Harvard Removes Seal Tied To Slavery


Harvard Law School is removing its seal, which is connected to slavery, reports the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The seal, which depicts three wheat sheaves below the word “Veritas” (Latin for truth) written over three books, is based on the coat of arms of the Royall family. Isaac Royall, Jr., who was a slave trader and owned a plantation in Antigua, gave a bequest which established Harvard Law.

In October of 2015, Harvard students began the campaign to remove the seal. Writing an open letter to the Harvard Law School Dean, a group called “Royall Must Fall” spelled out their objections to the Harvard Law seal.

“Physical symbols are an expression of who we are and what we value as a community. The most ubiquitous of these symbols, the seal—which adorns all of our buildings, apparel, stationery, and diplomas—honors a slaver and murderer.”

[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
According to the ACJ, Harvard students also “held several demonstrations throughout the school year calling for the removal of the shield among other things, including occupying a law school lounge for several days and protesting in the dean’s office.”

The Dean, Martha Minow, released a statement on March 14, shortly after the Harvard Corporation approved the removal of the seal.

“We cannot choose our history but we can choose that for which we stand. Above all, we rededicate ourselves to the hard work of eradicating not just symbols of injustice but injustice itself.”

The decision to remove the Harvard Law seal comes shortly after Harvard University voted to replace the title “house master” with “faculty dean” as reported by the Inquisitr. It was felt that the former had recognizable links with slavery.

[Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images]
[Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images]
It is an unfortunate fact that many of the nation’s oldest universities have strong connections with slave-owning families. Only the wealthiest of families could afford to establish a university such as Harvard, or bequeath enough money to do so. Until the Civil War, many of the nation’s richest families received income, at least in part, from activities related to slavery.

As reported by the Chicago Tribune, “campuses across the United States and overseas are debating whether historic symbols, statues and names should be removed because of their ties to racism, or whether that would amount to erasing the past.”

Recently students at Oxford University in England attempted to get a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed. Rhodes was a British colonist who took large swathes of land in the “Scramble for Africa” and paved the way for apartheid. While Rhodes remains at Oriel College, Oxford, his statue at the University of Cape Town in South Africa has been boarded up.

The sense of “erasing the past” that enables Rhodes to remain in Oxford had many Harvard alumni resisting the removal of the seal, “a well-known symbol of the powerful and prestigious institution which educated legendary Supreme Court justices and President Obama…”

Royall Must Fall created their own version of the Harvard seal, showing slaves stooping under the weight of the wheat sheaves, and matched it with a hastag #reclaimharvard.

The Harvard Law seal has already been removed from the school’s social media accounts, but it will take until April to remove all the seals on campus, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In the Harvard Corporation’s letter to Dean Minow, Harvard President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow William Lee wrote of the importance of recognizing the past and moving on from it. The removal of the Harvard Law seal is an important step toward reconciling the past.

“Modern institutions must acknowledge their past associations with slavery, not to assign guilt, but to understand the pervasiveness of the legacy of slavery and its continuing impact on the world in which we live…the School will actively explore other steps to recognize rather than to suppress the realities of its history, mindful of our shared obligation to honor the past not by seeking to erase it, but rather by bringing it to light and learning from it.”

[Photo by Chitose Suzuki/AP Images]

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