When Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin delivers Harvard Divinity School’s 2022 Convocation address on September 1, she will encourage students to “take up the mantle of their predecessors who fought for equity and justice.”
Brown-Nagin chaired the Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, which issued its report and recommendations earlier this year. Harvard President Larry Bacow accepted the report's recommendations that reckon with the University's history, and the Harvard Corporation established a $100 million fund to implement them. The report documents the University’s ties to slavery—direct, financial, and intellectual—and includes stories of Black resistance and the obstacles faced by abolitionists at Harvard. One of those abolitionists was John Gorham Palfrey, the first dean of Harvard Divinity School.
HDS’s 207th Convocation will be held on September 1, at 4 pm, in the James Room of Swartz Hall. Brown-Nagin’s talk is titled, “Legacies of Slavery: Bondage and Resistance.” The full event program can be found online, and members of the Harvard community are invited to attend.
Below, Brown-Nagin, who is also the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history at Harvard University, discusses some of the findings of the report, including stories of Black resistance, challenges faced by abolitionists on Harvard’s campus, and parallels with current social justice efforts.
HDS: John Gorham Palfrey was an alumnus, a faculty member, an overseer, and the first dean of the Divinity School (1830-39). In the report, he is described as one in a “small but vocal group of Harvard affiliates [who] pressed the abolitionist cause.” Can you tell us a bit more about what the committee discovered about him?
Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Some of this was already known, of course, but the example of Palfrey stands out both as evidence of the presence of devoted abolitionists at Harvard, and the ways in which the University at the time actually sought to moderate or silence abolitionist voices. Initially, Palfrey was reluctant to share his views publicly, but he eventually became more vocal, and it was this shift that complicated his relationship with Harvard throughout his career.
Several years into his tenure as dean, he had a run-in with then-president Josiah Quincy over a student-organized discussion on abolition. Palfrey held firm, allowing the event to continue as scheduled, but the incident led to a resolution by the Harvard Corporation that forbid anyone other than University faculty or staff from teaching, lecturing, or preaching at any of Harvard’s schools or associated societies without permission—essentially an effort to suppress open conversations about abolition or other topics that could be disruptive.
Palfrey resigned shortly thereafter and entered politics. Years after he left the University, Palfrey joined the abolitionist Free Soil Party, which prompted Harvard’s newly elected president—Jared Sparks, a friend of Palfrey—to ask him to moderate his public activities for the University’s sake. Palfrey refused, and it likely cost him two jobs for which he was later considered: a faculty appointment and the position of treasurer.
Most important for me, however, Palfrey serves as an example of the tradition of resistance that runs through Harvard’s history. And as our community undertakes the hard work of reckoning with the University’s ties to slavery, we can also look back on those who stood up for justice in their time as inspirations and guides.
HDS: Unfortunately, as outlined in the report, Palfrey was the exception to the rule at the time. What challenges did he and other abolitionists face on campus and here in Massachusetts?
TBN: In the decades before the Civil War, slavery was a heated national debate, and this was true at Harvard as well. Defenders of slavery, strident abolitionists, and a wide range of moderates were present at Harvard. The University was very concerned with its national stature at the time, and the way that played out in many cases was in efforts to tamp down abolitionist activity on campus.
Palfrey’s experience is one example, but there were others. For example, in the 1830s, abolitionist faculty members Charles Follen and Henry Ware, Jr. participated in the Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society. Their involvement was fraught: Ware, a faculty member at the Divinity School, eventually resigned from the abolitionist organization on the advice of colleagues and friends; and Follen, a professor of German, resigned from Harvard rather than accept a demotion to part-time instruction, which he believed was the result of his anti-slavery activities.
By the 1850s, events like the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act galvanized abolitionism in the North, creating greater dissonance between Harvard and public opinion in the region as the nation drew closer to civil war. By the time the war began in 1861, Harvard officially supported the Union and had awarded prominent abolitionists honorary degrees.
HDS: The report outlines the University’s and HDS’s connections to slavery and its legacy here. But it also highlights several stories of Black resistance in the face of oppression that continued well into the twentieth century. Can you talk about the importance of including those stories in the report?
TBN: Telling these stories is a crucial part of our work, both because they are part of our history and because they can guide us as we move forward. Indeed, there is a risk in surfacing the truth about Harvard’s ties to slavery that we focus only on how enslaved people were systematically subjugated. So, although the report documents the painful aspects of Harvard’s history, the committee believed it was critical to highlight the people whose resistance and resilience are also part of Harvard’s legacy. As a legal historian of the civil rights movement and someone whose work has highlighted Black agency, I was particularly committed to including examples of figures who struggled against racial oppression. These stories of Black resistance and excellence cannot be overlooked.
HDS: Where do you see parallels between these stories and current social justice efforts? How do we continue to build on the legacies of these individuals as well as on the progress made during the civil and equal rights movements?
TBN: There are many lessons to be learned from these stories, and part of what I hope to do in my convocation remarks is to encourage this generation of students to take up the mantle of their predecessors who fought for equity and justice. It is clear that profound inequities and injustices persist today, and a key lesson of these stories is that through inquiry and active engagement, we can make progress despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Commitment to justice alone, however, is not enough. I want to emphasize that this work requires civil exchange across difference: different identities, different backgrounds, different beliefs and approaches. I believe that as we seek to live up to our highest ideals, we must engage with one another even—and perhaps especially—when we disagree.
HDS: This academic year, the HDS community will reflect on the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report through the School’s annual common read program. What advice do you have for members of the HDS community—or anyone else—as they closely read and engage with this report? What is one thing you hope they take away from this report?
TBN: The history documented in the report is deeply troubling. But as I have often said over the course of this work: we cannot dismantle what we do not understand, and we can’t understand contemporary injustice unless we reckon honestly with our history, even when it’s painful. I hope that people take away from the report the complexity of our past and recognize that the report is just the beginning of our work. The process of reckoning with our history and achieving meaningful repair is a project that will unfold over years and decades. I invite everyone to engage in this ongoing, critical work.
—by Michael Naughton