Harvard hired a researcher to uncover its ties to slavery. He says the results cost him his job: ‘We found too many slaves’
When the extent of the university’s involvement with slavery was unearthed, a scholar tracking descendants of enslaved workers was suddenly fired
Jordan Lloyd had been praying for something big to happen. The 35-year-old screenwriter was quarantining in her apartment in North Hollywood in June 2020. Without any work projects to fill her days, she picked up the novel Roots, by Alex Haley, to reread.
The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s ancestor, who is captured and sold into slavery in the Gambia and then brought to Virginia, where he is forced to labor on a plantation. It was adapted into an Emmy-award winning television series in the 1970s, and while reading it again, Lloyd thought to herself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could make another Roots?”
A few days later, out of the blue, she received an email from an undergraduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The email was short. The woman introduced herself as Carissa Chen, a junior at the college studying history. She was working on an independent research project to find descendants of enslaved people connected to the university. By using historical records and modern genealogy tools, she had found Lloyd.
“I have reason to believe through archival research that you could be the descendant of Tony and Cuba Vassall, two slaves taken from Antigua by a founding member connected to Harvard University,” the email read. “Are you available anytime for a call?”
The note linked to a website containing a family tree that Chen had created, tracing the lineage of people enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr, an Antiguan planter and businessman whose endowment would eventually create Harvard Law School.
Chen hadn’t expected to find any living descendants, she told the Guardian, but through dogged research, she managed to uncover 50 names and found Lloyd through an old website she had made when she had first moved to Los Angeles.
“It all felt too specific to be a scam,” Lloyd recounted, so she agreed to a call that would eventually blow open everything she thought she knew about her family history, linking her with one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions and launching a phase in her life that would be colored with equal parts joy and pain.
US universities and the legacy of slavery
Though it contradicts a common perception of colonial New England, enslaved people were brought to work in northern cities in North America as well. In her book New England Bound, the historian Wendy Warren records the remarks of one European traveler who noted in 1687 that “there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [enslaved people]”.
As the country’s oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard’s history is inextricable from the history of transatlantic slavery. The enslaved labored in campus buildings, university presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage, and the school’s wealth grew through a circle of donors intimately connected to the plantation system in the Caribbean, the American south and the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Harvard began, informally, to research its relationship to slavery as early as 2007, when the history professor Sven Beckert started leading undergraduate research seminars such as the one Chen took. In 2016, then Harvard president Drew Faust acknowledged the university was “directly complicit” in slavery and, in 2022, the university released an official report, Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which detailed its history over more than a hundred pages.
Harvard is not the only academic institution with this burden. Currently more than 100 universities across the world are investigating their ties to slavery, the vast majority of which are in the US. A small subset of the universities researching their ties to slavery – approximately five – have committed to conducting genealogical research and identifying living descendants. Religious denominations such as the Episcopal church and the Evangelical Lutheran church and more than a dozen cities and four states have also begun researching their legacies of slavery. The California state reparations taskforce published a 1,000-page report two years ago, and state legislators have been developing – and passing – reparations-related initiatives.
The Guardian, founded in 1821 in Manchester, England, began its own process in 2020, when its sole owner, the Scott Trust, commissioned independent academic researchers to uncover its links to transatlantic slavery. It revealed that the newspaper’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and nine out of 11 of his financial backers had direct ties, mainly through Manchester’s cotton industry. In 2023, the Scott Trust apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and committed to a 10-year restorative justice program, with millions earmarked for descendant communities. That year, the Guardian also launched an ongoing series called Cotton Capital, which explores the legacies of slavery globally.
The 2022 Harvard report included a list of recommendations by the presidential committee: develop educational partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, create a public memorial, and – perhaps most contentiously – identify living descendants of people enslaved by university staff, leaders and faculty. The announcement was accompanied by a $100m endowment for “implementation”.
The person the university tapped to lead the descendant research is a man named Richard Cellini, who has a kind of mythological status in the world of institutional accountability and slavery research. By his own admission, his skill lies primarily in selecting talented researchers, and “keeping them happy”. The university, it seemed, was fully committed to beginning a process of discovery and atonement, putting resources and brainpower behind a project that could set the tone for institutions around the country, and the world. If successful, Harvard could demonstrate that truth-telling and reconciliation are possible on a large scale, that an institutional culture around silence and historical revisionism can be overturned, and that light can shine into even the deepest cracks. But that would ultimately not be the case. Not yet, at least.
‘A source of guilt and shame for Harvard’
When I visited Cellini in the archives of the Harvard Business School in mid-February, he was bent over a 19th-century ledger book, trained on a set of records with a magnifying glass. He is a trained attorney and tech entrepreneur, and though jovial and quick to joke, he becomes stoic when speaking about his research.
