Harvard earmarks $100m for descendants of slaves

HARVARD University has committed $100million (£79million) to address its legacy of slavery after a report found the institution enslaved more than 70 people.

The money will fund various schemes to address racial wealth and education gaps, including an endowment fund.

As part of the plan, students at historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUS, could be invited to spend a year studying at the Ivy League university.

Harvard announced the initiative alongside its publication of a 100-page report by the university’s committee on the legacy of slavery, making it the latest US institution to publicly confront its ties to the trade.

“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” the university’s president Lawrence Bacow said yesterday. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

The report set out a number of recommendations, including that the university seek to identify direct descendants of people enslaved by Harvard or its staff.

Harvard should “engage with these descendants” so they “can recover their histories, tell their stories, and pursue empowering knowledge”, the report said. Other recommendations included paying for lecturers from HBCU to be given visiting appointments at Harvard, while the Ivy League university’s own professors would be able to do the same at HBCUS.

However, the university stopped short of an apology for its role in slavery, as other elite American universities, including Georgetown, have done in recent years.