly a decade. “The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.”
In the tumultuous years since the creation of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, three memorial committee members have stepped down and researchers have been fired largely over disputes related to engaging descendant communities.
Vincent Brown, a history professor at Harvard, stepped down from his role on the initiative last winter, after a research team visiting Antigua was unexpectedly fired. “I felt like I was basically sacrificing my scholarly reputation to stay on a project that didn’t have scholarship as its priority,” he said. The university declined to comment on Brown’s resignation.
“I have been bombarded with questions that I cannot answer,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Is it true that the university does not really want to know the whole truth about its history of slave ownership in the Caribbean?” And if true, what would the university be trying to hide?
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In the 17th century and through the beginning of the 19th century, at least six different plantations in Antigua were owned by early Harvard benefactors or leaders who, in sum, enslaved at least 362 people and potentially more than 600 people, according to estimates produced by Richard Cellini, an independent researcher, and his team before they were fired. Cellini, who had been hired by Harvard to identify enslaved people tied to the university and their descendants, had travelled to Antigua last January along with a group of researchers. Upon their return, the entire team was fired without explanation, though Cellini believes the university was afraid because they had found “too many slaves” and could be bankrupted as a result, he told the Guardian last year.
Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly, university spokesperson, disputed Cellini’s statement, saying that no such instruction had ever been issued. “There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work,” she wrote.
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When Caitlin DeAngelis was hired by Harvard in 2017 to produce a report for the precursor to the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, the independent researcher found the names of more than 200 people who were enslaved at Oliver’s plantation in Antigua, including a 15-year-old boy named Richard Oliver.
She shared the source material with her supervisors, clearly showing the number of enslaved people along with their names, yet none appear in the final version of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report, which claims the number is unknown. DeAngelis believed a decision was made to omit the names, using a technicality: the census of the estate was taken two years after Oliver died, though he passed ownership to his heirs. A spokesperson for the university said that “the data in the report was carefully researched and sourced, reflecting our best understanding at the time.”
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DeAngelis said while she was a researcher at Harvard and teaching courses, the president’s office told her directly not to discuss her ongoing research with students, and that a course she was teaching called “Slavery at Harvard” was changed in the course catalogue to include a focus on abolition without her consent. A spokesperson for the university declined to comment.
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This fall, DeAngelis and a group of scholars including Martin, the lecturer, published a report sponsored by the National Park Service about Black families enslaved by Harvard-affiliated families in Cambridge, Antigua and Jamaica. When multiple team members tried to connect with the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, given the obvious overlap in research and looking for some guidance from the university, they were shrugged off, according to Martin. “We were not surprised,” she said. “It was more or less what we expected.”
The Legacy of Slavery Initiative is a “window dressing”, Martin said, “more performative than substantive”. As a member of faculty, she admits to struggling with her role and responsibility.
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When Cellini and his team were fired last winter, Sanders, the US ambassador, wrote a letter that expressed his disapproval and requested that the research into Harvard’s legacy of slavery continued. Brown, the Harvard history professor, had travelled to Antigua with Cellini shortly before he was fired. Brown wrote in his resignation letter: “In my view, Harvard’s historic relationship with Antigua should be something that the university rediscovers and nurtures for itself, not one left to a business partnership with an external concern,” referring to the university’s decision to entrust a private genealogy organization with the descendant research.
“I want to know that if I’m working as a historian on this, that I’m going to be able to do my work, and seeing that this initiative did not have the kind of support that I thought it had when I first joined, best indicated to me that my energy would probably spend better someplace else.”
This summer, Brown will be stepping down from his role at Harvard and moving to Yale. “I have loved teaching these students; I have wonderful colleagues here; and Harvard has generously supported my career at every stage,” he said. “But now, when a searching critical approach to the past and its legacies is more important than ever, I believe that Yale’s current leaders are more strongly committed to the health of the historical profession.” Founded in 1701, Yale’s history of Indigenous displacement and genocide and wealth accumulation through enslavement and the plantation economy roughly mirrors Harvard’s.
Newman, who is now in his final year at Howard completing his doctoral thesis, was initially afraid to speak out about his experience at Harvard because of potential legal or reputational retribution but affirmed that he did nothing wrong. “I was absolutely passionate,” he said. “I was very diligent in my research and in my work.”
He had been hired as part of a diversity initiative to “cultivate the next generation” of researchers and librarians from underrepresented backgrounds, but Newman said he was fired for false accusations, and the work he did for Harvard remains unpublished.
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The post Why Are Harvard’s Slavery Researchers Quitting or Being Fired? appeared first on American Renaissance.
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