Harvard University will create a US$ 100 million fund (R$ 498 million) to invest in policies to repair the racism that the institution itself helped to perpetuate. The announcement was made by the entity’s president, Lawrence Bacow, this Tuesday (26), in an email to all students.
The message accompanied a report produced by a committee created to investigate the legacy of slavery at the university. According to the document, there was slave labor on the institution’s campus, which also benefited from the slave trade and businesses linked to the exploitation of black people even after the practice was banned in the state of Massachusetts in 1783 —147 years after the founding of Harvard.
The report further documents the exclusion of black students and the defense of racism by academics at the university. The group that investigated the history of slavery at Harvard was chaired by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and an expert in constitutional law.
Although the institution has notable figures among abolitionists and in the civil rights movement, the investigation points out that “the oldest higher education institution in the country helped to perpetuate the oppression and racial exploitation of the time”. The report’s authors recommend offering Harvard’s descendants of enslaved people educational support and other assistance so that they “can retrieve their stories, tell their stories, and seek empowering knowledge.”
The study also recommends that the institution fund programs to bring students and faculty from historically underfunded universities to Harvard and, conversely, Harvard students and academics to historically black colleges such as Howard University.
The $100 million fund will be used to carry out the report’s recommendations, Bacow said, and has already been authorized by the university’s board of directors. “Slavery and its legacy have been a part of American life for over 400 years,” he wrote. “The work of further correcting its lingering effects will require our constant and ambitious efforts in the years to come.”
“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Dennis Lloyd, 74, who counts Cuba Vassall, a woman enslaved by the Royalls, among his ancestors — Harvard Law School was founded in 1817 by Isaac Royall Jr., whose family made a fortune in trade. of slaves and sugar plantations in Antigua, in the Caribbean.
“I’m happy to see that Harvard has recognized their connection to slavery, happy to see that they are expanding financial and educational resources to students who would not normally have access to Ivy League schools. [elite universitária dos EUA]”, he added.
Other centers of higher education in the country have created funds in recent years to deal with the legacies of slavery. A law enacted in the state of Virginia last year requires five state public universities to create scholarships for descendants of people enslaved by the institutions.
