Drew Faust: Harvard University Will Own Up to its Role in Slavery!

Dear Commons Community,

Harvard’s President Drew Faust announced yesterday that the university would recognize its role in slavery.  As reported in various media:

“Harvard University plans to install a plaque next week honoring four slaves who worked on the campus in the 1700s, to acknowledge its role in slavery, the Ivy League university’s president said on Wednesday.

“Although we embrace and regularly celebrate the storied traditions of our nearly 400-year history, slavery is an aspect of Harvard‘s past that has rarely been acknowledged or invoked,” Drew Faust said in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. “Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage from the college’s earliest days in the 1700s until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783.”

University officials on April 6 will install a plaque on Wadsworth House, the second-oldest building on campus, which formerly served as the university president’s home and now is an office building. It will honor four slaves named Bilhah, Venus, Titus and Juba, who worked in the university president’s home in the 18th century.

Earlier in March, the prestigious university decided to drop the 80-year-old coat of arms of its law school, because it featured the family crest of a slaveholder who was an early donor to the institution.

Faust also was quoted as saying:

We need to understand the attitudes and assumptions that made the oppressions of slavery possible in order to overcome their vestiges in our own time. It should not be because we feel superior to our predecessors that we interrogate and challenge their actions. We should approach the past with humility because we too are humans with capacities for self-delusion, for moral failure and blindness, for inhumanity. If we can better understand how oppression and exploitation could seem commonplace to so many of those who built Harvard, we may better equip ourselves to combat our own shortcomings and to advance justice and equality in our own time. At its heart, this endeavor must be about “Veritas,” about developing a clear-sighted view of our past that can enable us to create a better future.

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore. In more fully acknowledging our history, Harvard must do its part to undermine the legacies of race and slavery that continue to divide our nation.”

A small but important step!

Tony

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