Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired?

In 2022, Harvard’s $100m investment in reparations-related programs seemed to usher in an era of openness and accountability within the university about its legacy of slavery – but academics, both former and current, allege otherwise. Photograph: Sophie Park/Getty Images

Harvard, founded in 1636 in Cambridge, is widely considered the most prestigious university in the US, and has an endowment of over $50bn, which makes it the wealthiest university in the world. The revenue from the endowment, supplemented by donations, income from student tuition and sponsorships, is used to fund the university’s operations. Yet because the money is invested and meant to grow over time, the university maintains that its ability to draw from the endowment is limited.

Still, the school’s’s $100m investment in reparations-related programs in 2022 seemed to usher in an era of openness and accountability within the university about its legacy of slavery. Yet academics involved in the project and related research initiatives allege otherwise. Three Harvard-affiliated academics stepped down from their posts with the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, alleging the university was getting in the way of their work. The former executive director of the initiative stepped down for “personal reasons”, and 11 researchers who had been working on projects related to the initiative had been fired. Two professors wrote in a letter published by the Harvard Crimson that the university had tried to “delay and dilute” efforts to connect with descendant communities while designing a memorial on campus. In a statement made to the student newspaper at the time, a university spokesperson said it would “take seriously the co-chairs’ concerns about the importance of community involvement”.

Newman, 45, is originally from Ohio and a doctoral student at Howard University, specializing in African diaspora and Caribbean studies. His demeanor is calm and soft-spoken, and during interviews, he takes pains to be precise and methodical. His Harvard summer internship responsibilities were to create an annotated bibliography using sources from the Harvard libraries, but there was a wider initiative going on at the university to research its ties to slavery. He said his adviser promised to convey his interest in engaging descendant communities. Yet at the meeting with human resources, Newman said he was fired. He said he was accused of misrepresenting himself online as an archivist and reaching out to descendant communities when he shouldn’t have. Newman added that he only ever claimed he was “working for the Harvard archives”, not employed as an archivist.

A spokesperson for the university said they did not comment on personnel matters yet added “this individual was an intern at Harvard Library, and not with the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, which is the only group at the University authorized to engage in descendant research, descendant outreach, or additional research on behalf of the University.” Newman doesn’t contest that his research interests were expanding past the original job description, but he said he thought his curiosity about living descendants and the university’s ties to the Caribbean would have been encouraged. To be fired for a set of allegations after he tried to defend and explain himself, he said, was painful.

The ties between Harvard University and the Caribbean are myriad and consist of densely layered networks of wealthy families, trade, political power and violence. Dozens of university presidents, overseers (governing officials), donors and staff grew their wealth off of enslaved labor and the transatlantic slave trade. Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections – and potential obligations – to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. Officials in Antigua have tried to engage in a dialogue with the university about reparations for nearly a decade. “The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.”

In the tumultuous years since the creation of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, three memorial committee members have stepped down and researchers have been fired largely over disputes related to engaging descendant communities.

Vincent Brown, a history professor at Harvard, stepped down from his role on the initiative last winter, after a research team visiting Antigua was unexpectedly fired. “I felt like I was basically sacrificing my scholarly reputation to stay on a project that didn’t have scholarship as its priority,” he said. The university declined to comment on Brown’s resignation.

“I have been bombarded with questions that I cannot answer,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Is it true that the university does not really want to know the whole truth about its history of slave ownership in the Caribbean?” And if true, what would the university be trying to hide?

‘Soe infinite is the profitt of sugar’

It was the winter of 1641, and John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and one of the founders of Harvard University, was nervous about the economic viability of the colony. Attempts to create a codfish industry and expand the fur trade had failed, and a solution was desperately needed to prevent a crisis. “The general fear of want of foreign commodities, now our money was gone,” he wrote in his journal, “set us on work to provide shipping of our own.”

The growing plantations in the Caribbean provided the answer. Winthrop was aware of the “great advantages supposed to be had” in the southern expanses of the British empire, where, a friend in Barbados would inform him: “Men are so intent upon planting sugar that they had rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar.” The potential gains from planting and processing sugarcane were so great, in other words, that colonists ignored any other form of agriculture entirely. The Caribbean colonies would need to import their food and other necessary products from New England.

Shipments began to leave Boston for the Caribbean with commodities such as grain, fish, cattle and pipe staves, the wooden slats used to make barrels. Boats returning from the Caribbean brought back indigo, sugar, tobacco, cotton and the first recorded enslaved African people to be sold in New England. Within a few years, Winthrop could triumphantly claim that “it pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other islands in the West Indies.” Boston’s role in a transatlantic trade was cemented.

