From The Free Press: In June 2019, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared before a congressional committee to make the case for reparations. Advancing an argument he’d laid out in The Atlantic years earlier, Coates contended that America owed a debt to its black citizens not just for slavery but for generations of plundered wealth. Over the next few years, the issue had grown in visibility, and slogans like “Black Lives Matter” had entered mainstream political discourse. “It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery,” Coates told the committee. Six months later, Harvard University took up the cause when Harvard president Lawrence Bacow convened a faculty committee to excavate the university’s historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
...The university then established what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” which aimed to “remedy harms to descendants, to our community and the nation, and to campus life and learning.” It committed an extraordinary $100 million to the initiative and promoted Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy, to vice provost for special projects to shepherd the effort.
...One of the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s first hires was a man named Richard J. Cellini. His job was to find those descendants. At that point, Harvard had identified 79 individuals who had been enslaved by university affiliates, but it had yet to locate a single living relative. “I don’t think Harvard really understood what they were getting themselves into,” Cellini told me. Cellini, 62, is not the sort of person you might expect to do this kind of work. He describes himself as an “Eisenhower Republican” rather than a “social justice warrior.” Genealogy, which is now his avocation, came to him late in life. He began his career as a lawyer on Wall Street, and then spent three decades “growing and selling” technology companies.
...Harvard soon discovered that Cellini was a forceful advocate for his work, determined to find as many descendants as he could, no matter the consequences. Meanwhile, Harvard was clearly getting nervous about the potential scope of his efforts. ...[Harvard's] anxiety was not entirely irrational. Every name Cellini added to the ledger represented a potential claim on Harvard’s commitment. Cellini pushed to enlarge the list of potential beneficiaries by including the names of slaves owned by members of the university’s governing boards—a category administrators had debated. He won that debate—and the pool grew accordingly. A research trip to Antigua, following the discovery of several hundred individuals enslaved there by Harvard affiliates between the 17th and 19th centuries, yielded an additional hundred names from public archives. Cellini and his team also met with Antigua’s prime minister and discussed opportunities for collaboration between the university and the island nation, a conversation that likely did little to reassure Harvard administrators about the project’s scope.
...Shortly after Cellini and his team returned from Antigua in January 2025, they were all fired by Harvard. The university subsequently outsourced the work to American Ancestors, a New England genealogical nonprofit now on a three-year contract. Harvard has declined to provide a specific rationale for the change. American Ancestors has denied that the university has imposed any constraints on their research...
...Harvard, like any institution invested in its own survival, is not about to bankrupt itself. Its effort will likely follow the well-worn path of local reparations programs across the country: introduced with a bang and then quietly abandoned as the logistics and finances prove untenable...
Full story at https://www.thefp.com/p/harvard-reparations-plan-failure.
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