Law Schools

Harvard Law School Pressed To Make Reparations

Antigua and Barbuda make the case that HLS owes more than remembrances.

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(image via Getty)

It has been a while since we revisited the Isaac Royall controversy at Harvard Law School. For new people, Isaac Royall Jr. was the first benefactor of Harvard Law School. He was a wealthy man in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts and, upon his death in 1781, he bequeathed a large part of his estate to Harvard University, for the study of law or medicine. Harvard went with the “law” option and more or less, Harvard Law School was born. Royall is remembered through an endowed professorship and his family crest used to be the seal emblazoned on the seal of the law school.

As a wealthy white man in the 18th century, it should come as no surprise that Royall was a slaver. Research into Harvard’s founding resurfaced Royall’s oppressive past, and Harvard was pressured to divest itself of all memory of Royall. Eventually, Harvard did change the seal, marking a huge victory for students and alumni who pressed the university to get right with its past.

That was back in the spring of 2016. In the fall of 2016, America elected an open bigot as President of the United States. In 2017, Harvard put up a plaque recognizing “the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of the Harvard Law School.” On a personal note, I’ve seen the plaque. It appears maybe five steps away from where I once stood, as a black student at Harvard Law School, protesting Kiwi Camara’s use racial slurs in a class outline and the law school’s refusal to take disciplinary action against him. Life is long, strange, circular, and generally pointless.

I kind of lost the plot on whether we were still supposed to care about properly remembering 18th century slavers and their wheat insignia when their racist ideology so clearly lives on in modern times. Isaac Royall seems like an asshole, sure. But alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh is just sitting on the current Supreme Court, and I don’t feel like the great legal minds at Harvard Law School are doing nearly enough to make that not a thing.

But apparently, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, has not lost the plot. Additional research has shown that Royall’s slaves most likely came from those islands. Prime Minister Browne doesn’t want a damn plaque, he wants backpay. From the Harvard Crimson:

Browne’s letter calls for Harvard to send reparations as recognition and compensation of Antiguan slaves in establishing the Law School.

“Reparation from Harvard would compensate for its development on the backs of our people,” Browne wrote. “Reparation is not aid; it is not a gift; it is compensation to correct the injustices of the past and restore equity. Harvard should be in the forefront of this effort.”

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We are hopefully past the point where demands for reparations are met with cries of “impracticality.” In fact, Browne’s letter points out that the University of Glasgow and the Princeton Theological Seminary have already committed to some form of compensation for their roles in the Caribbean slave trade. I’m a Harvard man; I do not believe in a world where Princeton can figure out how to do something but Harvard can’t.

Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow responded to the Prime Minister’s letter with concern, but not cash:

Bacow said he considers the memorial’s establishment — along with the removal of the Law School’s seal containing the Royall family crest in 2016 — to be in “significant steps” toward acknowledging Harvard’s history, but noted the need for additional work.

“We recognize that there is more work to be done,” Bacow wrote. “Indeed, Harvard is determined to take additional steps to explore this institution’s historical relationship with slavery and the challenging moral questions that arise when confronting past injustices and their legacies. Harvard is also committed to working with other educational institutions to study slavery and its legacy.”

There are so many ways HLS can pay this debt. Off the top of my head, I can imagine: A Harvard legal clinic in Antigua and Barbuda along the lines of Harvard’s Ghana Project; a center for Caribbean Legal Studies at Harvard that could advance the scholarship around this overlooked area of law; scholarships for Antiguans seeking LL.M.s; setting up pipelines for Antiguans who want to apply to the law school; AND cash-money to Antigua and Barbuda from Harvard’s impressive endowment. Harvard could do them ALL.

This demand for reparations is an opportunity for Harvard to think critically and creatively about what it can do to fight against the legacy of slavery from which it has profited. Let’s hope they don’t waste the chance.

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Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Demands Reparations for Harvard’s Association with Slavery in Letter to Bacow [Harvard Crimson]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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