On Wednesday, Harvard University President Drew Faust announced the Ivy League university’s plans to recognize four former school employees who were also slaves.
Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, Faust explained that in order to come forward and acknowledge its role in slavery, the university plans to install a plaque honoring the four slaves who worked for two Harvard presidents in the 1700s: Bilhah, Venus, Titus and Juba. Harvard’s decision to do this comes from the institution’s desire to recognize and acknowledge most university symbols that have any tie to the slave trade era.
“Although we embrace and regularly celebrate the storied traditions of our nearly 400-year history, slavery is an aspect of Harvard’s past that has rarely been acknowledged or invoked,” Faust wrote. “Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage from the college’s earliest days in the 1700s until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783.”
On April 6, Faust, along with Congressman John Lewis, plans on installing the plaque on Wadsworth House, the second-oldest building on campus. She has also put together a committee of historians who will offer her insight into other symbols on campus that have ties to slavery.
Faust hopes that the recognition of Harvard’s roots will help the school better deal with current racial issues.
“If we can better understand how oppression and exploittion could seem so commonplace to so many of those who built Harvard, we may better equip ourselves to combat our own shortcomings and to advance justice and equality in our own time,” she wrote.