This spring semester we will mark a year since the Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery launched its landmark report, and while the university has already begun to take action on the report’s seven recommendations—to commemorate the enslaved people identified by the Initiative’s researchers; to educate our community about our institution’s complicated history of both promoting and resisting slavery, scientific racism, and white supremacy more generally; and to advance the causes of justice and equity in contemporary higher education—there remains much more to be done.
At the Bok Center, we know that one of the places in which we can contribute to that work is by helping the community of teachers and scholars with whom we partner to incorporate the findings, approaches, and concerns represented in the committee report into the Harvard College curriculum. Toward that end, this February we convened an Exploratory Seminar on “Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery: From the Committee Report to the Classroom,” bringing together six eminent historians of slavery from Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia to address an audience of Harvard faculty interested in learning more about the possibilities, and challenges, that come into play when we ask undergraduates to engage with our institutions’ historical relationship to slavery and white supremacy. Over the course of two days, Sven Beckert, Martha Sandweiss, Kathleen Brown, Laura Goldblatt, Adam Rothman, and Vincent Brown shared moving reflections on how this kind of teaching changed their relationships to their scholarship and students, and fielded a range of thought-provoking questions from our Harvard audience. The audience also heard from deans Sheree Ohen and Rakesh Khurana, who emphasized the importance of this kind of teaching to Harvard College’s mission. Harvard Magazine correspondent Lydialyle Gibson was there to take stock of the proceedings.
Following the conclusion of the seminar, the Bok Center has begun working with campus partners in libraries, museums, and curricular programs to develop an online resource that will help instructors identify and incorporate campus collections relevant to the history of slavery into their courses. We hope to share more news about this resource later this year, and in the meantime, we invite any instructor interested in thinking further about how to teach the history of slavery to be in contact with the Bok Center.