All Rev'd Up: Harvard Should Be Leading On Reparations But Lags Behind

Colleges Slavery Reparations — In this Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019 photo passers-by walk near an entrance to a building at Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Mass. A cluster of commitments to atone for historical ties to slavery marks new territory in a reckoning at U.S. colleges that have responded up until now with monuments, building names changes and public apologies.

Hannah Uebele is a producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley and previously worked as associate producer for Boston Public Radio. She graduated from Tufts University with a B.S. in English and Environmental Studies. She's a proud Delawarean but has found herself saying "wicked" more and more often, so the Bostonian metamorphosis is well underway.Contact: hannah_uebele@wgbh.org

March 23, 2021

Updated August 07, 2023

Students and advocates are calling on Harvard University to acknowledge its role in slavery and offer reparations to people who have been historically marginalized.

The Rev. Irene Monroe and the Rev. Emmett G. Price III spoke to Boston Public Radio on Tuesday about the growing number of colleges beginning to do restitution work for descendants of enslaved people and other underrepresented groups.

Harvard is currently undertaking a $5 million initiative to examine its history with slavery, Price and Monroe said. But many say it's not enough and that Harvard lags behind the efforts of other universities.

"With all the enormous wealth of Harvard, they should be the leader in showing many of these other institutions how to not only rehabilitate and restore relationships, but to do the reparative work which includes reparations, financially and emotionally," Price said.

Monroe pointed to Evanston, Illinois, which on Monday became the first city in the country to enact reparations.

"While a city can't be a model for Harvard, it says it can be done," Monroe said. "The way that we can move forward and address this inflection point that we're in is to really seriously enact reparations."

Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist, the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Price is a professor of worship, church and culture and founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Together they host the All Rev’d Up podcast, produced by GBH.