On February 13, HDS hosted the third installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at HDS.
Harvard Divinity School was founded nearly forty 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. Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery 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 endowment. In this session, we will consider whether the exploration of family histories can inform reparative work in the present day.
Hosted by Dr. Diane L. Moore, Faculty Director, Religion and Public Life, and Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: "Harvard Divinity School."
SPEAKER 2: "Religion and the Legacies of Slavery, A Series of Public Online Conversations. Harvard Divinity School and Slavery Family Stories. February 13, 2023."
DIANE MOORE: On behalf of our Dean David Hempton, welcome to our third in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery. This series is co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative, and HarvardX.
My name is Diane Moore, and I'm the faculty director of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And it is my immense pleasure and privilege to co-host this series with my friend and colleague, Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean for our Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
On behalf of us both and our many staff and faculty colleagues who have helped bring this series into being, I want to welcome the over 800 participants who are joining us for this presentation, representing over 20 countries worldwide. As always, we are incredibly honored to have you with us. Thank you for joining us.
Tonight is the third in a series of six critical conversations building upon and beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report. In this series, we explore through the head and the heart what the academic study of religion teaches us about the tangled histories and legacies of slavery and racism here in the United States and beyond. These tragic legacies are alive and present in many, many forms as the news on any given day devastatingly reveals.
So we've had two presentations in this series. We began two weeks ago by Professor Karen King, who focused on what it means to recognize that Christian scriptures were formed in a social and historical context where slavery was common.
And last week, professors David Holland and Kathryn Gin Lum led us in a conversation exploring the persistence of the ways that Christianity has been a powerful force historically and in our contemporary time in constructing and maintaining a binary of the Christian saved and the heathen other.
We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex roles of religion, that it will enhance our commitments to reparative action, and racial justice, and healing in our own time and in our own context. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of a just world at peace, healed of racism and oppression.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Before we proceed, we pause. [PAUSES] We pause out of reverence. We pause to acknowledge and honor those who came before us, who were indigenous to this land, and the African and Indigenous people who were enslaved in this country, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who were enslaved here at Harvard University, as detailed in the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report.
As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country, I am aware of the potential impact of hearing this tragic history. So we want to remind everyone that as we proceed through these difficult conversations and listen to these exchanges, it is important to be aware of what might be stirring up in us and happening in our bodies, particularly as we navigate our emotions regarding the current manifestations of the legacy of slavery as reflected in the police violence against Black people in this country.
So we ask that you remember to breathe and to take care of yourself during and after each session. We invite you now to breathe with intention and focus on your breath as we lift up the Harvard University Native American Program's acknowledgment of the land and people.
We acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of this Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
But for the stolen land and the stolen labor, this country and this university would not be. Our acknowledgment of the land and people extends beyond words. It's expressed through our action and is connected to what we are doing through these conversations. This series is a part of the broader work, stemming from our school's commitment to reading the Harvard and Legacy of Slavery report as our common read text this year.
As we engage with this report, we are discussing our institutional actions for redress and ways to support the university in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them. And we aim to further our vision of restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School. This is sacred work.
DIANE MOORE: Tonight, we have the wonderful pleasure and honor of hearing from our dear beloved colleague, Professor Dan McKanan. Dan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist senior lecturer at HDS, where he has taught since 2008. He studies religious and spiritual movements for social transformation in the United States and beyond, with particular emphasis on environmental activism, intentional communities, and socialism.
And tonight, he will be speaking on Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories. Thank you for being with us, Dan. And we look forward to hearing your presentation.
DAN MCKANAN: Thank you so much, Diane. And thank you, Melissa, for as always grounding us in the realities that we are accountable to when we do this work. And thank you to everybody in the Religion and Public Life team for making this wonderful series possible.
I also want to extend a special greeting to the Harvard Divinity School students who are gathered to watch this webinar together in the Brown Room. And I hope you all enjoy your time together. And I look forward to seeing you again next week.
So our previous two sessions offered some very big pictures about the way enslavement has functioned in Western Christian culture as a whole. And what I'd like to do today is to zoom in much, much more narrowly to Harvard Divinity School and what we can learn from the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report about how the Divinity School, at its founding, was entangled in the realities of enslavement in the United States and also around the world.
Now, Harvard Divinity School was founded in 1816, which is a generation after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. So it's easy to assume that slavery was a relatively distant reality for the Divinity School's founders and early students. And in fact, before the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report was issued, that is what I, myself, assumed.
The truth revealed by the report is that the founders of the Divinity School, many of them, were much more closely entangled with enslavement than most New Englanders of their generation. I would venture to say that they were more closely entangled with enslavement than most white Southerners of their generation.
And this entanglement is true even and especially for those among the Divinity School's founders and early students who were most personally opposed to slavery. They were not, as they were sometimes accused, looking to engage in charity far afield. Quite the contrary, they were seeking to atone for the sins of their own fathers in many cases.
And that's why I'm going to tell this story through the lens of family history, because enslavement was a family matter for our founders. Virtually every Divinity School affiliate who spoke out against slavery had close family members who profited from enslavement. And many of them profited indirectly as well.
Part of my inspiration for this approach to the story is the work that many Divinity School students are currently doing on ancestral healing. And by ancestral healing, I mean seeking to redress past harms and their ongoing legacies in ways that include our ancestors-- both ancestors who perpetrated the harms and ancestors who suffered them.
Ancestral healing obviously means one thing for our students whose ancestors were enslaved on this land or elsewhere or whose ancestors experienced the colonial appropriation of their land. And it means something very different for those who descend from enslavers and colonizers.
That side of ancestral healing, which is the side that connects more directly to the founders of the Divinity School, has particular significance for those of us who have inherited wealth that can be traced to enslavement, the land theft, the genocide, and to other forms of white supremacist evil. And several of our current students, including Morgan Curtis, for example, are national leaders in the conversation about how to make accountable reparation for inherited wealth.
In a sense, that conversation about how to make accountable reparation for inherited wealth must include everyone affiliated with Harvard because even if we haven't inherited wealth personally, we have, to varying degrees, benefited from the inherited wealth that Harvard carries in its endowment. So in a sense, everyone listening to this webinar is part of this story in some small degree because of your connection to Harvard.
Now, of course, this is much more true for some of us than for others, and especially true for me as I am a Harvard alum as well as faculty member and thus, I have benefited enormously from the inherited wealth that Harvard carries, much of it derived from enslavement and other forms of white supremacist violence. But I hope that what I say today might help all of us deal with the moral injury of benefiting from wealth that was gained through enslavement by looking at the ways, the founders of Harvard Divinity School grappled with their own sense of moral injury.
