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Harvard University has a longstanding history of academic excellence as the first institution of higher education in America. Harvard also has a less proud history of slaveholding within its administration. At least three past Harvard presidents are known to have owned enslaved people, and slaves were also forced to work on Harvard campus. Recently, Harvard has made efforts to uncover its slaveholding past. Listen to this story that describes Harvard’s initiatives to research the details of its past injustices, and commemorate the enslaved people Harvard once owned.
Story Length: 6:08
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January 21, 2014
7:26
Kate Byroade knew her family once owned slaves. She feels uncomfortable acknowledging that her ancestors dominated other people, but she knows that the story is important. As Kate has learned more about her family’s past, it has become increasingly personal for her and hard to reconcile. For instance, she felt troubled when she learned that an ancestor once owned an 8-year-old child. Listen to this story to hear more about how Kate thinks about her family’s slave-owning past.
Read MoreDecember 4, 2013
4:26
Slavery is a horror of history. The capture and transportation of human beings from Africa to North America through the Middle Passage is an experience that is hard to imagine. First-person slave narratives were the first honest account of the experience and were used by the abolitionist movements in Britain and the United States to show the reality of slavery. Listen to learn more about the first-person account of freed slave Olaudah Equiano, shared in his autobiography in 1789.
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