#  Head and Heart Work: Harvard Divinity Community Spends Year Deeply Engaged with Harvard Legacy of Slavery Report 

 





April 18, 2023

 

 

     ![Participants seated in a circle the Braun Room of Swartz Hall during the October Common Read opening session.](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/10182022-dibcommonreadcircle-900.jpg?itok=D9x3__c_) 

Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, center holding microphone, speaks during the opening session of the 2022-23 Common Read at Harvard Divinity School. Photo by Caroline Cataldo

 



 

On a fall afternoon in November inside Harvard Divinity School’s Swartz Hall, the School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Melissa Wood Bartholomew along with Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Steph Gauchel and their colleagues Professors David Holland and Diane Moore, prepared to lead a small group restorative circle session for the HDS community to discuss the [report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery](https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/report). They arranged chairs in a circle for participants and readied an agenda with multiple questions to pose to attendees.

As the room began to fill, Bartholomew and her colleagues had to arrange more chairs. The original circle they created kept getting bigger and bigger as more and more faculty, staff, and students showed up. Those who attended the event were eager to participate in the discussion. The organizers never got past their opening question: How did reading the report make you feel and how does your positionality impact how you feel?

“You have different people sharing the particularities of their identity, how they feel, their challenges, their emotions, and being vulnerable. It was a very powerful space. We felt a real strong sense of community,” said Bartholomew. “Our restorative approach has resonated with many members of our community and has helped to create heart-centered spaces where people can grapple with these hard truths and this hard history.”

That November event was just one moment during the 2022-23 academic year in which the Divinity School community came together to deeply engage with the Legacy of Slavery report. Moved and motivated by the report and its recommendations, HDS faculty, staff, and students were inspired to use their expertise to deepen the understanding of the complex histories and legacies of slavery as a way to support Harvard University in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them.

The report, [completed by a committee appointed by Harvard President Larry Bacow](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/04/slavery-probe-harvards-ties-inseparable-from-rise/) and released in April 2022, details the University’s deep connections to slavery and to the legacies of slavery into the twentieth century. The report includes several recommendations and the Harvard Corporation established a $100 million fund for their implementation now and in perpetuity.

   ![Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin speaking at a podium.](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/hds2/files/tomiko_brown_nagin_900x600_tony_rinaldo.jpg?itok=sFODAux7) 

 

*Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin speaking during HDS's 2022 Convocation. Photo by Tony Rinaldo*HDS opened the academic year with the report. Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who led the committee that completed the report, spoke about the legacies of slavery when she delivered the Divinity School’s [Convocation address](https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/09/29/video-hds-2022-convocation-legacies-slavery-bondage-and-resistance) in September. The report served as the School’s Common Read for the year, which is the anchor program of the HDS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging’s Reorientation and Common Conversation. The report’s findings and recommendations engendered a variety of offerings at HDS including a new course (“Exploring Racial Justice and Healing through the Life of Harriet A. Jacobs”), a [public event series](https://hds.harvard.edu/news/religion-and-legacies-slavery) exploring the role of religion in the legacies of slavery, a library exhibit that will open later this spring, student-led events, School-wide discussions, and more.

“The work done by members of the Divinity School community to deeply engage with the Legacy of Slavery report this academic year was at times painful and difficult,” said Dean David N. Hempton. “But this work was necessary in order to reckon with the truths laid out in the report, showing us our past and guiding us toward a more just and equitable future. The report serves as an opening toward racial justice and, we hope, a step toward healing.”

For Gauchel, the work of the previous two years engaging with The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice and Red Nation Rising for the Common Read program proved vital to allowing the difficult conversations to take place this academic year. The [final Common Read session](https://hds.harvard.edu/news/public-events-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view=event&eventid=164193090) reflecting on the year’s journey engaging with the report will be held April 24.

“Our overall approach to our DIB work—really centering racial justice and healing—has provided such an important grounding for reading this report. We laid important groundwork over the last few years engaging the community in a restorative justice approach and building a container where we can have these conversations,” said Gauchel. “It created space for people to be vulnerable as we’re focusing not just on the head questions, but the heart questions that are coming up in the report and just humanizing it.”