A painting of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and one of the founders of Harvard University. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

This development provided a lifeline to the struggling Harvard College, which at that point in 1641 had consisted of two buildings, one still unfinished, on a cow pasture. The university was reliant on financial support from the colonial government and the generosity of individuals, so as the colony flourished on the back of the transatlantic trade, so did the college. One of the largest donations made in the early years of the college came from the Caribbean: a group of colonists who had recently arrived in the Bahamas to develop plantations and enslave Indigenous people gave a gift of local dyewood. This offering, coordinated by an early Harvard graduate, sold for the equivalent of more than $20,000 in today’s dollars and enabled the college to expand to a third building.

The transatlantic economy, and subsequent enrichment of the college, began with Indigenous land dispossession, murder and enslavement. In the 1630s, Winthrop had overseen the massacre of at least 700 Indigenous people during the so-called Pequot war. He enslaved at least seven people for his own use and distributed others among friends, a group which included at least three fellow Harvard leaders and benefactors – letting them choose their favorites.

Winthrop began trafficking humans even before moving to the New World. His son Henry was part of the first British settlement in Barbados in 1627, three years before the elder Winthrop would sail across the Atlantic, and wrote to his father asking for people to work on his tobacco plantation. Winthrop procures two children, writing in a letter that he “knew not what to do for their binding”, because they were too young “to walk or write”.

Enslaved people were becoming the currency of a massive game of quid pro quo stretching across New England, Europe and the Caribbean, where family and alumni ties operated as de facto business networks. When Winthrop’s son Stephen went on a trading mission to Bermuda in 1638, for example, he carried with him a letter of introduction from Hugh Peter, a fellow colonist and member of Harvard’s board of overseers.

In the 1630s, Winthrop had overseen the massacre of at least 700 Indigenous people during the so-called Pequot war. Photograph: Stock Montage/Getty Images

In his book Sugar and Slaves, the late historian Richard Slator Dunn calculates that by the late 17th century, at any given time nearly half the trading ships in the Caribbean were from New England and more than half of the ships in Boston were involved in the West Indian trade. “It was a deeply integrated economic space,” said Sven Beckert, a Harvard historian. “But the rich part, the dynamic part of this space, was in the Caribbean, not [Boston].”

‘I see our people getting rich’

Antigua is only 100 sq miles large – a “small place” in the words of Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan novelist and Harvard professor, yet at the height of its colonial period, it was covered with more than 200 sugar plantations. The remains of these plantations, large stone mills used to grind sugar, still dot the landscape “like freckles”, as Agnes Meeker, a local historian, puts it.

In the 17th century and through the beginning of the 19th century, at least six different plantations in Antigua were owned by early Harvard benefactors or leaders who, in sum, enslaved at least 362 people and potentially more than 600 people, according to estimates produced by Richard Cellini, an independent researcher, and his team before they were fired. Cellini, who had been hired by Harvard to identify enslaved people tied to the university and their descendants, had travelled to Antigua last January along with a group of researchers. Upon their return, the entire team was fired without explanation, though Cellini believes the university was afraid because they had found “too many slaves” and could be bankrupted as a result, he told the Guardian last year.

Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly, university spokesperson, disputed Cellini’s statement, saying that no such instruction had ever been issued. “There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work,” she wrote.

John Winthrop’s youngest son, Samuel, arrived in Antigua in 1649 as one of the first four planters to settle permanently on the island. He had first tried to work as an agent and clerk for different trading companies in the Canary Islands before sailing to Antigua. “I have no fixed calling, not knowing what profession I should embrace,” a young Samuel complains to his dad, but he knew he wanted to make money. “I see many of our people daily growing rich and raising themselves from nothing,” he writes. He decides to go to the Caribbean, where the chances of getting rich are highest.

Samuel dropped out of Harvard before graduating, but he was an important benefactor. Before leaving Boston to begin his career, he and three other students made the first property donation in the university’s history in 1645: land which is now the site of Widener Library.

Within a decade of settling in the West Indies and beginning to enslave people, his plantation was producing tens of thousands of pounds of sugar annually for export. Almost all available land on Antigua was used to cultivate sugar, and the island was quickly transformed into a devastating slave society. Infant mortality rates were high, torture was used as a method of domination and enslaved people were frequently worked to death in order to produce the valuable commodity of sugar. Colonial rule and enslavement were routinely met with resistance, uprisings and organized attempts at rebellion.

