By the way....when is Harvard going to finally give up all the money it received from New England Slave Traders? Adjusted for inflation, that’s going to be a massive sum. Same goes for the rest of the Ivy League since New England was THE slave trading hub of the entire western hemisphere in the 19th century.
History shows slavery helped build many U.S. colleges and universities
Dozens of American colleges and universities are investigating their historic ties to the slave trade and debating how to atone.
Profits from slavery and related industries helped fund some of the most prestigious schools in the Northeast, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.......Early benefactors who gave money to Brown and Harvard, for instance, made their fortunes running slave ships to Africa and milling cotton from plantations......”Yale inherited a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships,” Wilder says. “It aggressively sought out opportunities to benefit from the slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world.”
At Harvard, markers of slavery
Harvard was the first institution of higher learning in America, founded in 1636. Slavery and the slave economy thread through the first 150 years of its history. Slaves made beds and meals for Harvard presidents. Many of the school’s major donors in its first centuries made their fortunes in industries either based on, or connected to, slavery.
Harvard’s ties to slavery were never a secret. Today, however, they’re hardly common knowledge on campus and they’re generally not reflected in official histories of the university.
That started to change in 2007, when Sven Beckert, a professor of American history, taught a seminar with four Harvard undergraduates. Their mission: dig into the school’s archival records to see what traces of slavery they could find. Beckert had been inspired by Simmons’ commitment at Brown.
They soon discovered that prominent Harvard figures — including the Puritan Minister Cotton Mather and the Declaration of Independence signatory John Hancock — were slave owners. “In some ways we were surprised by what we found,” Beckert says. “Of course, it was ridiculous that we were surprised, because clearly the economy of New England was deeply engaged with the slave economy.”
In fact, Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery, in 1641.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean devoted most of their land to growing cane. They imported grain, meat, codfish and other supplies from New England. Ship owners in New England hauled back barrels of molasses to make rum. Then they shipped the rum to Africa to pay for slaves. New England merchants used part of the profits from this triangular trade to finance Harvard and other schools.
Over time, cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean and the American South entered the mix. Cotton fed the great textile mills owned by the Lowell family of Boston, which had extensive ties to Harvard, including a Harvard president and a prominent professor.
Banks in Boston and New York supplied loans to southern plantation owners to buy slaves and seed; northern insurance companies underwrote slave voyages to Africa and the lives of enslaved people.
“Enslavement and the slave economy was the road for upward mobility for a lot of white Bostonians in the colonial era, and then the antebellum era. And part of becoming respectable is donating to a place like Harvard,” says Kathrine Stevens, assistant professor of history at Oglethorp University in Atlanta. Stevens was a Harvard graduate student when she helped Beckert teach his seminar.
Scientific racism is another of Harvard’s legacies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some Harvard professors proposed scientific theories they said proved the inherent inferiority of black people. Chief among them was Louis Agassiz, the geologist and zoologist often described as one of the “founding fathers” of American science.
Agassiz promoted the idea of polygenism — that the different races descended from different species. Other Harvard scientists propagating scientific theories of white superiority were Nathanial Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and anthropology professor Earnest Hooton.
“The work they did contributed greatly to legitimizing slavery in the 19th century and to the discrimination that followed,” says Zoe Weinberg, a student at Yale Law School who took Beckert’s seminar as an undergraduate at Harvard. “Harvard really acted as a pioneer and champion of the field of race science. That was a history I was totally unaware of as a student.”
Anti-slavery activists on the Harvard campus were pariahs for much of the antebellum period. Harvard professors who spoke openly against slavery invited fierce criticism from Boston newspapers and risked losing their jobs.
This past March, Faust and Harvard held a major conference on universities and slavery, drawing people from around the world.
“Harvard was directly complicit in slavery from the college’s earliest days,” Faust told the overflow crowd. “This history and its legacy have shaped our institution in ways we have yet to fully understand.”
Under pressure from students, the Harvard Law School in 2016 retired its shield — essentially its logo — because it was based on the family crest of an 18th century slave-holding family of Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the first law professorship at Harvard in 1815, described as the most distinguished chair in American legal education. Royall’s father was a Caribbean plantation owner who built the family fortune trading in sugar, rum and slaves.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2017/09/04/shackled-legacy
Always happy to introduce our bluest of blue state and bluest of blue Ivy League University friends to their true history.
It’s THIER turn. Thank you!
