What’s Next for Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative?

When the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative’s Remembrance Program identified more than 100 living descendants of enslaved people owned by University affiliates, it marked just the beginning of what will likely be a yearslong process to engage and support those descendants.

Though Harvard has not begun engaging with the living descendants, citing the need for the University to first complete its efforts to research and identify living descendants, similar initiatives at peer universities across the country offer an indication of how Harvard might approach its engagement efforts.

Richard J. Cellini, the director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, previously spearheaded the Georgetown Memory Project, a successful independent effort that discovered more than 10,000 living descendants of people who were enslaved by Georgetown University affiliates.

Though Georgetown University had no official connection to Cellini’s efforts, it launched the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project in 2015 which produced a series of recommendations to university leaders as part of a report on how to redress Georgetown’s ties to slavery.

Within three years, Georgetown — a private Jesuit university — issued a formal apology to descendant families and began a series of conversations to engage descendants.

Now, Georgetown offers descendants the same admissions preferences that other legacy students receive in the application process and publicly lists resources for people who are doing genealogical research to determine whether they are a descendant.

While these are possible routes the University could take as it seeks to “identify, engage, and support direct descendants,” Harvard spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly wrote in a statement that “direct engagement has not yet begun” with living descendants.

“The research to identify living direct descendants of individuals enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty and staff is ongoing,” Kennedy O’Reilly added. “H&LS is committed to engaging with living direct descendants as the research advances, though that direct engagement has not yet begun.”

Though the University has not begun engagement with living descendants, “planning for that engagement is also underway,” according to O’Reilly. Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara Bleich, who oversees the Legacy of Slavery initiative, has met with descendants communities in Cambridge and Boston as part of strategic planning efforts.

“This planning is grounded in the commitment to engaging thoughtfully with care and sensitivity, as the University believes these initial conversations about the findings of Harvard's research will be the basis for ongoing, long-term relationships between Harvard and these families,” Kennedy O’Reilly added.

Susan M. Glisson, a fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, had informal conversations earlier this year with Cellini, Bleich, and former Legacy of Slavery executive director Roeshana Moore-Evans about how to facilitate dialogue with living descendants.

The conversations with Glisson, who recently led reconciliation dialogues between enslaved and free descendants of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s plantation in Arlington, fazed out around the same time Moore-Evans suddenly left Harvard.

Harvard is also a member of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, which comprises more than 100 other institutions in five countries that have also undertaken efforts to study their own historical ties to slavery.

Many of the schools that are part of the consortium, which was launched by the University of Virginia, have already begun to engage with direct descendants, providing insight into the types of paths Harvard might take when it starts to engage with descendants.

However, efforts to engage with descendants have been a learning process for some universities, like Georgetown, that have already begun the process.

Former President of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States Timothy P. Kesicki, who was involved in Georgetown’s efforts to engage living descendants, said in an interview that the initial working group faced criticism that it started without any input from descendants.

“I think the listening is essential, but I would say listening is not enough. Descendants need to be in the room where the decisions are being made, and that was essential for us moving forward,” Kesicki said. “It’s a partnership. It’s descendants joining the leadership and coming together to form an answer.”

Monique T. Maddox, a descendant of Jesuit enslavement who also serves as CEO of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, said that “when you don’t allow descendants to take the lead, those in power then begin making decisions that are often in their own best interest.”

For Harvard, Maddox believes that consulting with descendants is the key for the Legacy of Slavery initiative to properly carry out its reparative goals.

“As descendants, I think Harvard would be best suited in speaking with some of those descendants about what exactly their most pressing needs are and being able to outline programs that could help them,” Maddox said.

The University of Mississippi also formed a research group in 2014 to identify people who were enslaved at the school as well as their living descendants. The group, which is co-chaired by professor Jeffrey T. Jackson, has opted to begin conversations with descendants even as its research remains ongoing.

“We’ll get queries from family historians, from family genealogists, and then we just share with them what we have,” Jackson said in an interview.

Jackson’s group published a list of the names of individuals enslaved on campus along with historical information and documents that provide background on the identity of these individuals. This also allows individuals who may be potential descendants to contact the researchers themselves and share their own family histories and records, which add to the primary sources already available at the University of Mississippi.

Jackson said that public transparency is a priority for them in helping reconnect descendants with their families.

“People are looking for it, and so we kind of have a responsibility to share what we find,” Jackson said.

The University of the South, which is located in Tennessee, has taken a different approach from Harvard and other schools as it engages descendants. Woody Register, the director of the school’s Roberson Project Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, said that they opt to form relationships with communities where descendants may have lived as a remedy for lacking “precise genealogical information” on descendants themselves.

“We have thought to develop relationships and partnerships in areas that were the epicenter of fundraising for this university,” Register said.

Jackson, the University of Mississippi professor, said that in an era where universities across the country are now working to reckon with past entanglements to slavery, it is essential for schools to work together.

“We all should strengthen our attempts to collaborate and to learn from each other and share information,” Jackon said. “We’re all trying to do something that’s pretty difficult and doesn’t have a very clear roadmap.”

—Staff writer Neeraja S. Kumar can be reached at neeraja.kumar@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @neerajasrikumar.

—Staff writer Annabel M. Yu can be reached at annabel.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @annabelmyu.