How Harvard’s Reparations Plan Flopped

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 committee, chaired by Harvard Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, ultimately produced a 134-page report confirming the ugly truth that Harvard, like many institutions in the North, was run by slaveowners—among them four university presidents—and that its professors had advanced so-called race science, including eugenics, to justify the trade. The report, issued in 2022, called on the school to “take responsibility for its past” and “leverage its strengths in the pursuit of meaningful repair.”