Balancing the Story of Harvard and Slavery
The Crimson | David E. Kaiser
David Kaiser ’69, former Harvard history professor, takes issue with the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Report: “The report gives much less attention to the ways in which Harvard graduates, faculty, and staff contributed to the end of slavery and to racial progress since the Civil War. As a Harvard-trained historian and former faculty member, I find this imbalance disturbing.” The report speaks to a larger risk— “the danger of [historical truth] being subsumed by modern efforts to recast history with a blinkered reading of the past.”
He explains the facts of the war, including, “The sum of dead Confederate soldiers from Harvard and the…Harvard faculty and staff who owned a confirmed total of 70 slaves before 1783 falls considerably short of the total of Union dead from Harvard, to say nothing of the larger number who fought and survived.”
Kaiser also discusses the role of Harvard alumni. “Many Harvard graduates, who by-and-large go unrecognized in the report, played critical roles in anti-slavery politics….The report also omits critical contributions to racial progress from some of Harvard’s most famous alumni.”
The report, he argues, is part of a larger rewriting of history. “Whatever their intention, the distinguished academics who signed the Harvard report contributed to the now-popular image of the racial history of the United States: an unremitting struggle between racist whites and oppressed nonwhites. Both white and Black Americans have been fighting for racial equality at least since the time of the American Revolution — which is why we no longer have slavery and legal segregation in the United States. Today’s popular one-sided view is effective propaganda, but terrible history.”
David E. Kaiser ’69 is a historian and former assistant professor in the Harvard University Department of History