Harvard Commits $100 Million , To Address Its Ties to Slavery.
Harvard University announced the creation of the "Legacy of Slavery Fund" on April 26.
The announcement follows an extensive report that articulates how Harvard was patronized by men who were made wealthy through slavery.
Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral, Lawrence S.
Bacow, Harvard’s President, via 'The New York Times'.
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, Lawrence S.
Bacow, Harvard’s President, via 'The New York Times'.
The fund will perpetuate research, create more opportunities for People of Color and seek to memorialize those who were enslaved ... .
... and honor their memories by creating connections with their descendants.
It is certainly the most significant response that any institution of higher education anywhere in the world has formulated in response to its entanglement in slavery, Dr. Sven Beckert, Harvard Historian, via 'The New York Times'.
According to the creation committee's report, the Legacy of Slavery Fund is “a necessary predicate to and foundation for redress.”.
The fund stops short of calling for monetary reparations to the decedents of those who lived life as an enslaved person.
[Reparations] means different things to different people, so fixating on that term I think can be counterproductive, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean Harvard Radcliffe Institute, via 'The New York Times'.
Those who assisted in the research of Harvard's ties to slavery say that the issue of reparations is complex beyond the scope of the fund.
The thing with reparations is that because we haven’t searched for living descendants for so long, it’s been kind of a thing that we think about abstractly, Carissa Chen, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, via 'The New York Times'.
The descendants themselves should be part of a conversation of what the university owes, Carissa Chen, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, via 'The New York Times'