In addition to helping create the island’s planter class, he was a staunch advocate of expanding trade, gave away hundreds of acres of land to settlers and served as the lieutenant governor of Antigua. By the time he died, he was one of the wealthiest men on the island, enslaving 64 people on a 1,000-acre plantation called Groton Hall, named after his birthplace in England, and owning one-quarter of the island of Barbuda.

He was reliant on “our New England friends”, as he told his father, to do business. In the Caribbean, wealth was concentrated through the intermarriage of a small number of planter families and alumni networks that facilitated business deals. Antiguan-born Thomas Oliver, who would go on to become a Harvard overseer and the lieutenant governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, built a mansion in Cambridge from wealth derived from the Caribbean. It is now the residence for Harvard University presidents, Elmwood.

The ties between Harvard University and the Caribbean are myriad and consist of densely layered networks of wealthy families, trade, political power and violence. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Just ‘a PR measure’

When Caitlin DeAngelis was hired by Harvard in 2017 to produce a report for the precursor to the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, the independent researcher found the names of more than 200 people who were enslaved at Oliver’s plantation in Antigua, including a 15-year-old boy named Richard Oliver.

She shared the source material with her supervisors, clearly showing the number of enslaved people along with their names, yet none appear in the final version of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report, which claims the number is unknown. DeAngelis believed a decision was made to omit the names, using a technicality: the census of the estate was taken two years after Oliver died, though he passed ownership to his heirs. A spokesperson for the university said that “the data in the report was carefully researched and sourced, reflecting our best understanding at the time.”

“They tend to limit the number of people that they acknowledge, rather than to read the historical record in a way that is expansive and more accurate,” she said. “It’s definitely evasive.” As of the report’s publication in 2022, the university had identified 41 Harvard enslavers and at least 70 enslaved people with ties to the university. By the time Cellini was fired in January 2025, his team had identified more than 900 enslaved people and nearly 500 living descendants – a number Cellini estimated could be about 10,000. The latest figures released by the university say the school has identified 1,314 formerly enslaved people and 601 living descendants, as of February.

DeAngelis said while she was a researcher at Harvard and teaching courses, the president’s office told her directly not to discuss her ongoing research with students, and that a course she was teaching called “Slavery at Harvard” was changed in the course catalogue to include a focus on abolition without her consent. A spokesperson for the university declined to comment.

“My understanding of Harvard’s orientation towards its research was that it was a PR measure to limit both publicity and legal liability,” DeAngelis said. “My job was not to use all of my skills as a historian to uncover the historical truth. My role was to hold down a desk that allowed Harvard to mislead the press about how serious they were about making reparations and confronting centuries of profiting from slavery.”

Dozens of Harvard University presidents, overseers (governing officials), donors and staff grew their wealth off of enslaved labor and the transatlantic slave trade. Photograph: Sophie Park/Getty Images

This fall, DeAngelis and a group of scholars including Martin, the lecturer, published a report sponsored by the National Park Service about Black families enslaved by Harvard-affiliated families in Cambridge, Antigua and Jamaica. When multiple team members tried to connect with the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, given the obvious overlap in research and looking for some guidance from the university, they were shrugged off, according to Martin. “We were not surprised,” she said. “It was more or less what we expected.”

The Legacy of Slavery Initiative is a “window dressing”, Martin said, “more performative than substantive”. As a member of faculty, she admits to struggling with her role and responsibility.

She said: “It remains very opaque to us, what is possible.”

Discounted business development courses

When 30,000 enslaved people in Antigua were emancipated in August 1834, plantation owners were compensated for their “property loss” by the British. The newly freed people were left with nothing, a common story across the Americas. A number of free Black towns were created on the island, but a majority of formerly enslaved people had no choice but to remain on the sites of former plantations.

The village of Winthorpe that had been established on the grounds of Samuel Winthrop’s plantation was destroyed in 1942 to make room for a US army base. The people living there were forcibly relocated to what is now the nearby village of New Winthorpes. The late Antiguan poet Mary Geo Quinn, who grew up in that village and referred to herself affectionately as a Winthorpean, was dedicated to preserving the memory of that place.

“Lest we forget, tell us again and again about our forefathers strong,” she wrote in one of her poems. “Who toiled for their captors in sun and in rain, And lived to triumph o’er this great wrong.”

The Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative is a “window dressing”, said Carla Martin, a lecturer of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Photograph: Jannis Werner/Alamy

Some are less likely to forget than others. When research began to emerge of the Antiguan connection to Harvard, particularly through a family called the Royalls, prominent plantation owners in Antigua whose wealth would create Harvard Law School, the government of Antigua began making demands itself. Coincidentally, Belinda Sutton, also known as Belinda Royall, had been enslaved by the Royall family at their Boston mansion and made one of the first legal cases for reparation in 1783.

