With initiatives like a new financial aid program, Harvard often start trends that ripple through higher education. But when it comes to investigating its institutional history, the University might do well to take a cue from its peers.

Like many venerable American universities, Harvard’s past is tied to slavery: for decades, if not centuries, the University inculcated pro-slavery sentiment and benefitted from funds that were the fruits of the slave trade or slave labor. But unlike many of its peers—such as Brown and Yale—Harvard has never conducted a formal examination of its past.

And though the University has no plans to launch such an investigation, many feel the time is right for Harvard to do so, given that University President Drew G. Faust—a leading Civil War historian and a self-professed “civil-rights advocate and activist”—is at the helm.

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Florida joins five other states — Alabama, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and New Jersey — that have apologized for slavery.
TALLAHASSEE — In a watershed moment in Florida's race relations, a solemn state Legislature on Wednesday apologized for the Florida's long history of slavery, expressing "profound regret for the shameful chapter in this state's history."

Described as a bid for "reconciliation and healing," the House this afternoon passed a resolution apologizing for state slavery laws dating back to 1822 – decades became Florida even became a state – that "perpetuated African slavery in one of its most brutal and dehumanizing forms."

Earlier, the Senate passed the same resolution with Gov. Charlie Crist looking on.

Legislators in both chambers sat in silence as historian John Phelps, a former House clerk, read a summary of state laws from the 19th Century that denied even basic freedoms to slaves.

Slaves could be subject to 39 lashes of a whip, administered to a bare back, for raising a hand or addressing a white person with language deemed to be abusive or offensive. For crimes as common as robbery, slaves could have their ears nailed to wooden posts for an hour or even be sentenced to death.

By 1860, at the onset of the Civil War and more than 50 years after slavery was outlawed in federal law, some 44 percent of Florida's 140,000 residents were slaves.

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The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the IllinoisTimes, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.

It's not as though the president is the only politician whose family owned slaves. Of the first eighteen presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses Grant, twelve owned people, eight of them while in office. At one time, Andrew Jackson was even a slave trader. Since Emancipation in 1865, a number of presidents have come from families that once contained slave masters.

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LAST SPRING, Yale finally banished a painting of its 17th Century namesake, Elihu Yale, because it depicted him with a dark-skinned servant who wears a shiny metal collar and kneels before him. The overtones had made the portrait toxic in the 1990s, but for 10 years, Yale resisted sporadic demands to remove it from its corporation room, where trustees meet.

Yale was also getting peppered for having dormitory names - Yale calls them "residential colleges"- honoring slave-owning alumni, John Calhoun, the South's famed orator, for one. The agitation stemmed largely from an unofficial history of Yale slavery ties, written by a trio of Yale graduate students in 2001. It had made Yale - rather than the more likely Brown - the North's restive campus in the long drive for reparations for African-Americans.

Yale's president, Richard Levin, felt the North's slavery involvements were "simply a fact of history" in an American past full of embarrassments, and supporters of keeping the names of the residential colleges included key black alumni: Henry Louis Gates Jr., the writer and Harvard's Africana head, who had lived at Calhoun, and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, then head of the Yale Corporation and now law-school dean at Howard University.

Yale kept the tarnished names, and declined to launch its own official search for whatever entanglements exist.

Brown's entanglement was more provocative - its namesake Browns owned slave ships and slaves - yet its campus remained free of agitation, except once and then in reverse order. David Horowitz, a West Coast conservative gadfly, bought an ad in the Brown Daily Herald in March 2001 citing 10 reasons to oppose reparations. A minority coalition, furious when BDH editors declined to apologize or make amends, then confiscated a BDH press run, intensifying the turmoil. The issues of free speech and minority grievances triggered wide national debate.

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It took more than 100 years to bring the race riot of 1898 into the light. Now, the past seems, once again, to be fading.

A package of laws intended to correct the century-old damage, caused by a white supremacist plot to drive blacks from power in Wilmington, has been all but ignored. And the movement's legislative champion, Rep. Thomas Wright, is embroiled in scandal.

"We agonized over this whole process," said Kenny Davis, a member of a commission that spent six years studying the riot. "We came up with recommendations that would improve the quality of life, not only for African Americans, but for everybody in the community. And now they're not being pursued."

Wright, an eight-term legislator from Wilmington, filed 10 bills on the issue when the legislative session started. All but one have failed even to come up for discussion. The remaining bill -- a simple acknowledgment that the incident occurred -- passed the House but faces uncertainty in the Senate.

Some commission members, who worked to uncover what had been one of the state's least-known and darkest episodes, say they are concerned that Wright is no longer effective and that their work may not result in the change they had hoped for.

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Hidden below the modern skyscrapers lay the ruins of Philadelphia’s history—the foundation of a city, and a nation, built and maintained by the labor of enslaved Africans. An excavation near the cracked Liberty Bell is laying bare the history of the first “White House,” where George Washington resided in the 1790s and kept nine enslaved Africans: Oney Judge, Moll, Austin, Hercules, Giles, Paris, Richmond, Christopher Sheels and Joe. It is also providing strong evidence to support the movement for reparations.

The excavation was planned to clear the site in order to lay the foundations for a memorial pavilion to the presidential house and its occupants, including the enslaved Africans. Intended to be completed in time for Philadelphia’s upcoming annual July 4 extravaganza, reaction to the dig may result in a change of plans as many people echo comments of an African-American visitor who murmured, “They should leave this. The truth is finally there to see.”