Humanizing the report was one of the goals for the Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross, MRPL ’23, when he and fellow student, Ahmaad Jahi Edmund, MDiv ’24, created a celebration of life event and reception for one of the people included in the report—Harriet A. Jacobs. Jacobs, who was born into enslavement, and authored the famous memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In the late nineteenth century, Jacobs lived in Cambridge and ran boarding houses that served Harvard students and faculty, including a Harvard Law School Dean.

   ![The Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross raises his arms during a ceremony in Emerson Chapel in Divinity Hall.](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/hds2/files/harriet_jacobs_ceremony_800.jpg?itok=9egH0WUu) 

 

*The Rev. Kevin Kitrell Ross, MRPL '23, center with arms raised, leads a celebration of life for Harriet A. Jacobs. Photo courtesy Kevin Kitrell Ross*During the December event in Emerson Chapel in Divinity Hall, 125 years after her death, students paid tribute to Jacobs, Morehouse College organist David Oliver played songs, and a descendant of one of America’s largest slave trading families participated in a litany of confession, repentance, and repair. The event was part of Ross’s and Edmund’s work for Bartholomew’s course, “Exploring Racial Justice and Healing through the Life of Harriet A. Jacobs.”

“Listening to Harriet or reading Harriet gave us some insight into the psyche, into the sociology, into the physicality of what it meant to be in chattel slavery in the United States of America. It was putting some flesh on the report, humanizing it,” said Ross. “This report is seeking to reconcile and surface the truth. But I think what we can offer from the Divinity School is a comprehensive dive into what is veritas and what are the various forms of it. It’s not just Harvard’s truth, but also the descendants’ truth about it. There’s a lot of truth to be talked about in order to bring this to a place of repair, reconciliation, and reparation.”

Informing and shaping the future by promoting the public understanding of religion in service of a just world at peace is the mission of the Religion and Public Life program at HDS. With that mission in mind, Diane L. Moore, RPL's faculty director, conceived the idea of holding [a series of online public conversations](https://hds.harvard.edu/news/religion-and-legacies-slavery) featuring HDS faculty that would explore the intersections of the study of religion with the legacies of slavery and racism. She approached Bartholomew and other faculty members, and all collaborated to create the six-session webinar entitled “Religion and the Legacies of Slavery.” Building on the growing momentum, the HDS team connected with colleagues across Harvard—including the Office of the Vice Provost for Special Projects, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and HarvardX—and launched the series, which drew over 2,000 total registrants from 75 unique countries.

“The study of religion gives further understanding of the intellectual structures and scaffolding that has persisted and allows for racist reproductions in a variety of disciplines,” said Moore. “What we offer through the Divinity School is language to challenge what appears to be inevitable in historical as well as contemporary moments. We want others outside of religious studies to have language to understand the power of religion because having that knowledge of the relationship between the study of religion and the legacies of slavery is the first step toward being able to dismantle forms of injustice.”

For Bartholomew, the Divinity School’s deep engagement with the report this academic year is part of the necessary groundwork for a vision of creating an HDS Truth, Reconciliation, Healing, and Reparative Justice Commission. It is the hope that it will support the work of healing and repair across Harvard and the United States. The report, she said, calls on all of us to “think and dream big about how we can, as members of the Harvard community, heal and repair the past and current harms rooted in our University’s entanglements with slavery and advancing the pseudo-race science that justified slavery.”

“This is in service of the ongoing work of moving towards a vision of a world healed of racism and oppression,” she said. “Beyond this year, we will continue interrogating this report and discerning our personal and institutional commitments.”

*—by Michael Naughton*



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Ethics ](/discover-stories-about/ethics)
- [ Faculty and Research ](/discover-stories-about/faculty-and-research)
- [ Religious Literacy ](/discover-stories-about/religious-literacy)
- [ Social and Racial Justice ](/discover-stories-about/social-and-racial-justice)
- [ Student Activities and Interviews ](/discover-stories-about/student-activities-and-interviews)
- [ Diversity ](/topic-tags/diversity)
- [ Race ](/topic-tags/race)
- [ Race identity ](/topic-tags/race-identity)
- [ Slavery ](/topic-tags/slavery)
- [ students ](/topic-tags/students)