By moral injury, I refer to the distress that we feel when we find ourselves entangled in actions that violate our own ethical principles even though we ourselves did not choose those actions. And the term "moral injury" is used in somewhat different ways by different people. But for the purposes of this talk, I will use the term only to refer to people who benefited from enslavement without directly choosing to participate in it.
Direct enslavers, some of whom I will also be talking about, had to deal with guilt for their actions, which I think is a somewhat different thing from moral injury. And before I tell you any more about these moral injuries, I want to acknowledge, as Melissa already did, that some of the stories I will tell describe the violent reality of enslavement.
And in the course of this talk, I will display some texts illustrating the white supremacist attitudes of enslavers. And I will also display some texts that show how white supremacist attitudes persisted even in the words and thinking of people who were engaged in the struggle against enslavement. As you'll see, this is a very complex story. And I urge everyone to be gentle with yourself as you encounter it.
Before I continue, I also want to say just a little bit about my personal story so you can have some sense of, perhaps, the biases or presuppositions that shape my grappling with these materials. I am the descendant of settler colonialists who came to North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Several branches of my family were serial land thieves, who claimed Indigenous lands on the East Coast in the 17th century, in Appalachia after the Revolutionary War, and on the Great Plains after the Civil War. Some of those ancestors also claimed property and other human beings, including here in Massachusetts as well as in Maryland and Virginia.
Other ancestors, who were not themselves slaveholders, fought and died during the Civil War to protect the right of other whites to hold property and human beings. My ancestors did not pass much wealth from generation to generation. But for the past few generations, they have been good at passing educational privileges to their children. And as a result, much of my own white privilege has been transmitted to me via the wealth of Harvard University.
And for that reason, I feel a certain kinship, difficult kinship, for the people I will be talking about today. It's also the case that my faculty position here at the Divinity School was created to preserve the school's historic connection to the Unitarian Universalist tradition.
The founders of the Divinity School, the people I will be talking about today, were also the founders of the Unitarian denomination. And their stories are close to the heart of my own teaching and research. The history that I will be sharing tonight is a bit tangled. So I want to help you out at the beginning by introducing some of my main characters.
This slide shows the faces of William Ellery Channing, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Gorham Palfrey. Like everyone who taught or studied at Harvard Divinity School in the early years, they were all men who understood themselves as white. They all wrestled with the moral injury of being financially dependent on relatives who made their money through enslavement.
Before I tell their stories, I want to acknowledge someone for whom we do not have a reliable image, someone who suffered the physical injuries that made Harvard Divinity School possible. That person is Duchess Quamino. She was born around 1739 in what is now Ghana.
When she was a teenager or a young woman, she was kidnapped and transported violently across the Atlantic, the Newport, Rhode Island, where she was forced to do household labor for a merchant family. She married John Quamino, who was claimed as a slave by a different family, and raised three children with him. But she was simultaneously caring for the many children of the family that claimed her as property.
Duchess Quamino also launched a baking business on the side in hopes of eventually purchasing her freedom. Her husband paid for his freedom, and then fought as a privateer in the revolution in hopes of liberating his family but instead died in battle fighting for the freedom of white people. Duchess Quamino still managed to obtain freedom for herself and her children, though she continued in the merchant family's employment for some time.
Eventually, she gained fame as Newport's most celebrated baker. When she died, she was honored with the epitaph you see here, "In memory of Duchess Quamino, a free Black of distinguished excellence, intelligent, industrious, affectionate, honest, and of exemplary piety, who deceased June 4, 1804, aged 65." And I'm grateful to an organization called enslaved.org and the caretakers of God's Little Acre in Newport for this information about Duchess Quamino.
The epitaph that I just read was written by William Ellery Channing, a child of that slave-owning family, who was cared for in his infancy by Duchess Quamino in the-- years just after she purchased her freedom. Channing wasn't a major donor or a member of the Divinity School faculty, so he doesn't figure large in the Legacy of Slavery report. But he was actually the visionary behind the founding of the Divinity School.
In Federal Street Church, he was the most respected minister in Boston. He was the mentor to many of the school's early students and faculty. He was also the leading visionary behind the founding of the Unitarian denomination, having delivered a manifesto for that movement at the ordination of future Harvard president, Jared Sparks, who, as we will see, does figure pretty prominently in the Legacy of Slavery report.
Channing also defined the division for the Divinity School when he dedicated Divinity Hall, the building where I am now sitting, in 1826 with a message that included the words you see on the screen now, a message that is still relevant. The Divinity School graduates are called to bring about a great revolution in the world because even where it appears that we live in civilized refinement, there are great evils that demand revolutionary action.
So how did this man come to be raised by Duchess Quamino? First and foremost, he was born in Newport, the most important slave trading port in New England and one of the most important in the Americas. His great-grandfather, William Ellery, was a sea captain who participated in the triangular trade linking England, Africa, New England, and the Caribbean.
As you can see from this horrifying advertisement, William Ellery kidnapped children in Africa. The children who survived smallpox, they brought to Boston Harbor and traded them for New England rum. This happened just 22 years before his great-grandson William Ellery Channing was born.
William Ellery Channing's father and father-in-law were merchants who did not trade slaves directly but provided a new generation of slave traders in Newport with the New England produced goods they needed to conduct their business. At the same time, in many ways, the Channing family embodied Newport's ambivalence about enslavement.
William Ellery Jr., Channing's maternal grandfather and the son of the slave trader, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who hoped that national independence would also lead to an end to slavery. At the time the Constitution was being created, he advocated strongly, in the words you see here, but unsuccessfully for national anti-slavery legislation.
As collector of customs for Newport from 1790 to 1820, he tried, again unsuccessfully, to shut up-- shut down Newport's trade in enslaved human beings, often clashing with his own relatives in the process. On one notable occasion, just after the US had officially abolished the slave trade, he tried to prevent French slaveholders, who had recently been expelled from Cuba, from bringing their slaves into the United States but was overruled by President Madison.
When he completed his term as collector of customs, he was succeeded by his own nephew, who overturned everything he had done, making the slave trade more possible once again in Newport. The Channings' and Ellerys' ambivalence about slavery was also shared by their pastor-- Ezra Stiles, for whom William Ellery had built a parsonage.
In 1756, Ezra Stiles gave one of his parishioners a hundred gallons of rum. The parishioner took the rum to Africa, where he kidnapped a 10-year-old boy. The parishioner bought that boy back to Stiles, who named him Newport and held him as a slave for more than 20 years.
