The president of Harvard University acknowledged Wednesday the college’s role during one of the nation’s darkest moments while unveiling a plaque that recognizes four slaves who were forced to work at the Ivy League school in the 1700s.
The modest plaque was installed on the colonial-era Wadsworth House and lists the names of four slaves who worked there more than 200 years ago: Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah.
“Their work and that of many other people of color played a significant role in building Harvard, ” President Drew Faust said at Wednesday’s dedication ceremony, National Public Radio’s local affiliate reported. “The plaque is intended to remember them and honor them, and to remind us that slavery was not an abstraction but a cruelty inflicted on particular humans.”
“Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage,” said Ms. Faust, a Civil War historian. “We name the names to remember these stolen lives.”
Ms. Faust told the Boston Globe that she had been wanting to honor the school’s former slaves, and was motivated to take action amid national discussions regarding race that have erupted at college campuses and elsewhere in recent months.
“Harvard is very involved with its past, but this part of it has been marginalized, hidden, made not visible,” she told the Harvard Crimson school newspaper after the unveiling. “We want to have a full understanding of Harvard’s history, because that, I believe, will enable us to come together around what has been and transcend that and move to what we want to have happen in the future.
“We know the names of individual people, and when the oppressions of slavery are translated into individual lives, I think they’re much more tangible. They’re much more available to us in the present to understand,” Ms. Faust added. “These are people like you or me, and slavery was not just a system, it was millions of human lives.”
Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat and famed civil rights leader, joined Ms. Faust for the unveiling, telling the Crimson that the plaque “is very meaningful not just for this campus and the Harvard University community, but to the nation.”
“When I first got to Congress in 1987 … I noticed there was a strange absence of the contributions that slaves had made to the construction of federal buildings,” Mr. Lewis said. “Slaves helped build the White House, the U.S. Capitol and other monuments of power in Washington. But not one word was ever mentioned about their action and their sacrifice.
“That is why it is so fitting and most appropriate that Harvard University, the first college in the nation, should pause and pay tribute to the lives of these slaves who served the university and its first president with great distinction,” he added.
Harvard announced in February it will stop using the term “house master” when referring to dormitory officials due to its association with slavery. Last month, the Harvard Corporation approved change to the Law School official seal because of ties to a family of slaveholders.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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