"Enslavement was a family matter for our founders. Virtually every Divinity School affiliate who spoke out against slavery had close family members who profited from enslavement. And many of them profited indirectly as well. . . . Part of my inspiration for telling this story through the lens of family history is the work that many Divinity School students are currently doing on ancestral healing [meaning] seeking to redress past harms and their ongoing legacies in ways that include our ancestors—both ancestors who perpetrated the harms and ancestors who suffered them.”
—Dan McKanan, “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories,” Religion and the Legacies of Slavery
On Monday, February 13, 2023, Harvard Divinity School hosted an event, featuring HDS Professor Dan McKanan, on legacies of slavery at HDS as seen through stories of the School’s founders and early students. The event was the third in a series of six public online conversations titled “Religion and the Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report.
Professor McKanan explained, “Harvard Divinity School was founded nearly forty years after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, yet many of the school’s founders and early students were intimately familiar with both enslavement and the slave trade.” Highlighting the stories of Harvard Divinity School’s first dean, John Gorham Palfrey, and his mentor William Ellery Channing, Professor McKanan illuminated how their family legacies shaped their antislavery commitments while also laying the foundation for the Divinity School endowment. He also challenged us to explore our own family histories and our accountability for reparative work in the present day.
Following the event, Morgan Curtis and Emily Chaudhari, both master of theological studies degree candidates at HDS, sat down together to talk about it.
Emily Chaudhari: Can you start by sharing a little bit about who you are and what you are studying at HDS?
Morgan Curtis: My name is Morgan Curtis, and I am in my second year of the master of theological studies program. I am studying the spiritual dimensions of reparations work required of white descendants of colonizers and enslavers. Sometimes I say I am studying whiteness as a spiritual sickness.
EC: You attended the event, “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories,” which was the third in the six-part HDS series, Religion and the Legacies of Slavery. Can you tell me a bit about the event?
MC: I was really excited to be at the event because Dan McKanan was one of my professors last semester, and we had some great conversations about this sort of work. For the event, he followed the stories of historic individuals connected to HDS, particularly two white men from the 19th century—John Gorham Palfrey and William Ellery Channing—whose families had various entanglements with the institution of slavery and slave trading. Professor McKanan worked to uncover both their financial entanglements with slavery and their familial and business relationships with one another. Then he offered some theorizing and imagining of how that influenced the positions they did or did not take on the abolition of slavery.
I believe that this sort of research and historicizing is a very important practice, and I thought Professor McKanan did it in a powerful way that centered the impact on folks of African descent that were enslaved and traded.
EC: Can you talk a little bit about how this event relates to your studies at HDS? How does it inform some of the classes you are taking this semester and some of the things you have been thinking about?
MC: Last spring I did an independent study reading and research course with Melissa Wood Bartholomew. She supported me in reflecting on the work I do out in the world, “Ancestors & Money.” Through this work I support people, mostly white inheritors of wealth, in creating plans for redistribution and return of money, land, and power to Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other communities of color.
Out of that independent study, Melissa encouraged me to offer my curriculum as a class at HDS. In fall 2022, I co-taught a student-led course with Emma Thomas, MDiv ‘24. There were 11 of us that spent the semester together doing the exact sort of work that Professor McKanan did during the event Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories,” but with our own families. I call it anti-racist genealogy. We looked through the records, histories, and file folders of our own people to understand where our lineages intersect with colonization and slavery. Then, we moved through the emotional impact of that, asking questions like, how do I let myself grieve? How do I let myself feel angry? How do I let myself move through recognizing that I have entanglements to these systems of violence within my own family? Professor McKanan calls this “moral injury,” meaning “the distress that we feel when we find ourselves entangled in actions that violate our own ethical principles even though we ourselves did not choose those actions.” Then, we looked at the current movement for reparations and Indigenous land return, its history, and how we can make personal plans for repair.
We welcomed several guest speakers including Marcus Briggs-Cloud, MTS ‘10, who came to talk about his community, the Maskoke people, returning to their ancestral homelands in Alabama. We visited the Kibilio, which is a Black land project in Western Massachusetts where they purchased the land through reparative gifts of financial resources from folks motivated by reparations. We also went on a Buddhist pilgrimage between sites of historical violence in colonial New England with the monks and nuns from the New England Peace Pagoda, and we had the privilege to be guests in ceremony with the Mashpee Wampanoag.
That class forged a strong community of students interested in doing the accountability and reckoning work of looking into our own lineages and taking responsibility for healing and repair—not just out of guilt, shame, or obligation, but out of a clear sense that our own liberation and futures are tied up in healing from the past. That was a really powerful journey. It was such a privilege to be able to bring that work into the HDS community because it’s what brought me to the Divinity School in the first place.
