Throughout the 2022–23 academic year, the Religion and Public Life (RPL) program and the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) engaged with HDS faculty to reckon with the roles of religion in slavery and its painful legacy. This work examined intersections with Harvard’s report on the legacy of slavery—culminating in a series of public conversations held throughout the spring semester.
In April 2022, the University released a report documenting Harvard’s ties to slavery—explicit, financial, and intellectual. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard publication offers recommendations to guide initial steps toward the work of reckoning and repair, including a commitment of $100 million to redress harm to descendant communities in the United States and in the Caribbean.
Beginning in the fall, the DIB team selected the report as the School’s Common Read, a community-wide, year-long program focused on a single text to reorient the HDS community around shared values and commitments: respect, dignity, mutual understanding, and trust. Led by Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Melissa Wood Bartholomew, MDiv ’15, and Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Steph Gauchel, the Common Read is designed to help the School advance its vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS and Harvard. This work is in service of a world healed of racism and oppression.
The start of the 2022–23 Common Read Program aligned with the 207th HDS Convocation. The event featured Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, of the Radcliffe Institute, who shared teachings from the report, including finding ways to advance a shared vision for a just world. As the semester progressed, community circles led by the DIB team brought depth, humanity, and witness to what Bartholomew calls the “hard and heart-centered” work of grappling with the text.
Moved and motivated by these conversations, HDS faculty, staff, and students were inspired to use their expertise to deepen the understanding of the complex histories and legacies of slavery to support the University in implementing and expanding upon its recommendations. One of those faculty members was Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life Diane L. Moore, MDiv ’84, who imagined a series that would lift up the work already happening at HDS by bringing together RPL frameworks, DIB’s Common Read, and faculty research in a way that would both educate and ignite the moral imagination of the public.
Through reflective conversations with HDS faculty, the Religion and the Legacies of Slavery series set out to grapple with the roles of religion in the long history of enslavement, consider the ways that the exploration of family histories can inform reparative work in the present day, and take account of religion and ethics in addressing and redressing the legacy of enslavement at Harvard and beyond.
As the University continues to reckon with the report on slavery, Schools and units across Harvard are united under the leadership of Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects, who is guiding Harvard through implementing the report’s recommendations.
“We don’t have a guidebook for exactly how we need to reckon with Harvard’s legacies of slavery, but what is clear is that the work of repair begins with having the difficult but necessary conversations,” says Bleich. “The Divinity School has done an excellent job leaning into the implementation work called for by the report and stands out as an example to the rest of the University.”
A Shared Vision of a Just World at Peace
The spring 2023 series is one model for the type of programming RPL seeks to create—programming that enhances public understanding of how religious literacy can help build a just world at peace.
“Religion has always functioned to promote the full range of human agency from heinous crimes against humanity, such as slavery, to nearly unfathomable acts of courage, compassion, and moral imagination, such as enacting reparations for stolen lands and labor.” Moore explains. “By understanding this power, we hope to give audience members tools to confront the harmful impacts of religion and to enhance the generative capacities in their own lives and contexts, whether they identify as religious or not.”
“These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms, as the news on any given day, in any given hour devastatingly and consistently reveals.” Moore says. “We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex power of religion relevant to historical and contemporary manifestations of racism and white supremacy, this knowledge will enhance our commitments to reparative action and racial justice and healing in our own times and in our own contexts. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of a just world at peace, healed of racism and oppression.”
HDS is already developing additional programming for Spring 2024 to examine pressing, interdisciplinary issues related to religion and spirituality, such as addressing climate change and supporting ethical leadership in fields ranging from medicine to the media. Advancing future programming requires ongoing attention, support, and other resources. The School aims to collaborate across the University, as well as with alumni and friends interested in cultivating resources for the study of religion in service of a just world at peace.
Religion and the Legacies of Slavery Series Overview
Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity
Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity
Description: Although the U.S. is a multireligious society in which an increasing number of people check “none” to the question of religious affiliation, historically the Bible has exerted an enormous influence in many domains of American life, and arguably it continues to do so. It is important, therefore, to ask what it means that Christianity was formed, and its sacred scriptures were written, in the ancient Mediterranean world where enslavement was ubiquitous. The presence of enslaved persons and ideologies of enslavement permeate Christian stories and teachings, which themselves express a wide variety of attitudes, aims, and assumptions involving complex relations with different groups in different ways. Examining these may sharpen our capacity to take account of religion in addressing and redressing the legacy of enslavement at Harvard and beyond.
Key Quote from King: “The Bible does not have a single coherent or consistent message about enslavement. But its materials have been interpreted and lived out in many ways, and that has several consequences....People who have used it to justify slavery, or were themselves enslavers, or who still use it to justify dehumanizing treatment of any person or group on whatever basis are accountable for the harm that’s done. It’s important to note that this Bible doesn’t tell a single story....The Bible has been used also to nurture a theology of a God who shares in pain and suffering, who requires justice and kindness, and who opposes enslavement and its legacies. So, it matters what stories are told. It matters that they are diverse, that they are complex, and that they are true. We have a responsibility to understand and to dig in deeply to the complexity of this literature that was written in a context of a society of enslavement.”
