A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative

A research team’s abrupt layoff sparks wider concerns about the University project. 

Harvard Yard with snow in the foreground

The layoffs of researchers identifying enslaved people is the latest in a series of upheavals at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative.  | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

“Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” That’s how Harvard historian Vincent Brown describes the University’s decision last Thursday, first reported by The Crimson, to abruptly lay off the staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance program (HSRP) and outsource its work. A part of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, the HSRP team had been researching the identities of people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff, and working to trace their direct descendants (see also “Acting on Slavery’s Legacy”).

The team had reportedly been making substantial progress. In a little under two years, the nine staff researchers and archival historians had named nearly 1,000 individuals who were enslaved by Harvard affiliates, and identified 1,400 direct descendants, nearly 500 of whom are still living, said Richard Cellini, an attorney and scholar who until last week was HRSP director. Earlier this month, after identifying hundreds of people who’d been enslaved in the Caribbean by Harvard affiliates during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Brown, Cellini, and HSRP senior research fellow Gabriel Raeburn traveled to the island of Antigua to meet with the country’s prime minister and governor. “We were embarking on a really great collaboration,” said Brown, the Warren professor of American history and professor of African and African American history, whose scholarship focuses on Atlantic slavery in early America and the Caribbean (see the profile, “History from Below,” March-April 2020). “We were delving into the names. We met archeologists. We met historians, museum professionals, even tour guides.” The team toured five plantations where people had been enslaved. “We went into the archives,” Brown said. “We had a real sense about how research collaboration on Antigua might develop.”

A week later, the University laid off the HSRP team and turned over control of the project to American Ancestors, a Boston-based genealogy nonprofit (formerly, the New England Historic Genealogical Society) that had been an existing partner in the work; its task, according to former HSRP researcher Wayne Tucker, had been tracking down living descendants of the enslaved people whom Cellini and his team were uncovering in the archives. Now, said University spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy-O’Reilly, American Ancestors will take over the work of both identifying additional enslaved people connected to Harvard and tracing their descendants. She added that the project includes an eventual plan for Harvard to engage with living descendants as the research progresses.  

Kennedy-O’Reilly declined to give a specific reason for the layoffs of HSRP’s staff. “We cannot comment on personnel matters,” she said. A University statement announcing the decision to turn over the lead role to American Ancestors described it as a “next phase” of the project. A spokesperson for American Ancestors president and CEO Ryan J. Woods said that he was not available for comment this week, because of a busy schedule.

In response to the layoffs, Brown—who has been deeply involved in the Legacy of Slavery Initiative and produced a documentary film accompanying the release of the 2022 report on Harvard’s slavery connections—resigned from another position within the initiative, as a member of the Memorial Project Committee, which is tasked with designing a public memorial for the people who were enslaved by Harvard affiliates. In his resignation letter, Brown called the dismissal of Cellini and his staff “vindictive” and “wasteful.”

This upheaval is the most recent in a series of setbacks and controversies that have plagued the initiative. In May 2024, the Memorial Project Committee’s original co-chairs, English and African and African American studies professor Tracy K. Smith and former Carpenter Center director Dan Byers, abruptly resigned, citing frustrations that University administrators were pressuring them to rush the memorial process and to “delay and dilute” their outreach to descendant communities, according to the pair’s resignation letter. The following month, the executive director of the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, Roeshana Moore-Evans, suddenly departed as well. In October, Cellini published an op-ed in the Crimson, writing that senior Harvard administrators had pressured him “not to find ‘too many descendants’” and “not to do my job ‘too well.’” (At other times, including in an interview last week with this magazine, he has specifically named Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects, who oversees the initiative.) Kennedy-O’Reilly disputes this assertion by Cellini. “There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work,” she said in a statement. (The University declined to make Bleich available for comment.)

In his op-ed, Cellini referenced a September 2024 Crimson investigative report, which had described disputes and growing tensions between him and Harvard administrators over HSRP’s work; the article also painted a fractious picture of unrest within the broader initiative. In part, Cellini wrote:

Last month, The Crimson reported that there was debate among senior administrators about the scope of the project. Some senior leaders questioned whether Harvard has a duty of repair where governing board members enslaved individuals “in their personal homes.”

Historically, Harvard’s governing boards have included some of the richest and most powerful people in the Atlantic world. Investigating Harvard slavery while excluding board members is like investigating bank robbery while excluding bank robbers.

HSRP’s mission is drawn from one of seven recommendations in the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report, which called on the University to “identify the direct descendants of enslaved individuals who labored on Harvard’s campus and of those who were enslaved by Harvard leadership, faculty, or staff.” To Cellini, the instruction was clear. “That was our remit,” he said, “to identify people enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff. We never distinguish between types of enslavement or locations of enslavement or periods of enslavement. We were fastidious about that. We didn’t focus on the intent or circumstances of Harvard slavery. The question was simply, was somebody enslaved?”