Now Dr. David Ragland, whom I have worked with for some time and who is a member of the Kibilio community, is teaching a class called “Reparations as a Spiritual Practice” at HDS. And last semester, Melissa Wood Bartholomew taught a class focused on the life of formerly enslaved woman Harriet Jacobs, in which we read the Legacy of Slavery report. I am infinitely grateful to the leadership of Melissa Bartholomew, who is creating such a rigorous and loving space at HDS for work around racial justice and healing. It feels auspicious to be at Harvard at this time, when the university is beginning to turn toward this huge and painful history that enabled this institution to exist. I am grateful for the Religion and the Legacies of Slavery speaker series as one part of that.
EC: You mentioned that looking into our own lineages and taking responsibility for healing and repair is work that is informed not just by guilt, shame, or obligation, but by our own liberation and future, which is tied up in healing from the past. During the event Professor McKanan spoke to this idea using the term “ancestral healing.” Can you explain that term?
MC: There are a number of different lenses to look at ancestral healing through. There are more and more scientific studies coming out that talk about intergenerational trauma and the ways in which we are impacted in our bodies and minds by what has come before us. One way to think about ancestral healing is to think about the healing we are doing now that our ancestors weren’t able to do and was passed down to us on a very literally embodied level.
A more spiritual way of thinking about ancestral healing is coming to terms with the work that our ancestors have left undone. As someone who is descended from people who caused a lot of harm, I believe that my ancestors can’t fully rest until what they did is put right. They have a stake in seeing that their legacy is not just that of racial inequality and violence, but that we arrive somewhere else. That is something that those of us living as their descendants can do to heal on their behalf.
EC: You also mentioned that the student-led class you co-taught was informed by the reparations work you do outside of HDS. What inspired you to get into reparations work?
MC: I am the daughter of American expats and was born and raised in England in an upper-middle class family with a lot of privilege and comfort. I was a little kid when I started questioning everything and feeling the pain of the world in a lot of ways.
In college I joined a fossil fuel divestment campaign through which I came to understand social movements as a way to create grassroots change. I had previously been taught that you have to go to a good school and get a good job to one day be able to impact the world. I began to learn that change has always been led from the bottom up by people who have been most impacted. After that campaign I threw myself into organizing work and the climate justice movement.
Around that same time, I learned of a bank account in my name that my father set up when I was young holding about $400,000. This was a huge shock to me, especially because it was invested in the very same corporations that I was campaigning against. That was one of my early moments of realizing that my family is very directly implicated in the crises that I see in our world.
My family is very proud of its early American history. Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is one of my ancestors. I also have Mayflower ancestors, and when I was a kid, we had oil painting portraits of ancestors on the wall. But as I found my way into the climate movement, I came to understand that the roots of the climate crisis are in white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. That is the history of my family. My history is directly implicated in so much of what people are still struggling to overcome.
Stepping into organizing, I received the message that I needed “to go organize my own people.” Initially I didn’t want to do that. I had put a lot of energy into getting away from the white, wealthy world that I was raised in, and I didn’t really want to go back. Friends and mentors of color really helped me to see that my role in any struggle for liberation is helping my people to stop hurting other people, to stop perpetuating systems of injustice. About six years ago, I turned my attention toward organizing people with wealth around redistribution, funding grassroots social movements, and learning to look through a reparations lens. We try to figure out how we can resource the organizing efforts led by Black folks, Indigenous folks, and other people of color to win reparations, land return, and progressive social policies that build a better world for all of us.
EC: During the event, Professor McKanan referred to you, saying, “several of our current students, including Morgan Curtis, for example, are national leaders in the conversation about how to make accountable reparation for inherited wealth.” What do you understand the term “accountable reparation” to mean?
MC: In my family and in many other white and/or wealthy families there exists this idea of giving back—the “we got lucky so we should share” mentality—rather than recognizing that we are upholding a fundamentally unjust system and continuing to accumulate benefits from the extraction of land and labor from other people.
We have benefited from a system that is structurally violent. Charity and philanthropy tend to approach fixing this problem by encouraging people to share. Whereas reparations approach this problem by calling for accountability for the choices that my ancestors made, that I have made.
Reparations are about returning what can be returned—money, land, stolen sacred objects—and offering compensation for all that can’t be returned—the lives, languages, and cultures that have been lost to colonization, slavery, and other manifestations of white supremacy. Formerly enslaved Black folks have called for reparations for hundreds of years. Indigenous people have called for a return of sovereignty over land for as long as there’s been colonization. I see my work organizing white people as a call to actually listen to what is being asked for rather than doing the thing that we think is best. We need to fundamentally restructure who holds money and power in society and unless we do that with a framework of repair that acknowledges the harms of the past, we won’t be able to move forward into a more equitable future. Being accountable means beginning at a place where we listen to what’s being asked for by communities of color.