The first weekend the archaeological dig opened in mid-May, it drew over 1,000 visitors, stunning Park Service officials. A steady stream of visitors gathered on a small elevated viewing platform for the opportunity to see the building outlines and hear archaeologists explain what they were seeing. The tone was almost solemn, the discussions serious about just what role slavery played in the founding of the U.S.

The floor of the kitchen where Washington’s enslaved African chef Hercules toiled is visible. The dig has uncovered new evidence that the kitchen had a cellar and that an underground passageway connected it to the main house.

The outline of a curving neoclassical window that would inspire the current White House Blue Room and Oval Office lies close to the viewing platform. The “important” visitors Washington received in front of this window, however, could not look out onto the quarters of the enslaved Africans. Archaeologists have uncovered the foundation of a wall they believe was built to hide the slaves from public view. Washington was violating a Pennsylvania law that entitled enslaved Africans to freedom after a six-month residency.

One of Philadelphia’s premier tourist attractions, Independence Hall, is visible behind the dig. Other enslaved Africans, who were never compensated for their labor, built Independence Hall.

That Washington and other early U.S. presidents kept slaves in Virginia has never been denied. But when it was discovered about 30 years ago that he also kept enslaved Africans in Philadelphia, the National Park Service buried the discovery. To keep slaves in a free state, Washington exploited a loophole, by periodically swapping his Philadelphia slaves with some of the 316 he kept in Virginia. When some managed to escape, Washington relentlessly hunted them down. [MORE]

Four of the remaining 70 or so survivors of mob violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31-June 1, 1921 have nightmarish memories:

 Annie Beaird was seven years old. She was wakened by shotgun blasts all around her family’s house. — Kenny Booker was a teenager. He remembers leading his sister through the house in horror as he learned every home on the street was in flames. “Is the world on fire?” his sister asked. “I don’t know,” Booker responded, “but we’re in a heck of a lot of trouble here, baby.” — Beulah Smith, then 14, escaped slaughter by hiding in the family hog pen as truckloads of white men shot black people on sight.

 George Monroe was five years old at the time: “They came in the house with torches, and my mother hid us four wee children under the bed. They set the curtains on fire and, as one guy was leaving, he stepped on my fingers. My little sister slapped her hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming out. That’s what I remember most, my little sister’s hand slapped over my mouth.” The roller rink his father owned was one of the many black-owned businesses destroyed by the mob.

 These survivors were among the lucky. Three hundred others were left dead and their 36-block neighborhood left in smoldering ruins. On the night of May 31, 1921, hatred, fueled perhaps by envy of the perceived economic prosperity of blacks, was unleashed by an armed mob that had gathered at the jailhouse for a lynching. A 19-year-old black man, a shoeshiner named Dick Rowland, had been wrongly accused of trying to rape a 17-year-old white woman, Sarah Page, an elevator operator in a downtown building, the day before. The woman never pressed charges.

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I want to suggest that we recast the immigration debate, by asking ourselves the following question: what is the price that one country must pay for destroying another country? I know this is not a simple question but it is actually central to the current discussions on immigration and it is something that few people want to actually address.

The facts are these. There are approximately 150 million people who are globally considered migrants. The lion's share of them originates in the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean), which were the targets of Western colonialism beginning in the 15th century. To this, of course, should be added the African slave trade and its impact on the Continent, as well as years of further intervention in the internal affairs of formally independent countries in this region by Western Europe and the U.S. beginning in the 19th century.

So, my first point: the economies and social structures of most of the Global South were turned upside down by the West for several hundred years. In this, the U.S. was directly complicit. Looking only at Latin America, for instance, self-determined economic and political development efforts were derailed by the U.S. through a history of what was once called "gunboat diplomacy" (sending in ships and troops), and later by indirect intervention through the propping up of local dictators as well as separate, covert efforts, to overthrow regimes the US frowned upon. If one looks at Central America alone, then, it should be no surprise that refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua would come north to the U.S. seeking a better life as the U.S. was cooperating in destroying their homes.

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WASHINGTON -- Germany has apologized for its treatment of Jews in World War II. Australia has apologized to its aborigines. And Tony Blair has apologized to the Irish for Great Britain's handling of the potato famine.

American presidents have come close to apologizing to African-Americans for slavery, and several have spoken of the evil of what some historians call the peculiar institution. Soon, in a measure introduced by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., -- a white man representing a largely black district -- the United States House of Representatives could finally, formally apologize for slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the continuing legacy of discrimination against black people.

 As of last week, due in part to a strategy devised to appeal more intimately to potential backers of his congressional resolution, Cohen had collected 97 co-sponsors, including Republican Phil English of Pennsylvania.

 In separate letters to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Jewish caucus, and to members of the Missouri, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey congressional delegations whose state legislatures have considered, or passed, similar resolutions, Cohen made his appeal.

 "Slavery and Jim Crow laws were able to survive in our country because they were protected by the actions and acquiescence of the United States government, including Congress; we are still fighting their enduring legacies to this day," the letters say.

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he Alabama Legislature passed a resolution Thursday expressing "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery and apologizing for slavery's wrongs and lingering effects on the United States.

Alabama is the fourth Southern state to pass a slavery apology, following votes by the legislatures in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

Immediately after the votes in the House and Senate, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley's spokesman, Jeff Emerson, said the Republican governor would keep a commitment he made earlier to sign the resolution as soon as he receives it.

In the Senate, the resolution vote split along party lines, with 20 Democrats in support and eight Republicans in opposition. The House took a voice vote, which provided no record of how anyone voted.

Sen. Hank Sanders, the black Democrat from Selma who guided the resolution through the Senate, said the vote "sends a message that Alabama is finally standing on its history rather than having its history weigh it down."

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