A month after the University laid off the staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP), which for more than a year had been working to identify people enslaved by University affiliates and trace their descendants, Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara Bleich offered assurances about the administration’s commitment to the program’s mission—and to the larger initiative it is part of. “I want to be clear that the University is committed to advancing the Harvard and Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” Bleich said in an interview late last week. “That is unchanged, and the work continues.” She added, “This work is meant to live on in perpetuity, and that also is unchanged.”
But Bleich, who oversees the $100 million initiative, said it was too early to predict when the project’s largest goals—which include building a campus memorial and engaging with living direct descendants of the enslaved—will be completed. (Several initial smaller actions have been taken: in 2023, Harvard began a partnership to digitize African American history collections in libraries at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and in 2024 the University launched a summer research internship for HBCU students. A “reparative grant” program offers seed funding of $25,000-$350,000 to projects in Boston and Cambridge addressing inequities tied to slavery. And since 2022, Harvard chaplains have led occasional campus tours exploring the entanglements with slavery.)
After HSRP’s staff was laid off, the Boston-based genealogical nonprofit American Ancestors, which had been a research partner, took over the lead role in identifying enslaved individuals and their descendants. “We’re excited to scale this work and expand it with American Ancestors,” said Bleich, although she declined to give an explanation on the record for the decision to dismiss HSRP’s in-house research team.
That sudden dismissal, the latest in a series of high-profile upheavals within the initiative since its 2022 launch, followed months of rising tension and disagreement between former HSRP director Richard Cellini and Harvard administrators. Cellini asserted on more than one occasion that University officials, including Bleich, had pressured him “not to find ‘too many descendants,’” as he put it in a Crimson op-ed—an allegation that Bleich has repeatedly denied. In last week’s interview she said, “We are very clear-eyed that the number of enslaved individuals and their direct descendants is going to grow considerably.” To date, the research has uncovered 229 Harvard leaders, faculty, or staff members who owned slaves, according to American Ancestors CEO Ryan J. Woods, and identified 940 people who had been enslaved; some 1,211 deceased descendants have been found, along with at least 460 living descendants.
In an interview last week, Woods explained that American Ancestors will provide Harvard with monthly reports on what information they’ve uncovered, and said that the University has imposed no constraints on the research. “There are no reins put on us in any way about the scope of the work we are doing,” he said. “And we fully expect that these numbers [of enslaved people and direct descendants] will climb rapidly, due to the nature of population demographics and the way in which we will be working on this systematically every day.” The initial term of American Ancestors’ contract with the University is three years, but, Bleich said, “we expect that the research is going to go on for much longer.”
In recent months, Cellini and his team had identified hundreds of people who were enslaved in the Caribbean, where Harvard leaders (including Law School benefactor Isaac Royall Jr., who served on the Board of Overseers) owned vast sugar plantations. Cellini expected that hundreds—or perhaps thousands—more names of the enslaved would be discovered there. Asked whether American Ancestors, which routinely traces family histories of enslavement within the United States, has expertise extending to Caribbean genealogies, Woods said yes. “Historically and institutionally, we have a lot of experience in Caribbean and West Indies research,” he said, “in part because these are locations that individuals from Europe came from and stopped in. And so, this has long been a part of the world in which we have conducted historical and genealogical research.”
The methodology, he said, is similar to that applied to compiling African American genealogies that are entwined with slavery. “Because the institution of slavery depended in part on breaking apart families and suppressing identities, you don’t find records, typically, such as birth, marriage, and death records that would be in civil registrations,” he said. Instead, researchers rely on documents like baptismal records, bills of sale, cemetery records, and other records that involve property and financial instruments. These documents are often held in church archives, court archives, or by individual families. A few are in universities.
Woods acknowledged that the work ahead is enormous. The task, as laid out in the University’s 2022 report on Harvard’s ties to slavery, is 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.” The approach Woods’s team has taken is to focus first on Harvard leaders, a list that he said includes roughly 2,500 people—among them University presidents and Overseers, as well as Massachusetts governors and deputy governors—who will have to be fully examined, to determine which of them held slaves. After that, the researchers will look for names of the enslaved, following the archival trail to their descendants.
At some point, the University plans to begin reaching out to those descendants, to begin offering the “dialogue, programming, information sharing, relationship building, and educational support” called for in the University’s 2022 report. Bleich said there isn’t yet a timeframe for that step. “When does the engagement start? The short answer is, I don’t know,” she said. But given that the number of named descendants is expected to multiply exponentially, “We want to ensure that we are as prepared as we can be for future conversations,” she said. “And when we have those conversations, we want to be able to engage as broad a group as possible, so that they can share their thoughts.”
Acknowledging a growing impatience among some on campus and in the community with the pace of this process, she added, “I personally am a descendant of enslaved individuals, and I don’t understand my entire family history. So, I completely appreciate the sense of urgency and people really wanting to understand where we are with the engagement. But I also know that we have to do this work thoughtfully and carefully, which means that it will take a little bit longer than some people would like.”
In preparation for reaching out to descendants, Bleich said, University officials have been conferring with peers on other campuses who have undertaken similar projects involving descendants. “Making sure that we have the right expertise in place to begin the outreach is also going to be really important,” she said. “For some families, they are going to be hearing about their relationship to Harvard for the first time, and so we want to make sure that we do that in a way that is very thoughtful and considerate.…We really want to make sure that we are prioritizing the individual one-on-one conversations, because that's going to be the start of a long-term relationship that these families have with the University. And so, we want those conversations to be as positive as they can be.”
