Harvard and Slavery: Office Hours with Sven Beckert

The era of Southern plantations and slave masters may seem removed from Harvard’s history, but the University features prominently in new research investigating slavery and its connection to America’s oldest colleges.

MIT professor Craig S. Wilder's “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” published last month, added to the conversation about Harvard’s role in slavery.

On our campus, history professor Sven Beckert has been conducting research in this area since 2007. We spoke with Beckert about his research and its reception from within the University.

“It's our historical responsibility to come to terms with the history of this community,” Beckert said. “The University was part of a larger system in which slavery was very central. It was part of it, it was complicit in it, and it profited from it.”

He started with an undergraduate student seminar, in which students conducted research in Widener Library and the University Archives. They quickly found enormous evidence of connections between the University and the slave trade.

According to their findings, when slavery was still legal in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War, slaves were a steady presence on campus. They served University presidents, faculty, and students.

Then, in the first half of the 19th century, donations from plantation owners to the University allowed it to expand and donated the estate in Jamaica Plain that eventually became the Arnold Arboretum. At the same time, despite being located in a state that was an abolitionist stronghold, the University stifled public debate about the subject prior to the Civil War.

A booklet summarizing the research, “Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History” was published in 2011, around the time of Harvard’s 375th anniversary.

“Our findings were never part of the story that was commemorated then,” Beckert said. “The University needs to recognize that slavery is as much a part of its history as many of its great accomplishments, and make the project not just a project of a small number of professors and students, but one for the University as a whole.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: Nov. 7, 2013

An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the type of research seminar in which history professor Sven Beckert began conducting research on Harvard’s role in slavery. In fact, the seminar was an undergraduate research seminar, not a graduate research seminar.