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in fact, I think we should explore this topic in much more depth. I wrote a post called “Cancel the Ivy League” last year going over this. Let’s focus on Harvard specifically:

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

So no, its not just that several Harvard presidents were slave owners and had their slaves with them and working while they served as president at Harvard. Its not just scientific racism which was invented at Harvard and which was used as justification for slavery in the mid 19th century. It is that the very seed money which founded and built up Harvard was a direct product of slavery and slave trading.

While this doubtless comes as a great shock to respectable lefty New Englanders, exactly zero people in the South are the least bit surprised. They’ve been saying it for over 170 years but now that somebody actually at Harvard studied it and wrote about it they’re all shocked to learn about it.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2017/09/04/shackled-legacy