In 2016, after the university’s decision to remove the Royall family crest as the seal of the law school, Ronald Saunders, the US ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda, sent a letter to then Harvard president Drew Faust. According to the Harvard Crimson, which first reported the news, he urged the university to “demonstrate its remorse and its debt”. He proposed that the law school could offer annual scholarships for Antiguan students as a form of reparations and suggested in an interview that the university could also offer support, presumably financial, to the University of West Indies, which was just being built at the time.

Faust’s chief of staff responded to the letter, the Crimson reported, outlining various steps the university had taken internally to address this history. But two years later, Saunders wrote another letter, this time to Harvard president Larry Bacow, reiterating the requests. In 2019, Gaston Browne, Antigua’s prime minister, sent a letter. “We consider Harvard’s failure to acknowledge its obligations to Antigua and the stain it bears from benefitting from the blood of our people as shocking if not immoral,” he wrote, and asked for an official meeting. Bacow replied to Browne a few weeks later, according to the Crimson, reiterating Harvard’s progress and admitting “there is more work to be done.”

Within a few months, local press in the Caribbean began to report a potential “programme of cooperation” between Harvard and the University of the West Indies, and that Bacow had signaled a willingness to meet, though a university spokesperson told the Miami Herald at the time the conversations did not involve reparations.

In 2021, the University of West Indies announced a partnership with the Harvard Business School: participation in a professional development program that seemingly amounted to discounted online courses. The program is ongoing, and according to Cellini, who travelled to Antigua and met with university representatives, the discount was between 10-20%. A spokesperson for Harvard said it “has provided course sharing” for University of West Indies students, yet declined to comment on whether that includes a discounted rate.

A spokesperson for the Antiguan government said that the “tacit agreement” in 2021 was that Harvard would provide a number of “incentives” to the University of the West Indies, including some form of scholarships, visiting professors, and that the school would receive help designing its curriculum. The word reparations, he said, was explicitly avoided.

Official and unofficial reparations requests from Antigua that emerged during and after Cellini’s visit have included scholarship programs, providing funds to upkeep National Archives, requests for genealogical research support (to identify descendants of people enslaved on plantations), and requests to fund non-communicable diseases research. To date, the discounted business development courses are all that have been offered by the university.

A Harvard spokesperson said that since 2019, the university had “pursued and expanded partnerships” with the University of West Indies at Five Islands and that in addition to the online courses, “faculty from both institutions have participated in conferences and programs hosted by each institution.”

A portrait of the Royall family, prominent plantation owners in Antigua whose wealth would create Harvard Law School. Photograph: Alamy

Disappointment and disapproval

When Cellini and his team were fired last winter, Sanders, the US ambassador, wrote a letter that expressed his disapproval and requested that the research into Harvard’s legacy of slavery continued. Brown, the Harvard history professor, had travelled to Antigua with Cellini shortly before he was fired. Brown wrote in his resignation letter: “In my view, Harvard’s historic relationship with Antigua should be something that the university rediscovers and nurtures for itself, not one left to a business partnership with an external concern,” referring to the university’s decision to entrust a private genealogy organization with the descendant research.

“I want to know that if I’m working as a historian on this, that I’m going to be able to do my work, and seeing that this initiative did not have the kind of support that I thought it had when I first joined, best indicated to me that my energy would probably spend better someplace else.”

This summer, Brown will be stepping down from his role at Harvard and moving to Yale. “I have loved teaching these students; I have wonderful colleagues here; and Harvard has generously supported my career at every stage,” he said. “But now, when a searching critical approach to the past and its legacies is more important than ever, I believe that Yale’s current leaders are more strongly committed to the health of the historical profession.” Founded in 1701, Yale’s history of Indigenous displacement and genocide and wealth accumulation through enslavement and the plantation economy roughly mirrors Harvard’s.

Newman, who is now in his final year at Howard completing his doctoral thesis, was initially afraid to speak out about his experience at Harvard because of potential legal or reputational retribution but affirmed that he did nothing wrong. “I was absolutely passionate,” he said. “I was very diligent in my research and in my work.”

He had been hired as part of a diversity initiative to “cultivate the next generation” of researchers and librarians from underrepresented backgrounds, but Newman said he was fired for false accusations, and the work he did for Harvard remains unpublished.

“It was very triggering for me on various levels,” he said, “particularly with the presence of the police and just how everything happened so abruptly”. But the lingering feeling a year and a half later, he says, is disappointment. “There was a great opportunity for Harvard to really be involved with the outside community,” he said. “They turned their backs.”