The Harvard Corporation will change the shield of the Harvard Law School because of its association with a slave-owning family.
The Harvard Law shield, adopted in 1936, incorporated the coat of arms of Issac Royall, whose endowment helped establish the school.
But the Royall family fortune was built on slave labor, and earlier this month a committee of faculty and students recommended the shield be changed.
Law School Dean Martha Minnow endorsed the recommendation, and today the Harvard corporation, which has authority on this issue, released a statement informing the school they could stop using the old shield. The hope is to have a new shield in time for the school’s bicentennial in 2017.
