Harvard Community

As Schools and units across the University join us in embodying our mission, we are excited to highlight the good work taking place as we build towards a reparative future. We invite members of the Harvard community and beyond to see how mending harms is actively being embedded into numerous facets of the University.

Multiple Harvard faculty, staff, and alumni have incorporated portions of the Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery or the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Film into their courses and areas of work, which is leveraging the University’s excellence in education and expanding knowledge about this important work.

Faculty Spotlight

Meira Levinson

Meira Levinson, the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, developed normative case studies for the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative. These normative case studies can be used to initiate open conversations about challenging issues related to confronting the history and legacy of slavery in higher education and beyond.

Learn more about normative case studies

Staff Spotlight

Andrea Jackson Gavin

Andrea Jackson Gavin is the inaugural program director of the HBCU Digital Library Trust. Funded by the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, the Trust collaborates with HBCUs, the HBCU Library Alliance, Harvard Library, and the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library to sustain and deepen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of Black history collections held by HBCU libraries and archives.

Alumni Spotlight

Earl Phalen, J.D. ’93

Earl Phalen, J.D. ‘93, is the CEO and founder of Phalen Leadership Academies, a network of more than 20 schools with almost 10,000 students throughout the country that focuses on providing access to quality education to underserved communities.

As a grantee of the inaugural Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative Reparative Grant Program, Phalen Leadership Academies partnered with Fernando Reimers, Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and received funds for “equipping individuals with the skills and opportunities needed to secure good-paying, sustainable jobs that transform lives and strengthen communities.”

Transforming Harvard

We are gratified that units and Schools across the University have embraced the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, unlocking enormous creativity and embodying our values as we continue to move the work forward. This is playing out through a wide variety of activities, such as community discussions, new lectures or lecture series, new curricular offerings, and much more. Below are just a few examples of the many additional efforts underway across the University.

Harvard Divinity School

Harvard Divinity School chose the Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery as its 2022-2023 Common Read book and engaged in a year-long, HDS community-wide conversation, and offered a public conversation series on Religion and the Legacies of Slavery. In 2024, HDS launched “Harvard Divinity School & Legacies of Slavery & Resistance: A Site for Reckoning, Healing, & Repair through Love,” an exhibit in the HDS Library that highlights the School’s entanglements with slavery drawing from the Report.

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is advancing the understanding of the legacy of slavery through the creation of meaningful programs and initiatives. Examples include the Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture and Academic Symposium and a commemorative installation that will pay tribute to Belinda Sutton and other enslaved people whose labor generated the wealth that contributed to Isaac Royall, Jr.’s bequest in 1781 to Harvard University. The donation funded Harvard’s first professorship in law, which was eventually transferred to, and helped contribute to the development of, the fledgling law school in 1817. As part of an effort to strengthen collaboration on future research and educational programming, the Law School is also providing $500,000 in financial support to the Royall House and Slave Quarters Museum in Medford, Massachusetts.

Harvard University Information Technology

Harvard University Information Technology and the Minority Serving–Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) launched a pilot collaboration in 2024, called the Technology Enablement Initiative. This is a six-month program for IT professionals at HBCUs who have a focus on knowledge exchange. The program aims to develop peer mentorship opportunities among Harvard, I2, and HBCU institutions. Participants have the opportunity to take IT Academy courses (a Harvard-developed professional development program for Harvard IT professionals) at no cost, join facilitated conversations to ideate and share knowledge, and engage in exchange visits to participating cohort campuses.

Interested in your work being spotlighted on our website? Email legacyofslavery@harvard.edu.