 

“They’ll Argue It Should Be Shut Down”

Surveying the larger context, Vincent Brown worries about what deeper issues of national and campus politics might underlie these tensions, and what it means for the future of the initiative as a whole. In his letter resigning from the Memorial Project Committee, he wrote that since news broke of the HSRP layoffs,

I have been bombarded with questions that I cannot answer: Does Harvard intend to continue this work? Is it true that the University does not really want to know the whole truth about its history of slave ownership in the Caribbean? Have Harvard’s leaders buckled to external pressure from donors or government, who have decided that suppressing Black history will be an effective way to discipline the political views of future generations? Or is this all about internal institutional disputes, some petty court politics unknowable to the general public? These questions displace the more important ones: How many people did Harvard leaders enslave, and where? What were their names? What can we discover about their lives? Who are their descendants and how can we help reconnect them to the stories of their ancestors? Most importantly, what can we learn about the scope, force, and direction of the still unfolding processes that shaped Harvard’s entanglement with slavery that might help us to prepare for the future?

In an interview on Monday, Brown reiterated a concern that he voiced in his letter, about the University’s ability to protect its students, staff, and faculty from “politically motivated attacks”; and he worried how this upheaval might affect the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, which was launched to great fanfare in 2022 and backed by a $100-million endowment. “There were always people who never thought this initiative should have been launched,” Brown said, “and my fear is that the more people see turmoil, it will be an excuse for them to say, ‘Well, this should never have happened anyway.’ And they’ll argue it should be shut down.” He added that as the new Trump administration mounts an aggressive attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs around the country, “I worry that the University administration might be willing to offer up the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative as a blood sacrifice.”

Harvard representatives flatly dispute that interpretation of last week’s events. Kennedy-O’Reilly shared a memo that was sent to the initiative’s advisory council last Thursday from Vice Provost Bleich, which outlined three “core priorities” for the next few years: “memorialization and education, supporting descendant communities, and advancing HBCU [historically black college and university] partnerships.” In the bullet point related to descendant communities, Bleich wrote that the initiative’s work:

will focus on two areas that have been launched and are the foundation for long-term initiatives. One is the Reparative Grant Program, which aims to support the advancement of descendant communities with a focus on Boston and Cambridge and regional Tribal communities. The second is continuing meticulous research to identify living direct descendants of those enslaved by University leaders, faculty, and staff. As you know, today Harvard announced that H&LS [Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery] has expanded our partnership with American Ancestors, a national center for family history, heritage, and culture, and the oldest genealogical nonprofit in America. This means that American Ancestors will now take the lead role in all aspects of the research to identify direct descendants. In parallel, we will continue to advance our planning around engagement with living direct descendants and align that planning with the milestones developed with American Ancestors around their research.

In a statement last Thursday announcing the University’s “expanded partnership” with American Ancestors, Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a member of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Advisory Council, praised the organization’s “extensive work” on the genealogies of enslaved people and its “exceptional ability to scale the enormous effort the University has ahead of it.” He also thanked Cellini and his staff, whose “superb efforts,” Gates wrote, “launched us on our way on this historically important mission, and now it is time for American Ancestors to take the lead in what will be a systematic, scholarly sustained effort to establish the facts about this dark chapter in our University’s history.”

Gates also added, “The University takes seriously the thoughtfulness and care that will go into engaging with living direct descendants, and that engagement will be based around rigorous and thorough research this partnership will advance in literally rebuilding family histories.” Gates serves as an honorary trustee of American Ancestors, and the nonprofit provides research support for his long-running PBS program, Finding Your Roots. The show is partly filmed in the atrium of American Ancestors’ Newbury Street headquarters.

 

“We’ll Be Able to Fill Harvard Stadium”

If Harvard had been preparing for this transition, HSRP staff members were not aware of it. The layoffs, Cellini said, took him and his team by surprise. “At 10:45 a.m., I got a phone call from the president’s office that the entire Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program was being terminated, and terminated effective immediately,” he said. “And an hour later, they told the rest of the staff. And about an hour after that, they shut everybody’s email off.” [Update 1/31/25, 9:45 a.m.: According to reporting by Inside Higher Ed, the layoffs were conducted by Harvard’s human resources department.] “It was done so suddenly, without warning,” added Wayne Tucker, one of the HSRP researchers who was laid off. “There was no proposal to be part of a transition, no offer to restructure what we were doing. It felt like a message.”

Cellini said that part of the reason the decision surprised him was because of the progress his team had made. “We originally inherited a list of 70 enslaved people,” he said. And by last Thursday, “we had fully identified around 1,000 people. That’s 14 times more—and we had barely begun to scratch the surface. The true number of enslaved people is much larger.” Early on, Cellini’s team compiled a list of roughly 2,200 Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff between 1636 and 1900 whom they identified as “potential enslavers”—people who may have owned slaves. “And from there, we’ve been painstakingly researching to find people among that population who were in fact enslavers,” he said. “And from there, we tried to identify enslaved people by name.” In the collaboration with American Ancestors, there was a division of labor: the HSRP team would uncover the first generation or two of enslaved people and their descendants, and then hand off the research to American Ancestors, which would trace the line of direct descendants through to the present generation.

Of the 2,200 potential enslavers on HSRP’s list, Cellini said, he and his staff had reviewed the wills—“just the last will and testaments,” not necessarily other documents—of about 400, to see if they had left enslaved people as part of their estate when they died. “So, there are 1,800 people for whom we hadn’t even read their will, hadn’t looked at anything.”

