On April 24, drumbeats echoed through Swartz Hall. The rhythm acted as a current flowing through staircases, between common areas, and into the James Room, where the School’s Racial Justice and Healing (RJH) Committee welcomed staff, faculty, students, and alumni to the closing circle celebration of the Common Read program at Harvard Divinity School. More than 100 community members gathered to reflect on a year-long journey with The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard Report engaging with and absorbing the text through a restorative justice approach while examining the report’s recommendations and discerning how to help the University implement and expand upon the recommendations.
Now in its third year, the Common Read is a community-wide, year-long series of engagements around a single text to reorient the School community around its shared HDS values and commitments—respect, dignity, mutual understanding, and trust. The program is designed to help the School advance its vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS and of a world healed of racism and oppression.
As Melissa Wood Bartholomew, MDiv ’15, and Steph Gauchel (HDS’s associate and assistant deans for diversity, inclusion, and belonging) regularly highlight, restorative justice is a holistic approach to institutional change that requires attention to the relationship between personal and systemic transformation. The closing session paralleled conversations over the past year both in sentiment and structure with small group dialogue and analysis of the recommendations outlined in the report, and a close examination of personal, professional, and institutional commitments of truth-telling and accountability, grieving and healing, and redress and repair based on the report’s findings.
The Common Read is just one of the many ways HDS has engaged with the report since it was released a year ago. Learn more about the closing Common Read session in this photo essay as the HDS community continues the work of creating a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School in furtherance of a world healed of racism and oppression.
Beloved Community
As the drums quieted, Bartholomew and Gauchel welcomed the crowd.
This closing celebration marked the ninth restorative circle session the community held this academic year to discuss the report. The series included large and small group circles along with affinity group circles. As Bartholomew explained, HDS approaches this text in its own way:
“All of these circles were efforts to respond to our call as a divinity school to engage this text in a holistic way and address the spiritual, psychological, and moral implications of slavery. These spaces are helping us to create the conditions where we can break our soul ties to slavery. This includes understanding the power of religion and its impact on the global dehumanization of Black people and marginalized people, recognizing that the fallout from slavery doesn’t just impact institutions and systems, but every human heart and being on the planet.”
Practicing what they preach, Bartholomew and Gauchel began the event with a grounding exercise meant to center each participant and create a foundation of trust. Gauchel shared community values for the School’s restorative justice approach, which remind participants of touchstones, such as “stories stay, lessons go” (a touchtone borrowed from educator Parker Palmer that is a gentle way to establish a space where personal details can be offered by individuals that stay in confidence, while also encouraging teachable moments). Bartholomew then read Lucille Clifton’s “atlantic is a sea of bones” as a poetic meditation reflecting both the pain the legacy of slavery has caused and the power of healing—healing that comes in waves.
Music, metaphors, meditations—this emphasis on beloved community and the evocation of emotion demonstrates the thoughtful leadership Bartholomew and Gauchel bring to Harvard. Facing a report that lays bare the University’s history of violence with the slave economy and the perpetuation of white supremacy culture (particularly through debunked race science) demands “head and heart” work. What Bartholomew and Gauchel show —in theory and in practice—is how to center connection and embodied experiences to serve as antidotes to systems of oppression, and how to incorporate the practice of joy in the work of reckoning and healing. This gathering was designed to be a celebration of a year of grappling with a hard, emotionally challenging text.
Transformative and Reparative Work
After a guided meditation for personal reflection and check-ins across tables for community connections, Gauchel welcomed leaders from across the School to the stage. Each panel, representing students, staff, and faculty, offered remarks about supporting the vision of a restorative anti-racist, anti-oppressive School and of a world healed of racism and oppression. Illustrating how different scales are necessary for sustained, continued work toward progress, these leaders shared goals and actions on individual, team, and School-wide levels to bolster larger efforts across Harvard.
Pictured above with Bernadette Emmons Holder, executive assistant to the dean and representative on the University-wide Legacy of Slavery committee, Professor Tracey E. Hucks, AM ’95, PhD ’98, addressed both the pain and the potential enmeshed in Harvard’s Report on the Legacy of Slavery.
“The report disrupted a mythic Harvard—the Harvard often surrounded by language of the best—the best in the nation, the best in the world, the best university—and the report showed that we were not always at our best,” Hucks shared with the community. “In revealing this history, I believe that Harvard has intentionally shown the world the worst of its past, so that we may truly embark on the best of our future.”