Even as he was taking Newport's labor against his will, Stiles joined his ministerial colleague Samuel Hopkins in preaching against the great inhumanity and cruelty of slavery and in raising money to send former slaves to Africa as missionaries, the course of action they saw as the antidote to enslavement. Stiles finally liberated Newport in 1778, just before he began serving as president of Yale.
But Newport continued to work for Stiles. And Newport's son, Jacob, was held by Stiles as an indentured servant from infancy to age 24. Even so, Stiles was chosen as the founding president of the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and for the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Ezra Stiles' grandson and namesake would later attend the Divinity School and serve as Channing's assistant minister.
And for this story about Ezra Stiles, I'm grateful to the Yale Slavery and Abolition report, produced by the Amistad Committee, evidence that the slavery legacies of the major universities are deeply entangled with one another. So what does this tangled family history mean for young William Ellery Channing?
There's no question that he hated slavery. And equally, there is no question that he was not willing to disavow his family heritage. Some historians have called William Ellery Channing an abolitionist. But I prefer not to do that because he never accepted something that was a core claim of the black and white abolitionists of his time, namely that slaveholders were sinners who deserve to be expelled from Christian communities.
Channing's mixed feelings about slavery may have reflected the moral injury of being dependent on relatives who had profited from it. And to understand his sense of dependence, it's helpful to know that although he came from a wealthy family, he didn't think of himself as wealthy during his young years. When Channing was 13, his father died with no money in the bank.
Channing could continue his education and care for his younger siblings only because relatives and family friends helped him out, family friends that included a group of Virginia slaveholders who invited him to earn some tuition by tutoring their children. Channing was horrified by what he observed in Virginia. But he refused to condemn his slaveholding hosts.
Instead, he turned their violence inward. While he was there, he stayed up all night studying, refused to buy new clothes for himself, slept on a hard floor without a blanket instead of in a bed. Eventually, Channing did become quite wealthy again, mostly by marrying his cousin, Ruth Gibbs, whose merchant father had fewer scruples about Newport's slave trade than the Channing family and become quite wealthy as a result.
So when we read what Channing had to say about slavery, including the words on your screen right now, we can interpret them as his way of grappling with moral injury and his attempt to achieve the same sort of ancestral healing that is still on our to-do list today.
His most extensive treatment of the subject came in a book published in 1835, at a time when several of his friends had joined the Garrisonian Anti-slavery Society, which called for an immediate end to slavery and the full civil rights for people of all races. In that book, Channing affirmed quite clearly the core anti-slavery principle-- claiming property in another person is categorically wrong. Full stop.
At the same time, he refused to condemn slaveholders in the way abolitionists demanded. No one, he insisted, should have their character judged by their actions. He didn't make quite clear how else we should judge the character of other people around us. But I think it's easy to see why he would hesitate to judge people he loved, members of his family, by their actions-- even when those actions horrified him.
Channing's opening passage to his book on slavery made clear that he was thinking hard about the money his family had made from enslavement. "The first question to be proposed by a rational being," he wrote, "is not what is profitable, but what is right." We thought about slavery through the lens of the prophets that others around him had made.
And the more he thought about this, the more opposed he became to enslavement. His opposition perhaps reached a peak in his final public address, delivered in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts on the fourth anniversary of West Indian Emancipation.
On that occasion, Channing chastised North Americans for not doing more to celebrate the recent emancipation of 800,000 human beings in the British Caribbean. The American Revolution, he said, was insignificant compared to an event that ended the galling, crushing, intolerable yoke, which bowed the African to the dust. Channing then compared West Indian Emancipation to the second coming of Christ.
That's how religiously significant he thought the freedom of enslaved people was, along the way adding a dig against millennialists who imagined that Christ would return in the clouds rather than in the form of a just society.
Now, I must confess that when I first encountered the passage you see here, I misunderstood it because I thought he was thinking about the Caribbean of the Haitian Revolution, rather than of British Caribbean emancipation. But in fact, Channing was talking about the emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean.
And there was a really important difference between these two cases that was very significant for Channing. He celebrated West Indian Emancipation-- in part, because it was not like the Haitian Revolution. Whereas Haitian slaves rose up and fought for their freedom, emancipation in the British Caribbean occurred in response to agitation by white abolitionists who were inspired by their Christian faith.
For Channing, that scenario was somehow preferable to other modes of emancipation. "Both self-emancipation by slaves with," as he wrote, "courage maddened by despair, and any form of emancipation inspired by pecuniary motives." Now, there's a lot going on in the passage that I put in front of you right now. And I will admit freely that I did not fully understand this passage.
But I think one of the things that it shows us is that Channing fundamentally thought of slavery from the perspective of white people who face the choice of whether or not to participate in enslavement. To say that white Christians had freed the slaves was tantamount for Channing to saying that Jesus Christ had freed the slaves.
It's not at all clear that Channing would have been willing to identify the struggle of Black Christians or Black non-Christians or their freedom with the work of Jesus Christ. And this, I'm afraid, is an all too typical way of dealing with moral injury. It can make us self-centered.
Channing's preoccupation with his ancestors' sins, his desire to redeem those ancestors, caused him to assume that it was up to people like him to take the lead in ending slavery. It's the same pattern that we saw with his minister Ezra Stiles, who condemned slavery but then said the solution was paternalistic benevolence rather than reparation and taking the lead from formerly enslaved people.
If you were able to attend our session last week, you heard Kathryn Gin Lum talk about the kind of racial thinking that draws a binary distinction between good, implicitly white Christians, and heathens, who were understood not as evil but as-- as she said-- a mass of unfortunates who need the help of Christians to save.
For Channing, some kind of Christian-heathen divide is at work here. It separates white bearers of moral injury from Black bearers of physical injury. And it prevented him from recognizing the Haitian Revolution or other acts of Black liberation as divinely inspired. He also may have had another reason for taking a negative view of the Haitian Revolution. And this brings us to his familial connection to some of the most prominent figures in Harvard Slavery report, the Perkins brothers.
In preparation for this session, some of you may have read the chapter of Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery that deals with five families that together contributed 1/3 of the donations received by Harvard in the first half of the 19th century. Of these, first and foremost, were the Perkins brothers-- James, Thomas, and Samuel.
James, who died just after the Divinity School was created, served as an officer of the Society for the Promotion of Theological Education, the body that created the Divinity School. Another slave trader, Israel Thorndike, was vice president of that body. Both James and Thomas Perkins gave it money.