Prior to his work at Harvard, Cellini founded and led the Georgetown Memory Project, an organization tracing the descendants of people who were sold in 1838 by the Jesuit leaders of Georgetown University to plantations in Louisiana. In that project, Cellini’s team was able to name and identify about 240 people (out of a total estimated population of 272 who were sold), and from those ancestors, researchers have traced more than 10,000 direct descendants, 5,000 of whom are still living. At Harvard, he said, the HSRP staff had already named and identified nearly 1,000 enslaved people, and were still processing an “enormous backlog” of others, with still more people whom they were just beginning to discover in the archives. “You can do the math,” Cellini said. “That’s a huge number.”

Tucker said he believed the speed and enormity of the team’s findings may have caught University officials off guard. “My impression is that Harvard thought we would maybe fill a lecture hall full of living descendants one day,” he said. “And my feeling is that we’ll be able to fill Harvard Stadium. And that’s probably a lowball estimate.”

Hundreds—or perhaps more—of those enslaved were located in the Caribbean, where some early Harvard leaders (including Law School benefactor Isaac Royall Jr., who served on the Board of Overseers) owned vast sugar plantations. “Harvard has always been an international community, from the very beginning,” Cellini said. “People were enslaved [by Harvard affiliates] throughout the Atlantic world, from the 1630s right up until the Civil War.”

Those are connections that Brown saw as an opportunity, a potential “victory” from which Harvard snatched defeat. “We have been a world university for a very long time, but in some ways that we haven’t been as eager to recognize,” he said. “To know that Harvard affiliates enslaved people in the islands in the Caribbean is also to know that Harvard has deep links with the Caribbean, and I think that we should be recovering and nurturing those links in a more positive way for the future.” After the team’s recent trip to Antigua, “I thought that this would be a great opportunity for Harvard to rebuild on that history. And hopefully that can still happen.”

 

“Every Name Is Precious”

Tucker and Cellini spoke of both the exhilaration and gravity involved in this work. “You know that rush when you discover a piece of information that is just mind-blowing, and you can’t feel your face?” Tucker said. “That happened weekly. And it was gratifying, because we were restoring family histories and lives. We were identifying people who for centuries were essentially lost to the archives.”

“Every name is precious,” Cellini said. “Every family is precious.” The Harvard Corporation, he added, “tasked us with identifying as many people as possible who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty and staff, and locating their direct descendants. That’s a solemn responsibility.”

Asked how long it would take to complete the work that HSRP started, Cellini paused to think. At least 25 years, he guessed, and maybe more like 75. But in truth, he said, “I think this work done properly would probably never end.” In part, that’s because more information is constantly becoming available—new archives coming online, new records being transcribed or made accessible. Technological improvements mean that research tasks that used to take months might now take hours, or minutes; and tasks that once seemed impossible are now feasible. But also, Cellini said, “Harvard’s complicity [in slavery] was so deep and wide—so many people from Harvard were involved in so many different ways in slavery—that the true number of enslaved people, once it is known, will be shocking.”

The only obstacles to his work, Cellini said, came not from the archives, but from the University. “One hundred percent of the resistance, if resistance is the right word, has come from the office of the president and the provost,” he said. “It’s fear, it’s anxiety, it’s roadblocks, second-guessing. It’s restrictions you didn’t ask for and you don’t know why.... In general, I or anybody else has more academic freedom to study Harvard’s ties to slavery from outside the University than inside the University.”

Responding to Cellini’s complaint, Kennedy-O’Reilly pointed to a pair of previous public statements from President Alan M. Garber, both of which acknowledged the complexity of the work to locate enslaved people and their descendants, as well as the “substantial, sustained effort” required to complete it. In last week’s announcement about American Ancestors’ takeover of the project, Ryan Woods, the organization’s CEO, said, “We understand from our extensive experience that tracing families descended from enslaved individuals is a complex, time-intensive process filled with significant challenges. We are committed to advancing this critical research to help Harvard establish meaningful connections and engagement with living descendants.” [Update 1/6/25, 12:15 p.m.: The above quote was initially attributed to Garber in error.]

Cellini, meanwhile, intends to continue his work. Asked what he would do next, he said, “My research agenda today is identical to my research agenda yesterday.” Just as before, he’ll be working to uncover the names of enslaved people and their descendants, only now as an independent scholar, free of University supervision. “It’s better to be doing it on the outside,” he said.

Most of the records documenting Harvard’s ties to slavery are not located at Harvard, he added. They’re in archives around the world—and nearly all are accessible to the public. Since the news broke of the HSRP layoffs, Cellini said that he’s been contacted by “a great many private individuals who want to fund the research.” It’s a return to his previous way of operating: the Georgetown Memory Project was a privately funded organization, independent of the university. “Harvard doesn’t have a lock on any critical asset,” Cellini said. “There’s a lot of money in the world. All the data is in the world. There are a lot of people who know how to do this work, who have the skills and insights and information. Actually, it turns out the scarce and valuable resource is courage.”

Read more articles by Lydialyle Gibson
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