In 2015, he
started an independent project at Georgetown University in Washington
DC to locate the descendants of 272 enslaved people sold by Jesuit
leaders in the mid-1800s to raise money for the university. Cellini said
he was driven by a sense of moral outrage upon learning about the sale,
as well as a curiosity to see what he could find. Along with 10 other
researchers, they would eventually locate more than 10,000 direct
descendants. Cellini’s effort, called the Georgetown Memory Project,
remains independent although the university has given preferential
consideration during the admissions process to descendants and created a
“reconciliation fund’ for their benefit.
In the winter of 2022, before the Harvard report was made public,
Cellini said he was approached by the former president of the school,
Larry Bacow, and a dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who asked him if he could
do the same thing for Harvard.
When he started the research, Harvard had already identified the names of 70 people that had been enslaved with ties to the university. Over the course of the past three years, working alongside American Ancestors, the country’s pre-eminent genealogical institute, Cellini and his researchers have identified more than 900 people that had been enslaved by university affiliates (faculty, staff and people in leadership positions) and nearly 500 of their direct living descendants.
It wasn’t long after the work began to pick up steam that Cellini started running into trouble.
In March 2023, he said he was asked to meet with the project’s executive director, Roeshana Moore-Evans, and the Harvard staff member overseeing the initiative, the public health professor and vice-provost for special projects, Sara Bleich.
These informal meetings were held in a boardroom in the student center, a tall glass building overlooking the gates of Harvard Yard. It was here and during extended phone calls that Cellini claims he was told repeatedly by Bleich “not to find too many descendants”.
“At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” he said.
Cellini told Bleich that was “ludicrous”, he said. Was he supposed to falsify the evidence, to destroy it, to ignore it? “I asked for guidance, and the answer was that she didn’t know,” he said, “but we shouldn’t report too many descendants.”
Bleich denies this. “The university never issued a directive to him to limit the number of direct descendants that could be identified through the work,” she told the Guardian during a phone interview. Moore-Evans declined to comment on the meetings.
In the process of trying to get additional funding for the project, arguing that the amount of work had increased tenfold because of all the additional names that were being uncovered, Cellini met with the finance director for the president’s office, Patricia Harrington, this past fall.
Harrington wouldn’t give him a clear answer about his funding request, telling him, “Unfortunately you keep finding more slaves,” he said, and that “every new person is a source of guilt and shame for Harvard”. A spokesperson for the university said: “Any assertion that Patricia Harrington disparaged the work of the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, including descendant research, is false.” Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
A family’s rich history tied to the founding of the US
The early days of discovery were a golden time for Lloyd and her immediate family. Together with Lloyd’s father, Dennis, and Chen, they would meet over Zoom and swap stories. Her dad was sharing parts of family history that Lloyd had never heard before: about his soft-spoken mother and his dad, who owned a flower shop in a neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown.
“People will open up to a stranger in a way that’s more honest and unfiltered, wanting to be thorough in a way that you would never with your family,” Lloyd said. Chen, in turn, detailed the findings of her research to the Lloyds and they began to fill in their histories, tracing connections to the colonial period and height of the “triangular trade”.
Lloyd’s ancestor seven generations back, Cuba Vassall, was three years old when she was forcibly moved from Antigua to a suburb of Boston along with her family by Isaac Royall Jr, in 1737. The Royalls were the largest slave-owning family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, owning nearly 70 enslaved people who labored on a 500-acre plantation just north of Boston, as well as controlling more than 100 people on their plantation in Antigua.
Before long, Lloyd’s ancestors were transferred to another wealthy Cambridge family, the Vassalls, for whom they labored in an elaborate Georgian mansion currently known as the Longfellow House, near the campus of the then growing Harvard University.
The Vassalls owned plantations in Jamaica where more than a thousand people were enslaved. John Vassall was a Harvard graduate, along with his brother Lewis, who once paid for a portion of his tuition with a large barrel of sugar, one of the most lucrative commodities produced by enslaved people. Cuba’s original enslaver, Isaac Royall Jr, didn’t have any direct ties to Harvard while he was living, but he endowed a professorship in his will, likely to ensure his legacy would live on as a member of the colonial elite. The seal of Harvard Law School was the Royall family crest until 2016, when students protested to demand its replacement. The Royall professorship was retired in 2022.
At the Longfellow House, Cuba met and married a man named Tony, originally from Jamaica, who was also enslaved by the Vassalls. They had six children, including Lloyd’s ancestor Darby. During the American revolutionary war, the royalist Vassalls fled and the house was occupied by George Washington, who used it as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. According to one anecdote, Washington asked then six-year-old Darby to work for him, who replied he wouldn’t work without wages.
After the war, Tony and Cuba petitioned the state to stay in a small dwelling on the property, where they cultivated a piece of land for farming. They had both spent 60 years of their life in slavery, Tony wrote in the 1781 letter, and “though deprived of what makes them now happy beyond _expression_ yet they have ever lived a life of honesty and have been faithful in their master’s service”.