Harvard & Slavery…

Watching numerous race issues erupt at Harvard — from the controversial seal and hate crime at Harvard Law School to the dropping of “house master” titles in the dorms — I’ve found myself reflecting back on when I taught at Harvard and pushed my students to see the vestiges of slavery all around them. For example, I took my Egyptomania students on a field-trip to the nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetery to analyze not just Egyptian Revival funerary monuments but also the sphinx pictured above — erected to commemorate the end of slavery and the Civil War. Carved into the side of the Sphinx are these words: “AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED / AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED / BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE / BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES.”
Whenever my Harvard students would visit me during my office hours in Warren House, I would show them the trapdoor hidden in the hallway directly outside my office door — which was intended to hide fugitive slaves fleeing north on the Underground Railroad. Every time I passed over that trapdoor myself, I was reminded that slavery’s violent and painful past is quite literally hammered into the hallways of our most hallowed and elite institutions — from Harvard to the White House. In recognition of slavery’s brutal history and present legacies, some are now calling for the creation of a national memorial to tell the truth about slavery and its victims and supplement the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture next year…