Harvard sets up $100 million endowment fund for slavery reparations

Harvard University is setting aside $100 million for an endowment fund and other measures to close the educational, social and economic gaps that are legacies of slavery and racism, according to an email the university's president sent to all students, faculty and staff on Tuesday.

The email from Harvard President Lawrence Bacow included a link to a 100-page report by his university's 14-member Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. The panel was chaired by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a legal historian and constitutional law expert who is dean of Harvard's interdisciplinary Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The email and the report were released to Reuters.

The move comes amid a wider conversation about the impacts of centuries of slavery, discrimination and racism. Some people have called for financial or other reparations.

The report laid out a history of slaves toiling on the campus and of the university benefiting from the slave trade and industries linked to slavery after it was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783 - 147 years after Harvard's founding in the state. The report also documents Harvard excluding Black students and its scholars advocating racism.

While Harvard had notable figures among abolitionists and in the civil rights movement, the report said, "The nation's oldest institution of higher education ... helped to perpetuate the era's racial oppression and exploitation."

The report's authors recommended offering descendants of people enslaved at Harvard educational and other support so they "can recover their histories, tell their stories, and pursue empowering knowledge."

Other recommendations included that the Ivy League school fund summer programs to bring students and faculty from long-underfunded historically Black colleges and universities to Harvard, and to send Harvard students and faculty to the institutions known as HBCUs, such as Howard University.

"It's a step in the right direction," said Dennis Lloyd, 74, a real estate developer from Roxbury, Massachusetts, who traces his lineage to Cuba Vassall, a woman enslaved by the Royall family. Harvard Law School was established in 1817 with a bequest from Isaac Royall Jr., whose family made much of its fortune in the slave trade and on a sugar plantation in Antigua.

"I'm happy to see that Harvard has acknowledged their connection to slavery, happy to see they're expanding the financial and educational resources to students who would normally not have access to Ivy League schools, and certainly the HBCU connection," added Lloyd, who attended Howard.

In his email, Harvard President Bacow said a committee would explore transforming the recommendations into action and that a university governing board had authorized $100 million for implementation, with some of the funds held in an endowment.

"Slavery and its legacy have been a part of American life for more than 400 years," Bacow wrote. "The work of further redressing its persistent effects will require our sustained and ambitious efforts for years to come."

Other U.S. institutions of higher learning have created funds in recent years to address legacies of slavery. A law enacted in Virginia last year requires five public state universities to create scholarships for descendants of people enslaved by the institutions.