EC: During the event, Melissa Bartholomew asked Professor McKanan how he goes about discussing legacies of slavery and the need for reparations with family and friends. How do you go about such discussions in your own life?
MC: It’s been a long journey. The early stages of my racial awareness looked like huge amounts of guilt, shame, self-loathing, and paralysis. It was all too easy to project that onto my family, friends, and community. I was really angry, and my poor dad was the center of that phase of my journey. What I have learned since then is that the opportunity to participate in repair and racial healing is actually one of the most life-giving, meaningful, empowering, important pieces of my life and what it means to me to be human. I can do this work out of a place of excitement. I love being part of movements that are taking accountability and responsibility. Learning how to participate in accountable reparations has become much more about standing in truth and openness about my story. I am happy to share with anyone who wants to listen, and I welcome anyone into this work who feels moved to be part of it. People get drawn in out of a sense of wanting to do the work rather than feeling like they are supposed to or are being forced or shamed into it.
EC: Why is it important for Harvard Divinity students to learn about legacies of slavery at HDS? What do the stories Professor McKanan shared teach us?
MC: My hope is that people who came to the event will feel encouraged to turn toward their own personal histories and to understand the importance of the institutional history that we are all a part of. It is very hard to move forward when we don’t know where we have been.
This is true on a Harvard level, where the institution is recognizing that if they don’t name and face this history, we are not going to be able to become the institution we need to be. It’s also true on a community level. For my fellow white students, there is often a cultural amnesia about who our families have been, or what we have done, or how we came to be in the positions that we are in. It is immensely powerful to peel back the layers and look beneath the surface to discover things like,
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We live in a particular neighborhood because it was redlined here.
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My grandfather went to college because he was able to access education through the GI Bill when Black veterans were not.
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My family has been in a particular place for generations, and when our ancestors arrived a war against Native people on that land had just been fought.
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My great-great-grandfather was able to get a loan to start a business that still supports our family today in a time when Black folks had no access to capital.
There are infinite examples like these. There is something powerful about recognizing that this history is ours and that it is still with us and impacting our lives today.
EC: How can people start to learn about their family history?
MC: I always tell people to ask around to see if someone in their family is already tracking or interested in tracking their ancestry. Otherwise, the first step is to contact the oldest people that are still alive that may know things about the family. Even if they aren’t into ancestry, you can learn a lot from interviewing a person about their connection with the family, or a relative about their childhood. Questions about where they lived, what their parents did for work, what their grandparents did for work, what stories they heard about how they ended up living in a particular place, etc. Always start with family members because they won’t always be around. In so many families this stuff isn’t talked about, so it is often surprising how much can be learned when you just ask a few simple questions.
The second step is to see if there are any records lying around like an old book of family stories, a family tree, or a memoir from a great-grandparent. Make sure those records don’t get lost.
The third step is to check resources on the internet through Ancestry.com, historical societies, and libraries.
EC: During the Q&A portion of the event, an audience member asked Professor McKanan what actions he recommends for addressing the legacy of slavery at Harvard. Professor McKanan called on Harvard to transition control of the University’s endowment to a new structure that would be both reparative and democratic. What recommendations would you give to the Harvard community?
MC: Anne Symens-Bucher, who is both my mentor and the founder of the intentional community Canticle Farm where I live, always says that when you hear yourself say “I can’t do this”—like “I can’t solve racial injustice” or “I can’t turn around the culture of racism in my family”—you must always put “alone” on the end of that sentence.
It is true that we can’t do anything alone. We have to find other people who have the same longings we have, who are dreaming in a similar direction as we are. That could mean organizing some friends to do a study group about a book. It could mean joining the local chapter of an organization that already exists like Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), or Resource Generation, which is a multiracial organization for people with class privilege that are interested in redistribution. The important thing is to get to a place where you are asking questions in community because we have so much more power when we are together. That includes both gathering with people of shared identity and shared privileges and showing up in solidarity with movements that are being led by the people most impacted. For example, I have been connected to a campaign called “Free Renty,” which is asking Harvard University to return the daguerreotypes of enslaved people from the Peabody Museum to the descendants of those people.
This work requires getting involved in active campaigns aligned with your values and showing up even if you don’t know what you have to offer. It all starts with community building, personal introspection, learning about history, and showing up in solidarity with movements that are already making progress.
—by Emily Chaudhari, MTS ‘23, RPL Graduate Assistant
Visit the “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories” transcript to watch the third session of the Religion and the Legacies of Slavery series with Dan McKanan.
Learn more about Morgan and her work at Morganhcurtis.com. You can also find Morgan’s prayer book about her ancestral healing journey, Decolonial Dames of America at The Constellation Project.