As part of an ongoing project to identify people who were once enslaved on Harvard’s campus or by Harvard affiliates, the University this week released a publicly accessible database of 1,613 individuals, whose locations ranged from Cambridge to the Caribbean.
The information was assembled by the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP), which since 2023 has been researching the identities of people enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff between 1636, when the University was founded, and 1865, when the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. The program is also tasked with tracing direct descendants of the enslaved; according to a University spokesperson, HSRP researchers have so far identified roughly 600 living descendants.
The HSPR is one of several projects that grew out of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, launched in 2022 to reckon with the University’s historical and financial ties to the slave trade. An in-depth report released by the University that same year laid bare many of those ties, including details about how some of Harvard’s earliest leaders and benefactors had owned slaves—not only in New England and the American South, but also in the Caribbean, where enslaved labor on vast sugar plantations fueled massive fortunes.
For example, Isaac Royall Jr., who served on the University’s Board of Overseers and in 1781 bequeathed the founding gift for Harvard Law School, made his wealth as a plantation owner on the island of Antigua. Numerous other Harvard Overseers held plantations in places like Barbados, Jamaica, St. Croix, Haiti, and Cuba.
Other Harvard leaders—including presidents, treasurers, deans, University attorneys, and members of other governing boards—held slaves throughout New England and in Southern states like Louisiana and South Carolina.
In 2022, the University set aside $100 million as an endowment to implement the report’s recommendations. Among them was that the University “identify, engage, and support direct descendants” of people enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff through “dialogue, programming, information sharing, relationship building, and educational support.” Harvard has not yet begun contacting living descendants, a spokesperson said, and the concrete specifics of its engagement and support are yet to be worked out. University representatives have said in the past that the relationship with descendants should be determined by a shared discussion with individual descendant families, rather than decided unilaterally up front.
This week’s launch of the database is the first major public step in the project’s work since January 2025, when Harvard abruptly laid off its in-house HSRP research staff and turned over control of the program to American Ancestors, formerly the New England Historic Genealogical Society, a Boston-based genealogy nonprofit that was an existing partner in the work. At the time, Richard Cellini, the attorney and scholar who had been the program’s director, accused University administrators of pressuring him “not to find ‘too many descendants,’” a charge that Harvard officials repeatedly denied. “We are very clear-eyed that the number of enslaved individuals and their direct descendants is going to grow considerably,” vice provost for special projects Sara Bleich, who oversees the slavery initiative, said in a February 2025 interview.
Last month, The Guardian aired a new set of complaints from Harvard faculty members about HSRP and reported that Warren professor of American history Vincent Brown, who until last year’s shakeup at HSRP was deeply involved in the program’s research effort, will be departing the University this summer for a new faculty position at Yale.
University representatives declined to comment Tuesday on The Guardian report.
In announcing the database’s release, Harvard officials stressed that the task of identifying enslaved people and their descendants is far from finished. “While our work is by no means done, this is a big step forward,” Bleich said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. When he was laid off in 2025, Cellini said that his team had identified nearly 1,000 enslaved people and traced almost 500 living descendants. He estimated that Harvard affiliates may have enslaved hundreds or even thousands of people in the Caribbean alone. The total number of descendants (both living and deceased) would be exponentially higher. Right now, the database includes enslaved people from at least 50 towns in Massachusetts, plus 12 states and 12 countries.
Harvard is one of more than 100 universities that have begun investigating their connections to slavery in recent years, but only a handful have committed to researching the identities of the enslaved and tracking down living descendants. An initiative at the University of Virginia now funds scholarships for descendants of the enslaved workers who built and maintained the campus, and Georgetown University has given $27 million to a foundation benefiting descendants of the 272 enslaved people who were sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838 to help fund the newly founded university. (Before joining Harvard, Cellini led Georgetown’s search for descendants.)
At both the University of Virginia and Georgetown, the link between the enslaved and the institution was direct: people were enslaved by the university itself. At Harvard, in all but a few cases, the relationship is one step removed, and Harvard has also gone farther than other major universities in the expansiveness of this genealogical research, seeking to find and reconstruct family trees for every person enslaved by a long list of University affiliates.
In order to begin identifying enslaved people connected to the University, researchers had to first create a comprehensive list of all University leaders, faculty, and staff (until relatively recently, no centralized registries existed). Searching through handwritten notes from University meetings, stewards’ books, faculty records, legislative charters, and other sources, the researchers put together a list of approximately 3,000 people who were University leaders, faculty, or staff (the categories specified in the 2022 report) between 1636 and 1865. Studying documents related to those 3,000 people, they have so far identified at least 259 who definitely were slaveholders.
From there, to find archival mentions of individual enslaved people, the researchers turned to documents like baptismal and marriage records, bills of sale, cemetery records, probate records, land and property deeds, and other records involving financial instruments. These documents are often held in church and court archives, or by individual families. Some are in universities. Many enslaved individuals are mentioned only glancingly, in documents that are hundreds of pages long, and often only by first name: Caesar, Jemme, Dinah, Mary. Common first names were used over and over again for different people, and it was not unusual for an enslaved person’s name to shift over time.
Sometimes their names are not mentioned at all. Harvard’s database lists hundreds of people whose individual existence has been documented, but whose names remain unknown. “Name Once Known,” their entries read, in row after row. Or, if another descriptive detail is available: “Name Once Known, Female Infant”; “Name Once Known, Son of Matoonas”; “Name Once Known, Negro Boy.”
University officials said they plan to update the database periodically with new findings, although there is no set schedule for those updates. In a video accompanying the database’s release, Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who serves on the initiative’s advisory council, spoke of the importance of demonstrating “institutional honesty and humility in confronting the complexities of our institutional past” and added, “Every chapter in history, every family tree, and every institution, has its share of shadows and surprises. The journey isn’t always neat and easy, but it’s a crucial part of self-knowledge—an experience both necessary and transformative.”