Religion, Race, and the Double Helix of White Supremacy
David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History
Kathryn Gin Lum, Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Stanford University
Description: It has long been a historical truism that, in the early modern West, pseudoscientific racial hierarchies replaced religious hierarchies as the dominant framework for understanding human difference and justifying oppressive colonialist practices, including slavery. Recent research has challenged this axiom to suggest how important religious conceptions of difference remained to the racist imagination into the modern period—and, indeed, into our present day. The convergence of racialist and religious orderings of humanity converged in American institutions like Harvard University, persisting in ways with which we have not sufficiently reckoned.
Key Quote from Holland: “As a historian, I’ve long believed, and I’m far from alone in this, within the discipline of history and well beyond, that the denaturalizing of assumption is not paralyzing. It is in fact empowering....because when we assume the world that we’ve inherited somehow had to be as it is without recognizing that it’s the product of choices, it’s one option among a number of contingencies. When we recognize that there were paths not taken and there were choices that result in the things that we’ve inherited, it reminds us that we have an opportunity to shift the arc of history as well.”
Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories
Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity
Description: Harvard Divinity School was founded nearly 40 years after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, yet many of our school’s founders and early students were intimately familiar with both enslavement and the slave trade. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard highlights the case of our first dean, John Gorham Palfrey, who was abandoned as a child in Boston when his father moved to Louisiana to establish a plantation. Palfrey’s mentor William Ellery Channing, who was the intellectual founder of the Divinity School, was the great-grandson of a slave trader and in his own childhood was cared for by a formerly enslaved woman, Duchess Quamino. Channing was also related by marriage to the Perkins and Higginson families, who had derived vast fortunes from trade in slaves and slave-produced goods. These family legacies shaped the antislavery commitments of people like Channing and Palfrey, while the associated fortunes laid the foundation for the Divinity School. In this session, we consider whether the exploration of family histories can inform reparative work in the present day.
Key Quote from McKanan: “One of the most basic things that religious traditions do is orient our relationships between people who are living now and people who’ve lived in the past. A deeper understanding of the ways that we relate to our ancestors can provide all of us with better tools for thinking ethically about accountabilities to ancestors who suffered profoundly and ancestors who perpetrated atrocities.”
Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations
Terrence L. Johnson, Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies
Description: The 1619 Project spawned an unprecedented national conversation in and outside the classroom on slavery’s ongoing afterlives in American society. The enthusiastic response to the project was not universal. A few historians noted in a letter to The New York Times that the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding of ideology.” The challenge raised here underscores central ethical concerns at the center of American national identity: who is responsible for slavery? What role does religion play in addressing the lingering “afterlives” of African enslavement in the United States? Do African and African American scholars play a unique role in public debates and scholarship on slavery? Terrence Johnson examines how the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison establish a framework for exploring the role of religion and ethics in grappling with the memory and history of African enslavement.
Key Quote from Johnson: “The fact that we have been debating, engaging, trying to make sense of the harm that’s been done to these human beings, that to me sets the very stage for the viability of reparations. Often people have said, look, there’s no political currency in this conversation. And yet I want it to show there actually is currency because we have a road map.”
Slavers and Slavery: A Dialogue with Descendants
Tracey E. Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Dain and Constance Perry, Racial Justice Advocates and Contributors to Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Description: Slavery is most readily associated with the U.S. American South with the geographies of the North often eclipsed. Tracey Hucks led a discussion on slavery and the slave trade that focuses on New England and the DeWolf family of Rhode Island. The DeWolf family was understood as the largest slave-trading family in the United States and Dain Perry, a direct descendant, will be featured in this webinar. The event also highlights the reparative and healing workshops co-facilitated by Dain and his wife, Constance Perry, conducted throughout the U.S. at religious, social, and educational institutions. Participants interested in this webinar might also want to view the documentary Traces of the Trade, which follows DeWolf family descendants on a historical journey from New England to West Africa and on to the Caribbean.
Key Quote from Hucks: “One of the things that Dain Perry said in our conversation was: there’s an umbilical cord that extends from slavery and that violence to the violence that we see today. And if we cannot reimagine, if I cannot reimagine it for my students, and for the communities that I feel accountable to, and to the ancestors that I’m accountable to, then we will be in a very desperate moment. When I’m in the classroom, it’s not a moment that’s disconnected, and I’m teaching the historical violence. It’s not disconnected from the contemporary violence that one is experiencing and that we’re experiencing in our society. And how do you join those two together when we’re trying to train not just scholars but leaders to be a part of that, that very messy, violent, complex world?”
Concluding Faculty Discussion
Reflecting on Religion and the Legacies of Slavery
The concluding session features all of the faculty presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, the discussion focused on the overarching questions that framed the initial collaboration: What does the academic study of religion teach us about the complex histories and legacies of slavery? How can a deeper understanding of the roles of religion enhance our commitment to reparative action in our contemporary times?
In the words of Interim Dean of Harvard Divinity School David Holland: “When we think about our financial obligations and the economic dependence that our School had on these systems of slavery, we can think about ways to put our current resources to use in addressing the very issues that this series has raised, including support for students that are working on these issues, as well as resources that might empower faculty to do their own curricular review and transformation.”
Visit Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations to watch the recorded discussions.
—by Suzannah Lutz, ALM ’21, and Natalie Cherie Campbell, MTS ’18 (with contributions from the DIB team)