They also gave a lot of money to other parts of Harvard. James endowed the Perkins professorship of mathematics. Thomas and Samuel endowed a chair in natural history. And meanwhile, James gave his home to the Boston Athenaeum while Thomas gave his to the Perkins School for the Blind.
Much of this money came from the time the Perkins had spent in Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, when they were young men. Their father died when they were teenagers. They went to sea to recoup the family fortune and arrived in Saint-Domingue shortly after their 21st birthdays. This was at a time when that French colony was importing 40,000 human beings as slaves every year because so many others were dying for overwork-- from overwork.
The Perkinses were utterly indifferent to the suffering that surrounded them. And so slavery report highlights James' wife, Sarah Paine Perkins, wrote that she believed that slaves experience no more mental anguish than mules when they were whipped. Her husband-- or no, her brother-in-law Samuel was so impressed by the island's cosmopolitan prosperity that he asserted that Haiti's slaves could not be considered poor.
He served as a middleman between the kidnappers and the plantation owners, as well as working in the slave market with sea captains to send more slaves to Cuba, Jamaica, and other islands. The Perkins business came to an abrupt end with the Haitian Revolution of 1791.
But even after James left, Samuel stayed on to the bitter end, eking out the last bit of profit. He was buying and selling human beings right up to the moment when none remained in the market. In addition to selling people to planters, the Perkins kept several for their personal use. Among them was a man named Moussa Deyaha, who had worked as a shepherd in Africa before his kidnapping, nearly died during the Middle Passage.
In addition to claiming his life in labor, the Perkins claimed the right to tell his story. And according to their telling, he was a faithful slave who protected the family from revolutionaries, swam out to their boat when they were escaping, and lived with them the remainder of his life in Boston, even being buried together with James Perkins.
40 years after the Haitian Revolution forced him out of the slave trading business, Samuel Perkins wrote a memoir for a friend and for his family. This memoir was written in 1835, the very same year that Channing published his book on slavery. In his telling, Samuel lifted up the last days of French rule in Haiti as a cautionary tale against the evils of abolition.
"Before the revolution," he said, "travelers were charmed with the kindness of the Masters." He had the gall to assert that the only cruel masters were those of mixed race. And he blamed those same people of mixed race for instigating the revolution after being exposed to the ideals of the French Revolution.
After telling a series of atrocity tales about what the white people of Haiti suffered during the revolution, Perkins addressed himself to abolitionists in the United States, a group that was soon to include quite a few of his own grandchildren and great nieces and nephews. "Freedom for slaves," he insisted, "would bring misery not only to the innocent whites but misery and tenfold wretchedness to the slaves themselves."
Perkins urged abolitionist women to contemplate the horrors of degradation, which must fall in their own sex, if slaves were freed. Perkins' viciously white supremacist memoir provides an interpretive key to William Ellery Channing's writings on slavery. When Channing wrote about West Indian freedom, I feel confident that at one level, he intended his words as a rebuttal to Perkins' horrific image of emancipation.
"One should not imagine that freedom will lead to mayhem. If done right," Channing suggests, "it will lead to an outburst of Christian piety." Yet his response was really only a half rebuttal because Channing simultaneously implied that emancipation would be done wrongly if done by the slaves themselves, as happened in Haiti.
Here's an especially puzzling passage from Channing's book. "If slaves were to revolt," he wrote, "white people would be bound to resist for them." But by the same token, white people were utterly obliged to work for emancipation. "On this point," he wrote, "we have no liberty." So what did the Perkins brothers have to do with Channing? Why am I confident that Channing was thinking about Samuel Perkins when he wrote about slavery?
As it happens, a thicket of family ties connected them. Here's a quick rundown. Thomas Perkins was probably the wealthiest member of Channing's congregation. Samuel Perkins wife's sister was married to Channing's older brother Francis. After Francis died, she and her small children lived in the Channing parsonage.
Somewhat later, Samuel Perkins' daughter married Channing's younger brother, Walter, himself, a major figure in the history of Harvard Medical School. Samuel Perkins' son James went to the Divinity School and became the first Unitarian minister in Cincinnati. Just about everywhere he went, Channing bumped up against members of the Perkins family.
And part of the glue that held them together was another family-- the Higginsons. The two sisters, who were married to Samuel Perkins and to Channing's older brother, were hidden since. They were the daughters of the sea captain and Federalist politician Stephen Higginson. And looking into the Higginson connections really helped me understand the particular flavor of slave trading that shaped the founders of the Divinity School.
Now, the Channings were merchants based in Newport, the Perkins in Boston, the Higginsons in Salem. If Salem was the most important slave trading port in New England-- I mean, excuse me. If Newport was the most important slave trading port, Salem was the place where merchants made even larger fortunes by shifting from the Atlantic to the China trade.
And when you think about people like the Higginsons, when historians think about them, they usually frame them as participants in the emergence of the China trade. Now, the China trade itself was deeply tainted, insofar as it involved the importation of vast amounts of opium into China.
But Salem merchants would never have ventured to China if they hadn't first tried to profit from enslavement in the French colonies of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Now, back in the time with Channing's great-grandfather, New England sea captains were part of the British Colonial Empire. That ended during the US revolution when many of them became privateers, attacking British ships instead.
After the Revolution, they established new ties to the colonies of the United States' new ally, France. That's what brought the Perkinses to Haiti right after the Revolution. The next step was to go to the islands of Bourbon in France, now known as Réunion and Mauritius, located off the East Coast of Africa. Sea captains who could manage that journey realized it was one short step further to the riches of China.
One of the founders of Salem seafaring community was this man, Elias Hasket Derby, known as King Derby, who encouraged the young men of Salem to take to sea on his behalf. This quotation from the son of one of those young men reveals these young seafaring adventurers retired from the sea by the time they were 30, many of them wound up as major financial backers of the young Unitarian denomination.
They don't all show up in the Harvard slavery report because they didn't all trade directly in slaves. But a close look at their journey shows just how much they depended on enslavement for their wealth.
Late Richard Jeffrey Cleveland-- as a teenager, he decided to seek his fortune by joining with childhood friends in one of the voyages on Derby ships. They went to Haiti. He came away thoroughly disgusted by the experience not because of his encounter with human bondage but because of his encounter with seasickness.
But a few years later, he signed on for another journey-- this time, to the Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. While there, he perceived what he called a great deficiency in the number of vessels requisite for the conveyance of passengers and freight, to and from, the Isles of France and Bourbon. Now, these islands were French slave colonies. The overwhelming majority of people on each of these islands were enslaved.
