[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing these related articles to our attention.] The full title of this article by Sophie Gao and Alexandra M. Kluzak (The Harvard Crimson, April 25, 2025/May 4, 2025) is “Harvard Outsourced Its Slavery Research. Then a Former Employee Began Notifying Descendants — Without Its Knowledge.” For more direct information on this project’s discovery of ties to Antigua and Barbuda, read “Harvard Hired a Researcher to Uncover Its Ties to Slavery. He Says the Results Cost Him His Job: ‘We Found Too Many Slaves,’” by Michela Moscufo (The Guardian, June 21, 2025). Here are excerpts from The Harvard Crimson.
Richard J. Cellini directed the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program until he was laid off in January. He’s spent the last three months telling people that Harvard affiliates enslaved their ancestors — without Harvard’s knowledge.
Cellini says his work, unlike Harvard’s, is “independent scholarship” and derides the official effort as “work-for-hire.” He believes Harvard’s decision to not contact descendants until a later stage of the research is just a “relatively silly restriction.”
“What exactly is Harvard waiting for? Who benefits from this policy of control and delay?” Cellini wrote in an email. “If Harvard had your family history in its files, wouldn’t you want to see it immediately?”
In January, Harvard outsourced its own research to American Ancestors, the largest genealogical nonprofit in the country. American Ancestors used to work with Cellini’s team to help construct enslaved individuals’ family trees, but it has now taken over the research in full.
Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich said in February that the University would reach out to descendants with “humility” and establish a “long term relationship.” She added at the time that Harvard wanted descendants “to hear from us first” — a goal that Cellini’s efforts may render impossible. Cellini is just one of several parties researching Harvard’s historical ties to slavery, though he is the only one doing it in such a bold, unsanctioned manner.
In 2022, Harvard launched an initiative to reckon with its ties to slavery on the recommendation of its landmark Legacy of Slavery report. It joined institutions like Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Brown University in redressing its historical ties to slavery.
Before the outsourcing, Harvard’s internal team had identified at least 913 enslaved individuals and 403 of their living descendants. Both American Ancestors and HSRP researchers have that full list. Cellini, who directed HSRP, denies ever having access — but he’s searching for new names.
And there are at least three other groups doing the same work. Some aren’t focused on Harvard alone, researching enslavers in the Boston area or at the colonial colleges more broadly. But the University is implicated in each. The searches could have far-reaching consequences — on the lives of the people who learn they might be descended from someone enslaved by Harvard affiliates, and on the institutional responsibility some of them may demand of the University.
At other schools, similar work has led to reparative measures; Georgetown, for example, gives preferential treatment in admissions to the descendants of enslaved people owned by the Society of Jesus’ Maryland Province — 272 of whom were sold to pay off the school’s debts. [. . .]
Harvard’s initiative wasn’t Cellini’s first foray into descendant research.
Before the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, Cellini founded the Georgetown Memory Project, an independent initiative that traced the descendants of enslaved individuals sold to pay off the school’s debts.
At Harvard, unlike Georgetown, Cellini started off with the school’s backing. He was recruited to identify people enslaved by the University’s faculty, staff, and leadership, as well as their direct descendants. Yet, even as he worked for Harvard, he didn’t hesitate to criticize the institution.
Cellini alleged on several occasions that, as HSRP’s director, Bleich instructed him “not to find too many descendants.” After his team was laid off in January, he wrote in a Crimson op-ed that Harvard had “flunked History of Slavery 101.” Harvard has vehemently denied Cellini’s accusations, saying no such directive had been issued.
Now, Cellini hopes to replicate what he did at Georgetown by starting an “independent, privately funded” inquiry into Harvard’s historical ties to slavery. He plans to name it “slaverytruth.org,” though the domain is currently empty.
Cellini called his new research effort “version 2.0 of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program.” He said he has reached out to nearly 50 descendants so far and he views the initiative as a “collaborative exercise” with them. “Best practice calls for radical transparency in the research process,” Cellini added in response to an emailed follow-up. “Harvard should contact descendants as soon as they have been identified and not wait until ‘the effort to identify them is further along.’”
Technically, Cellini is still a Harvard affiliate despite his distaste for the institution. After he was terminated as HSRP’s director, he remained an associate of Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, though he emphasized in a text that he is “NOT a member of staff.”
And though he has condemned Harvard’s new partnership, he also maintains ties with American Ancestors. Since 2023, Cellini has been the founding executive director of American Ancestors’ 10 Million Names project, which aims to identify every African American enslaved in the United States.
[. . .] University spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly emphasized in a statement that Cellini’s effort was unsanctioned: “Any direct descendant research or engagement being done outside of our partnership with American Ancestors has not been authorized by the University,” she wrote.
‘Cousin Richard’
For Cellini, his outreach serves two purposes: to let people know and to further his work. In many cases, Cellini said, you can’t obtain personal information like birth, death, and marriage certificates for research “unless you’re talking to the family itself.” After identifying descendants, Cellini finds their contact information through sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and relies on word of mouth to expand his outreach. In his view, descendants are not just subjects — they’re potential partners. But, he said, they don’t always respond immediately and often do so with “a lot of suspicion and a lot of mistrust.”
When he first speaks to them, Cellini said, they often pause after he tells them about their ancestors: “You can just feel the ice breaking and the conversation goes from complete silence to genuine curiosity.”
Descendant families have varied reactions and none, he said, “jump for joy” after learning that a Harvard affiliate enslaved their ancestor. So, he tries to build trust with descendants to help get “the vital information” he needs. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/25/slavery-notifying-descendants
[Photo above from the Bettmann Archive: Photographs of enslaved people in the US, possibly the oldest known in the country, were discovered in the basement of a Harvard University museum in 1977. For more information, see The Guardian.]
Also read “Harvard Hired a Researcher to Uncover Its Ties to Slavery. He Says the Results Cost Him His Job: ‘We Found Too Many Slaves,’” by Michela Moscufo https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/21/harvard-slavery-decendants-of-the-enslaved
“A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative
A research team’s abrupt layoff sparks wider concerns about the University project.”
Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine, January 29, 2025, updated March 6, 2025
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harvard-legacy-of-slavery-layoffs
“In Antigua and Barbuda, Legacy of Slavery Initiative Identifies Hundreds More Enslaved by Harvard Affiliates” Sophie Gao and Alexandra M. Kluzak, The Harvard Crimson, January 17, 2025
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/1/17/harvard-slavery-remembrance-program-antigua-barbuda