Students and pedestrians walk through the courtyard of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 10, 2020. REUTERS / Brian Snyder / File Photo
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April 26 (Reuters) – Harvard University allocates $ 100 million for a fund to donate and other measures to fill educational, social and economic gaps that are a legacy of slavery and racism, according to an email the university president sent to all student professors. and staff on Tuesday.
An email from Harvard President Lawrence Bacchou includes a link to a 100-page report from his university’s 14-member Harvard University Commission on the Legacy of Slavery. The panel was chaired by Tomico Brown-Nagin, a legal historian and constitutional law expert who is dean of the Radcliffe Interdisciplinary Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The email and report were published on Reuters.
The move by the University of Massachusetts comes amid a broader discussion of the effects of centuries of slavery, discrimination and racism. Some people demanded financial or other reparations.
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The report sets out the history of campus slaves and the university, which benefited from the slave trade and the slave-related industries after it was banned in Massachusetts in 1783, 147 years after Harvard was founded. The report also documents Harvard, excluding black students and its scholars who advocate racism.
Although Harvard had notable figures among abolitionists and the civil rights movement, the report said: “The nation’s oldest higher education institution … has helped perpetuate racial oppression and the exploitation of the age.”
The authors of the report recommend that the descendants of people enslaved at Harvard be offered educational and other support so that “they can reconstruct their stories, tell their stories and pursue empowering knowledge.”
Other recommendations include Ivy League to fund summer programs to bring in students and faculty from long-underfunded black colleges and universities at Harvard and to send Harvard students and faculty to institutions known as HBCU, such as Howard University.
“This is a step in the right direction,” said Dennis Lloyd, 74, a Roxbury-based construction contractor in Roxbury, Massachusetts, who traces her lineage back to Cuba Vassal, a woman enslaved by the Royal family. Harvard Law School was founded in 1817 by a will from Isaac Royal Jr., whose family made much of their fortune in the slave trade and sugar plantation in Antigua.
“I’m happy to see Harvard acknowledge its connection to slavery, happy to see it expand financial and educational resources for students who don’t normally have access to Ivy League schools, and certainly the connection to HBCU,” added Lloyd, who attended. of Howard.
In an email, Harvard President Bacchow said the commission would investigate the implementation of the recommendations and that the university’s board of directors had approved $ 100 million to implement, with some of the funds donated.
“Slavery and its legacy have been a part of American life for more than 400 years,” Buckow wrote. “Working to further adjust its lasting effects will require our continued and ambitious efforts for years to come.
Other universities in the United States have set up funds in recent years to tackle the legacy of slavery. A law passed in Virginia last year required five public state universities to create scholarships for the descendants of people enslaved by the institutions.
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Report by Michela Moscufo; edited by Donna Bryson, Jonathan Oatis and Mark Porter
Our standards: Thomson Reuters’ principles of trust.
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