Take Down My Ancestor’s Name

On the wall in my childhood home hangs my great-grandmother’s family tree. It’s in a gilded frame, but in a back room, both revered and ignored. I remember looking up at it as a child, intrigued by the legend at the bottom: Yellow star indicated “Commissioned Military Officer,” blue star meant “Patriot of the Revolution,” and squiggly underline signified a “Founder of Family in America.”

These were things I was taught to be proud of.

Years later, while an undergraduate, I joined a fossil fuel divestment campaign. It was students of color who began to teach me the deeper roots of the climate crisis. Hearing about colonialism and racial capitalism for the first time, I couldn’t help but draw links between those topics and my own family. Some of my ancestors were founders of American families; others were bankers, lawyers, or captains of ships and industry. Both of my grandfathers worked on Wall Street.

Soon it became clear to me: I have personal divestment work to do.

I joined Resource Generation, a national network of young people with wealth and class privilege who organize in partnership with poor and working class-led movements to redistribute money, land, and power. In RG, we have a practice of telling “money stories”: the too often unspoken narratives behind the racial wealth gap in this country. I learned to see how my family’s good fortune had been bolstered by generations of Ivy League degrees and country club connections — the boarding school to boardroom pipeline.

As I revisited that family tree with RG, it wasn’t long before I uncovered dozens of stories of my ancestors’ participation in the founding injustices of this country: colonization and slavery.

One of those ancestors has a house at Harvard named after him.

In the top left corner of my family tree appears Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, my tenth-great-grand-uncle. Winthrop believed the aristocracy should justly rule, that religious dissenters should be banished, and that God had chosen some to be rich and all others to be poor.

He also took the Massachusett tribe’s territory for his own, personally enslaved Native people, and helped write the first law legalizing slavery in North America. Winthrop is said to have declared one of the first “thanksgivings” in 1637, as a celebratory feast after the Mystic Massacre: An estimated 700 Pequot men, women, and children were burned alive, with any who tried to escape the flames shot on sight. In 1638, while the colony was under his leadership, a ship named Desire brought enslaved Africans to Boston for the first time.

This is not an ancestor to be proud of. Yet Harvard has made Winthrop unavoidable. From Winthrop House to the larger-than-life statue in Annenberg Hall, his legacy and likeness are memorialized, valorized, and uplifted. I encounter him almost daily, as do thousands of other Harvard students, many of whose ancestors were directly victimized by mine.

In February, the Generational African American Students Association, in collaboration with Natives at Harvard College, submitted a request to dename Winthrop House, accompanied by a petition which has so far accrued over 600 signatories. The request echoes much of the history the University has already admitted to, with the Winthrop name appearing 109 times in Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery report.

“The damage caused by Harvard’s entanglements with slavery and its legacies warrant action,” says the report. “Such action cannot possibly address the many complex and damaging legacies of slavery in and beyond the United States, but nonetheless, action is vital.”

As part of this public commitment to action, the denaming of certain buildings, professorships, and programs is a step Harvard can and must take. This is not about erasing history, but putting it in its rightful place — in history books, curricula, and museums — instead of it being a haunting presence in the daily lives of students.

Some of my family members accuse me of judging our ancestors by the standards of our own time. In response, I point to the small but important history of anti-racist choices by white people as evidence that a different decision could always have been made. In Winthrop’s time, it was Roger Williams, who wrote to him asking him to reconsider “perpetuall slaverie” of captives from the Pequot War.

Other family members have worried I am trying to break ties with our ancestors. To the contrary, I see this work of truth-telling as bringing me closer to them: Before I began talking about this history, the Winthrop name had been long forgotten in my family. Indeed, as I preached about at Harvard Divinity School last year, Winthrop’s story now motivates the racial justice work that I see as mine to do. By committing to transform and transmute the trauma he caused, I’m trying to prevent wealth inequality and racial violence from becoming the final chapter of our family’s legacy.

And I’m not the only one: So far, I and 44 of my fellow Winthrop descendants have signed on in support of GAASA and NAHC’s request.

“Our history demands a conscious, collective, emotional ‘knowing’ about the legacy of slavery,” say psychologists Bryan K. Nichols and Medria L. Connolly. “Otherwise, the moral wound of slavery will continue to persist.”

Harvard has allowed the moral wound of slavery to persist for far too long. Amidst nationwide efforts to obscure our country’s past, this University has a timely opportunity to step toward the right side of history. We must begin by listening to Black and Indigenous communities whose “knowing” about the impacts of our history has been for far too long ignored.

One step is clear: Winthrop must fall.

Morgan H. Curtis is a second-year Master of Theological Studies student at Harvard Divinity School.