Group May Sue Harvard for Slave Reparations

Harvard could soon find itself targeted in a lawsuit demanding reparations for slavery, according to one of its own professors who is spearheading the suit.

In an editorial published in Sunday’s New York Times, Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree, co-chair of a national committee seeking compensation for slavery, wrote that the group is reviewing possible defendants for a wide-ranging reparations lawsuit it plans to file next fall.

And institutions of higher learning—including Brown, Yale and Harvard—are under review, he said.

In an interview yesterday, Ogletree said he feels that taking the issue of reparations to court would stimulate public debate on the effects of slavery.

“We are hopeful that this move will create opportunity for discussion of slavery and its impact on culture and society,” he said, “as well as how we can move forward as a nation to remove barriers and work for equality to stop racial disparity.”

For several years the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a group of about two dozen lawyers, academics and public officials, has researched potential defendants in a reparations suit.

And the group has recently thought of targeting universities such as Harvard, Ogletree said, because they may have received grants and endowments that originated with profits of slavery.

At this point, Harvard officials have offered no specific response to the suggestion that Harvard may have benefited from gifts related to slavery, or to the possibility that the University would be a target in a reparations suit.

“We respect Professor Ogletree’s right to bring this issue to the forefront,” said Alan J. Stone, vice president for government, community and public affairs. “We understand this is an important issue but at the moment there is no way for us to evaluate the charges because there has not been a formal accusation.”

The movement for slavery reparations was sparked in part by Randall Robinson, a Harvard Law School graduate, who co-chairs the reparations committee with Ogletree. According to Ogletree, Robinson’s book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, stirred much of the recent debate on reparations.

The reparations committee is pushing for compensation of poor blacks generally, rather than looking for payments on an individual basis.

“The reparations movement,” Ogletree wrote in the Times editorial, “must finance social recovery for the bottom-stuck, providing an opportunity to address comprehensively the problem of those who have not substantially benefited from integration or affirmative action.”

In the past the federal government has offered compensation to Japanese Americans interned during World War II and has paid reparations to survivors of race riots.

While Ogletree and his committee are hopeful that their most recent push will add poor blacks to that list, some experts remain skeptical of the idea.

Christopher F. Edley, professor of law and a director of Harvard Law School’s Civil Rights Project, said he has doubts about the proposal.

“There’s a chance that the reparations movement will do more harm than good, because the central change is educating the public about the here-and-now effects of slavery and Jim Crow,” said Edley, who advised former President Bill Clinton on race matters. “We must correct the widespread view that, because landmark court decisions and legislation occurred 40 to 50 years ago, the legacy of color caste is only about history.”

And even if Harvard were found to have had some link to slavery, reparations might still not be a productive way to address the history of blacks in the United States, said Carswell Professor of Afro-American and Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah.

“On the whole, I am a bit worried about reparations in the context of guilt and blame and find somewhat unclear how helpful that is,” he said.