Acknowledging the gravity of this work, Hucks continued: “We have only just begun to do this transformative, reparative, and healing work on Harvard’s campus.”
Healing at the Root
Storytelling and the sharing of personal narratives are at the center of creating spaces of genuine connection—and that’s where the work of building a restorative, anti-racist and anti-oppressive community begins. Over lunch, Common Read participants reviewed the University-wide recommendations and set intentions for further action at both the personal and institutional levels. They shared stories about their own engagement with the text and reported back to those gathered in the James Room.
Connected to this, participants engaged in a vision tree building ritual. Organizers set up a fabricated tree, with material draped at the bottom and covered in colorful patches that named community values, symbolizing that the community’s values are at the root of this work. Members of the community wrote their personal intentions or actions on paper leaves and placed them on the tree branches, which will serve as an anchor and guide for the community’s continued work.
Emma Thomas, MDiv ‘24, led the exercise, prompting participants to remember that trees are connected by a system of complicated networks and can act as a model for how to repair our broken systems and a reminder that healing must begin at the root of systemic oppression.
“Trees have so much to teach us in the work of sustainably healing long-term,” she says. “They are truly distributive beings—they take from places where resources are swollen and move them to places where they are needed.”
Part of a Larger Whole
As the University continues to reckon with the Legacy of Slavery Report, 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 recommendations of the report. She joined HDS for its closing celebration and shared remarks following the community’s discussion of the report’s recommendations. Her office’s approach, she says, focuses on humility and meeting people where they are, wherever they are throughout this ongoing process.
“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. You have truly done a fantastic job at making reparative efforts part of your School’s DNA, and I look forward to seeing what you do next,” Bleich said after reflecting on the themes witnessed during the day’s events.
“We have your back,” Bartholomew responded on behalf of the entire room. “We are one small microcosm of a larger whole and you have the hard job of uniting us all. Please see us as a partner in this ongoing work.”
Leadership Dedicated to Justice and Healing
A signature moment of the event was a presentation of the inaugural Dr. Katie Cannon Award for heart-centered leadership advancing justice and healing. Named in honor of Cannon, a leader within the Womanist movement and WSRP Research Associate at HDS in Christian Social Ethics from 1983-1984, this award recognizes individuals at the School dedicated to justice and healing.
After sharing a video of Cannon's powerful address at the HDS Bicentennial Celebration, Bartholomew acknowledged David Hempton’s unwavering support and advocacy advancing justice and healing throughout his tenure as Dean, which began when she came to HDS as an MDiv student in 2012.
In a tender moment, Bartholomew surprised the Dean with the award and asked him to join her on the stage. She then offered him a water globe, thanking him for his commitment to building a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School.
Sharing a heartfelt reflection, Dean Hempton remarked: “Wherever you look, it’s a time of reckoning, and we are at a moment where these reckonings will grow in significance…. I feel hopeful—and maybe a little confident—that we are charting a better course.”
Healing to Prevent Future Harm
Jamie Johnson-Riley, interim registrar, acknowledged the significance of hearing open, honest, and vulnerable conversations take place in response to the report. A member of HDS’s Racial Justice and Healing Committee, Johnson-Riley recognizes that such conversations are not easy to have.
“We are taught, especially if you are a person of color, not to share your emotions. I believe that this stems from our history of enslavement and the suppression of our voices. Having programs like the HDS Common Read engages with the work that needs to be done to break the chains, so to speak, on the oppression that still exists in many ways, but just in a different form,” said Johnson-Riley. “There is a lot of work to be done and although we cannot change the past, we can inform and help shape the future so that it is better for generations to come.”
As Dean Bartholomew reminded the HDS community: “The work of healing from harm is also a strategy to prevent future harm. This is the work of restoration and rebirthing. This is a work of love. Deep love. It is spiritual work and must come from the place in us where love resides—through the head and heart.”
Reckoning with and attempting to heal and repair centuries of racial violence and oppression takes time. “This ends our Common Read program for this year, but our work with this report will continue," explained Bartholomew. “It is the foundational text for our ongoing work.”
Building on the water metaphor shared throughout the day, the Div School community is reckoning with our history to “chart a better course for our future,” and the Common Read program offers a shared language for building a shared consciousness to help us navigate these waters.
By: Caroline Cataldo and Amie Montemurro
With contributions from Mike Naughton
Photos: Osa Igiede and Caroline Cataldo