When Cleveland decided that Americans should do more to trade with these islands, what he meant was that Americans should do more to profit from enslavement. And soon his friend Stephen Higginson was lobbying Congress to open up trade to them. Cleveland went on to make his fortune traveling onward to China and eventually retired to the rural town of Lancaster, where he shaped a cluster of liberal thinkers who would have a big impact on the Divinity School.
His wife, Dorcas Cleveland, wrote pro-Unitarian pamphlets and ran a salon that discussed the latest progressive educational theories from Europe. They hired teachers for their schools, like Elizabeth Peabody who invented the American kindergarten and inspired the transcendentalist approach to education. Another teacher they hired was Jared Sparks, a farm boy who went on to marry a sea captain's daughter and eventually become president of Harvard.
You might recall that William Ellery Channing preached his most famous sermon at Sparks' ordination, like Channing sparks spent time tutoring on a Southern plantation to pay for his education. Sparks plays a significant report into slavery, plays a significant role in the slavery report.
But before I talk about that, let me tell you about the youngest member of this group of folks in Lancaster-- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, someone who both honored and departed from his family's legacy of enslavement. As you can see, from this quote, Higginson took-- participated actively in the 19th century craze for genealogy. He took a lot of pride in his Puritan ancestry.
As a child, he spent a lot of time, not only in Lancaster but also here in Cambridge, where his father worked as Harvard University steward. But that father died when Higginson was 11. And he found himself in exactly the same situation that Channing and Perkins had experienced as teenagers. All were accustomed to a life of privilege but could not maintain that privilege without relying on relatives with ill-gained wealth.
As it happens, the death of Higginson's father occurred just a year before Channing and Perkins wrote their rival accounts of Emancipation. He was likely familiar with both accounts. Samuel Perkins lost his Uncle. William Ellery Channing might as well have been his uncle since Higginson's aunt and cousins lived in Channing's house.
One of Channing's first jobs after Harvard College was tutoring some of Samuel Perkins's grandchildren. Soon thereafter, he married another one of those grandchildren. Still, other grandchildren were editing Samuel Perkins's memoir of Haiti about his time. Higginson might very well have read the account alongside them.
If he did, he was certainly horrified by what he'd read. Higginson resolved his own sense of moral injury by becoming the most radical white abolitionist in Boston. He's very active, for example, in the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of Black and white activists who pledge to prevent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in the 1850s.
In one famous case, Higginson led the armed group-- who sought to rescue fugitive Anthony Burns from custody-- they failed. But Higginson received a sword wound and may have participated in the killing of one of the police officers, charged with holding Burns in captivity.
The contemporary coverage of this event is intriguing. Higginson was portrayed not as the son of a merchant who profited from slave colonies but as a faithful heir to the freedom-loving founders of Massachusetts. So we can see that even at the height of abolitionist education, even among abolitionists, white New Englanders were actively erasing their region's history of enslavement.
Higginson went on to use some of his wealth to support John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, a Brown Secret Six major funders, Higginson was the only one who did not flee or disavow Brown after he was captured. Higginson then served in the Civil War as Colonel of the first South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment composed of formerly enslaved soldiers.
He wrote a book about that experience, that honored the diversity, humanity, and courage of the men with whom you served, most of whom, Higginson stressed, had voluntarily met more dangers in their escape from slavery than their white officers faced in the Civil War.
Now, earlier, I criticized Channing because he was willing to celebrate Emancipation when it was brought about by white Christian charity but not when it was brought about by the militant resistance of the people who were enslaved. With Higginson, almost the opposite was true. He celebrated Emancipation, especially when it involved manly, violently force.
Yet he never stopped taking pride in his family history. "No episode of American history," he said, "was more brilliant than Salem's glory days when brave sea captains competed with the giant forces of England and France to dominate the Indian Ocean."
I said before that Channing's approach to slavery marked a boundary between virtuous white Christians and the unfortunate heathens who suffered from enslavement, Higginson seems to have drawn a different boundary, but one that may have been equally problematic, dividing those able to exercise heroic masculinity-- both the Salem sea captains and slave rebels. And this made him eerily comfortable celebrating the memory of enslavers.
Both boundaries-- the one that Higginson created and the one that Channing created-- can, I think, be understood as byproducts of moral injury, of their struggle to come to terms with their own anti-slavery ideals in juxtaposition to their family loyalty. And this paradoxical approach is especially clear in the one book that Higginson devoted both to his own ancestors and to heroic Black liberators.
This book was called Travellers and Outlaws. It was published in 1889, so a long time after his Civil War experience, as a collection of essays originally published in magazines. The first essay is focused on Salem sea captains, the ladder on marooned communities in the Caribbean, and on the leaders of three major US slave rebellions-- Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner.
As far as I can tell, Higginson doesn't seem to have noticed the irony of his title. Did he mean to suggest that sea captains were travelers while rebellious Blacks were outlaws or, it would have been more appropriate, the other way around? In another sense, though, it's a deeply ironic book in ways that I find quite troubling.
When he wrote about his ancestors, he celebrated their courage and vigor but also painted them in a somewhat pathetic way as victims of the precarity of their fortunes. And when he turned to his Black heroes, he simultaneously perpetuated and undercut his uncle's racist version of slave rebellion. So here's a text from his essay on Nat Turner.
He sensationalized Turner as a religious fanatic who was inspired to revolt by hallucinations and who, unlike John Brown, resolved to spare no life, regardless of age or sex. He racialized Turner's violence, comparing it to that of Native Americans, adding that unlike Native Americans, in his telling-- Turner's men did not mutilate the bodies they kill.
Higginson also stressed that Turner's men did not rape anyone but undercut that point by implausibly suggesting that Turner was the only American slave leader who rose above the ordinary level of vengeance. So there's not much difference in a way between his account of slave rebellion here and the very negative anti-abolitionist account that his uncle had given.
But another passage, he offered a really important corrective to racist stereotypes of slave rebellion, making sure to honor the 120 enslaved people-- many of them with no connection to Nat Turner-- who were murdered by whites in the days following Turner's rebellion. "In shuddering at the horrors of the insurrection," Higginson chastised his countrymen, "we've forgotten the far greater horrors of its suppression."
Now, this is one of the places where I really-- I'm kind of brought to a halt by my own sources. I cannot make clear sense of the mix of racists stereotypes and subtle anti-racist analysis that lie side by side on the pages of his book. But I want you to consider the possibility that Higginson's confusion is, in some way, a byproduct of moral injury, and that many of us today may be suffering from similar forms of confusion.
