The announcement that Harvard University has long benefitted from its association with slavery and slaveholders may have come as breaking news to many people including alumni of that notable institution. The truth is, Harvard, and every other Ivy League school except Cornell which was founded after the abolition of slavery has a similar set of skeletons in its closet. All this country’s most elite universities that were organized before the abolition of slavery in 1865 benefitted from the slave trade in one way or another. That point was made by Craig Steven Wilder in his 2013 book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Wilder is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his research was originally commissioned by Brown University.1
Brown University was aware of its association with slavery, since it was founded by John and Moses Brown of Providence, Rhode Island who were active in both the Revolutionary War as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Among other things, the Browns provided many of the ships that were used to transport enslaved persons across the Atlantic Ocean. John Brown (not the 19th century abolitionist) was convicted in 1794 of continuing to engage in the slave trade after the passage of the Slave Trade Act that prohibited the making, equipping, loading, dispatching, or outfitting of ships that would be used in human trafficking. Brown University faced up to its association with the slave trade in its February 2013 report, Response of Brown University to the Report of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
There is no doubt that all the Ivy League schools, the Seven Sister colleges, and any other heavily endowed college or university founded before 1865 benefitted from the slave trade. It is now well known that Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the oldest Jesuit university in the country founded in 1792, relied heavily on endowments from slaveholding Catholics in Maryland. Enslaved persons worked on the plantations that generated the wealth that would eventually allow Georgetown to open its doors. In 1838, Georgetown sold 272 enslaved persons to two plantations in Louisiana to remain fiscally solvent.2
Support of involvement in the slave trade took many forms. Slaveholders provided money for the construction of buildings on university and college campuses. The children of slaveholders brought tuition revenue to colleges and universities, and sometimes brought their slaves along with them. Princeton University launched a study in 2017 called The Princeton and Slavery Project to trace the involvement of its trustees, faculty, students, alumni, and donors in the slave trade. At Yale University an 18th century building called Connecticut Hall was constructed with enslaved labor.3
Some of the most esteemed names in Harvard's illustrious history — Lowell, Eliot, Winthrop, Leverett, Wadsworth among them — belong to men who profited from slavery.
Schools looking for an association with slavery should look beyond the issue of direct financial support from slaveholders whether through endowment gifts, building construction, tuition revenue, or the efforts of actual enslaved persons that worked without compensation on their campuses. Attention must also be given to the insurance companies used by those campuses that established themselves by ensuring slave vessels and their cargo. Every major U.S. insurance company founded before the Civil War of 1861 profited from the slave trade and provided a safety net for slave traders if anything should happen to their cargo.
The production of cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and other crops was not an end in itself. Those raw materials were converted into commodities sold in stores in Richmond and Charleston as well as in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Profiteering from slave labor did not stop on the plantations where enslaved persons were forced to work. Those profits worked their way into every sector of the U.S. economy. They fueled political campaigns and candidates. They funded the construction of antebellum mansions and 20th century cities from Atlanta to Charlotte to Memphis to New Orleans. They endowed Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist conventions and church buildings with their towering steeples and their stately white columns that dot the southern landscape to this day.
Stone monuments to those who fought to defend “the peculiar institution” are only now being taken down after standing as a reminder of the Confederacy and its desire to maintain the right of some people to hold other people in a form of slavery that extended from 1619 to 1865. As anyone paying attention can see, there are concerted efforts at voter suppression, immigration restrictions, and the banning of books that try to shed light on the issue of America’s slaveholding past. The attitudes of some people in this country still lean toward the white supremacy that laid at the heart of slavery.
Here in Cleveland the issue has taken an expected turn with the name of Cleveland State University's Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. There are those who object to the name of John Marshall being associated with that school because along with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and many other founders of this country, John Marshall was a slaveholder. Other colleges and universities across this country have removed from campus buildings the names of those once venerated figures of the past who were found to have ties to the enslavement of persons of African descent.
Harvard University has promised to spend $100 million to account for its involvement in slavery. For a school with an endowment more than $53 billion, the amount being pledged is underwhelming given the magnitude of the crime of slavery and the benefit Harvard and other schools have reaped over the centuries. Nevertheless, it is a start that will hopefully prompt other schools, businesses, and church bodies to follow suit.
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1 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.
2 Rachel L. Swarns, 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It owe Their Descendants? nytimes.com, April 16, 2016.
3 Yale University, Slavery Research Project
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The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011.