OK. Everything I've said so far about Channings', Perkins', and Higginsons' legacies of slavery sets up the conflicts that divided the Harvard community in the years just before the Civil War and are dealt with extensively in Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.
The most dramatic of these conflicts pitted the first dean of Harvard Divinity School, John Gordon Palfrey, and his high school friend, Harvard president, Jared Sparks. It's Palfrey on the right, Sparks on the left. These two men had a lot in common with one another.
Both experienced economic hardship in childhood, attended Phillips Exeter and Harvard on scholarships, became Unitarian ministers and professional politicians, and eventually made their way into the Bostonian elite. Both were mentored by William Ellery Channing along the way.
Palfrey had another thing in common with Channing, Perkins, and Higginson. He lost a parent early on and wound up relying on the assistance of prosperous Bostonians, who regarded him as one of their own. In his case, it was his mother who died early. His father went south to seek his fortune, leaving Palfrey in the care of Channing and others while he made a new fortune as a Louisiana plantation owner.
Palfrey managed actually to be a student at Harvard Divinity School before becoming its first dean. In the early years, they did not have the Office of Dean. And his term as Dean occurred in the 1830s, the height of abolitionist agitation in Boston when Channing and Perkins were writing their rival accounts of Emancipation.
This was the time that Palfrey realized that his father's plantation meant that he, himself, stood to inherit a large number of slaves. He responded ethically and courageously by arranging to inherit as many of those slaves as possible so that he could immediately emancipate them, something that he did following his father's death in 1843.
While dean, he also allowed for a student debate on slavery against the wishes of Harvard president, Josiah Quincy, who quickly brought his deanship to an end. Palfrey then began a political career-- first as an anti-slavery Whig and then as a Free-Soiler. But he remained interested in Harvard, and Harvard remained interested in him, especially when his friend Jared Sparks became president.
At the end of his presidential term, Sparks tried to arrange for Palfrey to take on a professorship in history but only on the condition that Palfrey stop his anti-slavery political activity. Now, to understand why Sparks made that demand, we need to a little bit more about sparks.
Unlike just about everybody else I've talked about, he did not come from a line of sea captains or slave traders but from Connecticut farmers. As a student, he earned money not only by teaching sea captains' kids in Lancaster but also slave owners' kids in Maryland, and eventually married the daughter of one of those Salem sea captains.
Sparks' first ministry was in Baltimore, where many members of this congregation had profited from enslavement. During that time, he traveled widely, observed slavery directly, and aligned himself firmly with the Colonizationist Movement, which hoped to end enslavement by returning enslaved people to Africa-- so-called returning, whether or not they've been born there.
Sparks was so enthusiastic about colonization that he actually wrote the first major history of the Colonization Society, launching his own celebrated career as a historian. In that history, he claimed not to believe in intrinsic racial differences. But still argued that white prejudice based on color was so strong that there was no point even in trying to overcome it.
Sparks also blame the victims, arguing that freed slaves who remained in the United States would be both a nuisance to society and less happy than the slaves themselves. So this long history of racist colonization as viewpoints provides context for the tangled negotiations between Palfrey and Sparks between 1849 and 1851, exactly the years when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law despite the fervent opposition of people like Palfrey.
To persuade Palfrey to withdraw from politics, Sparks brought in lots of heavy hitters. Among them was Ephraim Peabody, minister at King's Chapel. I haven't told you much about Peabody, but he embodied the same tangled family history I've been talking about. Married to the granddaughter of a slave trader, his son Francis would eventually serve as dean of the Divinity School. And son-in-law Charles Elliott, son of a politician who voted for the Fugitive Slave Law, would eventually serve as president of Harvard.
Now, Peabody's efforts to get Palfrey out of politics fail. He remained in politics and as a result, never worked for Harvard again. Yet an intriguing aspect of this story is that the conflict doesn't seem to have ended the friendship between Sparks and Palfrey. Even though they took opposite positions on the greatest moral issue of their own time and of American history, both devoted most of the rest of their lives writing historical books that celebrated their shared ancestors.
And here are some of Palfrey's words in celebration of New England ancestors that he believed carried a unique legacy of freedom that would eventually work for good in the politics of the world.
In other words, even after doing everything so courageously to oppose slavery and to liberate those who had been enslaved by his own father, Palfrey continued to experience himself as part of a Harvard-centered moral universe that also included his political opponents like Sparks, Peabody, and Perkins but did not so easily include the people his own father had claimed this property.
Now, I wish that I could crystallize the family stories I've been telling into some tidy, morally satisfying conclusion. But I simply cannot. There's much to admire in the stories of our Divinity School forebearers-- William Ellery Channing, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Gorham Palfrey, all experienced grave moral injury by depending from early childhood on wealth accrued from kidnapping, murder, and the violent appropriation of land and labor.
As adults, all exhibited significant moral courage in the fight to end enslavement. Faced with similar challenges, I am not confident that I would fare so well. And yet they all paid honor to ancestors who perpetrated atrocities. I don't know whether they were right or wrong to do so. They knew their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers as complex human beings, not reducible to the worst things that they had done-- even though those worse things were truly atrocious.
Ancestral healing, for many of us, surely involves grappling with ancestors like Bears. And yet Channing and Higginson and Palfrey bequeathed to us a University that remains much more generous to their descendants and to people like them than to the descendants of Duchess Quamino, and Moussa Deyaha, and people like them.
And I think part of the mistake here is that they fail to recognize that however complex their ancestors lives, their ancestors' money had mostly derived from atrocities and thus was mostly owed back in the form of reparations. We, who benefit from Harvard's endowment today, are also wrong if we fail to recognize it as an accumulation of atrocities, an occasion for profound reparation.
And here, I want to highlight two things that I wish the Harvard Slavery report had said a little bit more about. One is the way that wealth that derived from enslavement was entangled with wealth derived from other forms of white supremacist violence, including the theft of Indigenous land, the flooding of China with opium, and more recently, the ecocidal violence of fossil fuel extraction.
I also wish the report had said a little bit more about the kinds of stories I've been exploring here, the stories of people who didn't personally have money to give but nevertheless benefited from the wealth of their relatives. When Channing, Higginson, and Palfrey first arrived at Harvard, they all thought of themselves as poor, not rich because their family's ill-gotten riches had been destroyed, one way or another.
Their moral injury made them keenly aware of what their ancestors had suffered as well as what their ancestors had perpetrated in creating the wealth from which they would benefit. And one way they dealt with this part of their ancestral legacy was through active concern for young men of similar backgrounds to their own.
This is Channing's relationship to Palfrey and Sparks. He saw them as promising young men who had fallen on hard times, just as he, himself, had been. I find these choices the privilege young men, like oneself, all too easy to understand.
When we experience the moral injury of being dependent on ill-gotten well, it's easy to compensate with acts of generosity to others who've experienced similar moral injuries, others like ourselves, rather than to those who suffer the physical injury of having their lives and labor stolen from them. We can see this in the disproportion of Channing's response to Duchess Quamino and to John Gorham Palfrey. He wrote an epitaph for Quamino.
He set Palfrey on a path that allowed Palfrey's descendants-- even to the seventh generation, even to right now-- to share in all the privileges of a Harvard education. And I am no better than this.
Just a few years ago, I participated in a fundraising campaign to restore Channing's grave in Mt. Auburn Cemetery-- the grave you see on the right-- and not the campaign to restore Quamino's grave. It's at Little Acre in Newport, the one you see on the left.
The story of Harvard's endowment, I fear, is the story of these two gravestones. Some combination of guilt and moral injury has led those who profited from enslavement to turn their wealth into philanthropy. But that philanthropy has mostly benefited their own descendants and others like them.
In many ways, giving money to an endowment like Harvard's is a better strategy of intergenerational wealth transfer because giving money directly to one's own children runs the risk that they'll squander the inheritance.
So it is up to us now to do this differently. It's up to us now to expand our imagination of which ancestors and which descendants count. Personally, I do not think this would be possible without a form of reparation and democratization that changes who has power over the entirety of Harvard's endowment, not just a fraction of it. And with that, I look forward to being in conversation with all of you.
DIANE MOORE: Dan, thank you immensely for that powerful presentation that raises a number of questions for us in our contemporary time about our own profit from that horrible legacy. And that's how you start it. And that's how I'd like to shift our conversation here.
Melissa and I are going to just ask you probably a question before we turn to the rich questions of the audience. But can you elaborate on the power of the framework that you're laying forth about moral injury? Can you talk about what that entails because I think as I hear you, it has multiple layers.
And if we-- there's the layer of not even having moral injury because moral injury requires a consciousness, I would assume, relevant to one's complicity in these histories. But then as you so powerfully demonstrated, if we just stop there and individualize kind of understanding of moral injury, that it can play out in ways that are complicated. And I really appreciate your recognition of the complexities of these men that you identified and helped elaborate their stories for us.
So can you just talk a little bit more about your understanding of moral injury as a powerful force that we might, ourselves, be able also-- and should, I would argue-- be able to garner for ourselves, relevant to our context and our time?
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, I should have given honor to Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Letini, who are the scholars who introduced me to this very powerful concept of moral injury, which they have used primarily in the context of their work with veterans of war, particularly people who we're adjacent to, were unable to prevent, et cetera, atrocities happening, in the context of war.
And as I've done some of my own genealogical work around legacies of white supremacist violence, I found it to be a useful category for thinking about myself and thinking about the other people in history, like the ones I've been highlighting, who've wrestled with this in ways that are both similar and different.
And I'm also just really conscious of how slippery a thing it is. And I was conscious of the ways I was replicating some of the things I was criticizing in this talk. and I decided to leave that in to help us all wrestle with it, that moral injury. Because it is a form of injury, it can make you self-centered in ways that occlude the much more profound injuries suffered by others.
And I don't know any way around that but through it. But it's something that I'm sitting with very, very deeply, and very grateful that the upcoming sessions in this series will deal with issues of reparation, ways that center-- some stories other than the stories I've been.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I'm really, really grateful for the history that you laid out. And particularly, I'm grateful for what you just shared, that you're not-- you were not afraid to keep your own story in the story. And you gave us a bit of your history at the beginning to add to context, acknowledging that you are a descendant of colonizers and so forth. And you acknowledge that moral injury and confusion is something that many still grapple with.
And so what I'd love for you to think about is a question that actually David Holland, who was our faculty presenter last week, posed to our small group. So as everyone knows, we are reading this report as a small-- as a community throughout the year. So we have small group sessions and the question that he raised to our group last week was about how do we address members within our family who don't appreciate the significance of this history.
So your talk just illuminated the complexities within families and the way that people struggle. And so bringing it home, because we are about the work of trying to dismantle racism and the legacies of slavery that rests within us, personally and within our institution, what are some of the barriers to having conversations, difficult conversations, with members in your family, members in your-- in this community, who don't necessarily see their connection to this history or accountability?
How do you-- how do you engage in conversations with people and help them to see and understand the connection so that everyone, or at least, the majority of folks are on board with what you so rightly identify at the end this call for reparations-- because it's going to take a groundswell of people, people who are particularly identifying the way that you identify, to really be on board with this.
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, I think-- for me personally, the really big challenge is how to be prophetic without being self-righteous in self-defeating ways. And that's because in my own family, I am the third or the fourth generation of people who have tried to grapple with these legacies while thinking the previous generation did it the wrong way.
So my dad felt that his mother had too much of a paternalistic attitude toward descendants of enslaved people. And he tried to correct that. And I felt that my dad had a too individualistic and less insufficiently systemic approach to structures of white supremacy.
And it's always a balancing act-- when to really push those critiques and when to say, actually, we're all involved in the same struggle that's really hard.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you. Thanks, Dan. I'm going to turn to some of the audience questions. There are several here. We're not going to, sadly, get to all of them. But we will share the questions with Dan. So please don't hesitate to put questions up if you have them.
I'm going to combine two, Dan. And if you haven't engaged in this depth of the history of the school or these questions, then just pass on it. But I think you will have something to say.
I'm going to combine Hunter Limbaugh's question. My reading of the report on the legacy of slavery didn't reveal any illumination of the theological rationalization-- gymnastics, he says-- in which the enslavers and their beneficiaries would have engaged, considering what I assume to have been that self-centered piety.
And then I'm going to combine that with Bernadette Bruton's question, which she is asking-- Bernadette who was here on the faculty and biblical studies for a good period of time and a brilliant scholar in her own right. Could you please comment on the intellectual role of the Divinity School faculty and Biblical Studies, relevant to these questions?
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, I wish I knew more about this. The real founder of Biblical Studies at Harvard was a man named Andrews Norton. And his-- I wish I could remember the details of his family's story in relation to enslavement. My understanding is that on these issues and many others, he was much more conservative than somebody like Channing.
But I don't want to-- I don't want to say things that I don't know. I think that would be-- I think my approach to this was following the money of Harvard's donors and realizing how much those people were entangled familiarly with certain folks.
But another way to start would be to follow the scholarship. My guess is that Harvard Biblical scholars were not involved-- not as involved as people in some other places in the debates about, say, whether the Bible is a pro or anti-slavery book. But that's only a guess.
And similarly, I'm really appreciative of the questions and see one from John Zato about Indian Ocean enslavement. And I feel like I've just-- this was all new to me when I read the Harvard and the Legacy of Enslavement. And it just opens up this whole world of realities that are just papered over when people say things like China trade.
And it's really exciting at the Divinity School today, that we do have real experts, people like Terence Villa, and the Indian Ocean world, and-- and it would be great to know more deeply how Harvard is entangled in that story.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I'm going to offer a question from Alessandra regarding William Channing. And you highlighted this complexity so thoroughly. So this is Alexandra's question, do you think that William Ellery Channing's decision to not be a self-identified abolitionist was due in large part to his belief that he would not be able to make change if he was identified as such, that he would not be invited to the table with those who were not so outspoken or against slavery?
This feels similar to those who are in favor of the defund the police movement but don't want to use those words for fear of being able to make change as a result.
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, I think-- it would be tempting to read Channing as a brilliant social justice strategist because I think actually many of his actions, in effect, we're kind of strategically brilliant, that he did open up elements of the conversation that were not open to people who took the hardest line positions.
But my impression is that, for him, it was actually-- it was not strategy but was a genuine process of moral evolution deeply colored by familial loyalties. But it's-- yeah, it's a wonderful-- it's a wonderful question for further research.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah. I'm going to ask a very hard one but I-- and I'm going to preface it by personal appreciation for your framing of these responses to moral injury in the context of incredible-- I don't want to say complexity like it's a cop out. I just mean-- what does it mean to really garner a moral imagination and the moral courage? The combination is really critical, I believe, to be able to respond in ways that might be more effective in hindsight, because I think hindsight is the key here.
So Isaac Lassiter asked, I appreciate your analysis of the problem. What actions do you recommend?
DAN MCKANAN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, so I'll start with the action that I highlighted at the end. Because I fundamentally disagree with the Harvard Slavery report's characterization of the endowment as kind of less-- the report identifies a significant share of the endowment as derived from enslavement.
But the report does not clearly name that American capitalism, as such, is founded on enslavement and land theft. And therefore, the endowment, in its entirety, needs to be understood from a reparative point of view. And to me, that demands a fundamental change in who controls the endowment, which is to say, a fundamental change in the Harvard Corporation, which is a group of people who are passed, generation by generation, appointing their own successors.
So as long as that power rests in the hands of people who are appointed by their predecessors, the original sin of its creation remains intact. So I am calling on the Harvard Corporation to hand over its control of the university to some new structure that would be both reparative and Democratic in some profound way.
But that's a little bit easy for me to say because I'm not a member of the corporation. And I don't actually have the power to do that. I guess my invitation to everyone who has benefited from ancestral legacies of white supremacy, whether in the form of personal inheritances or-- as is the case for many more of us-- in the form of institutional allegiances, I think we're obliged to band together to work for reparation and work for democratization of those concentrated forms of wealth everywhere we can.
DIANE MOORE: All right. Thank you.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I just want to say, Dan, thank you. You said that you think-- what you said about the corporation needing to change leadership, it's easy for you two say because you don't have power. I don't think it's easy to say because if it was easy to say, more people would say it.
So I just want to thank you for saying it and note the significance of all that you have shared, specifically, specifically with respect to the call for reparations, so thank you.
DAN MCKANAN: Well, I like to say it because I'd like to find out who agrees. And the only way you can find out is by saying stuff that you're not hearing being said.
DIANE MOORE: Right. I think also we might have I think more time for one more question? Do you have one you want to ask?
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I don't. Dan, you have something-- you have a final thought? Or do you see a question that stands out?
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, just quickly, for people who asked about specific families, there are lots of different Perkins families. Don't assume that any particular Perkins family is related. Whereas, Peabodys, they're all related to one another. But it's really complex. And there's more than one museum at Harbor that has been named after very different Peabodys.
So lots to learn there. Let me-- I'm trying to-- I want to acknowledge Fatima Ibrahim's concern about how we balance the telling of painful stories with the work of healing. Yeah, and also-- I'm sorry. I always make sure who they are-- oh, it was someone who didn't identify themselves who raised the issue of how I balanced the white perspective stories that I was telling with-- the stories of survivors of slavery.
It's really difficult. I don't think any one events can be-all and end-all. We need to have many different conversations. And what I've shared today, I was really following the lead of the stories in the report. And that led me to some places that made me pretty uncomfortable for the reasons that each of those few people, I think, [INAUDIBLE].
DIANE MOORE: Right.
DAN MCKANAN: We all work with this discomfort.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I just saw someone just echo appreciation for Fatima's question or comment in terms of the difficulty of this history and just acknowledge that it is painful. And as I shared in the beginning, we just ask that you take care of yourself and breathe and acknowledge what's happening in your body and what's happening as you are listening to these stories.
But we appreciate your call for us to balance it more. But just know that we hear you. I hear you. And I completely understand it, really, so thank you.
DIANE MOORE: And I just want to thank all of you for joining us, for the people, again, who helped make this possible, and Dan, especially to you, for bringing these stories and the discomfort to the forefront. An answer I have to what to do next is to reckon with our own positionality relevant to these questions. And that you've really laid out a challenge for us to do that and invitation for us to do that,
And I want to say that I'm really grateful. And I want to take you up on that challenge, as a faculty member here at Harvard, to really wrestle with our own benefit of this tragic history and to wrestle with the implications of that in an urgent way. So thank you so much.
And just to reiterate, these are challenging conversations. They're intended to be to raise the urgent questions of what it means to wrestle with these legacies of slavery and the roles that religions can play. So as Melissa said, please connect with each other. Think about these questions. Talk to each other. Breathe, as Melissa always reminds us to do. And to please stay connected with us as we move through the series.
We are taking next week off because it's a holiday. So we will gather again on February 27, two weeks from tonight, when Terrence Johnson, Professor Johnson will be speaking on memory, history, and the ethics of reparations, so a timely topic to continue what you started us off with here, Dan, raising these urgent and important questions.
Thank you all. We hope to see you again in two weeks, and really appreciate your joining us for this series of important and critical conversations. Good night.
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