The Descendants of Harvard Slaves Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah should be Harvard Legacies

In 2017 a plaque on the side of Wadsworth house was dedicated to four slaves who lived and worked at Harvard. I happened upon the ceremony, presided over by Harvard President Drew Faust, and a crowd of spectators, and reporters on my way to get coffee on break. Being African American, myself, I was intrigued by the history of slavery being memorialized at world famous Harvard University, where I've worked for over 20 years. One of the names, Titus, was very familiar to me. It was my grandfather's name, passed down to my father, and brother as a middle name, and given to another of my brothers as a first name. The plaque reads:

Titus & Venus

Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of
President Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-1737)

Juba & Bilhah

Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of
President Edward Holyoke (1737-1769)

This simple plaque serves to memorialize a tragic history that was the basis of the American economy nearly 300 years: the forced and uncompensated labor of black people in order to enrich their white owners, and the establishment of the racial caste system, opening up opportunities to white people, and closing them off to black people, resulting in the cumulative enrichment of white society, which depended on the exploitation and corresponding impoverishment of black society. Slavery and racism became the foundation of a false meritocracy.

These four individuals' lives symbolize the lives of untold numbers of enslaved people of Harvard, but who were they as people? It is likely that their lives were entirely consumed by their identity as enslaved people, as opposed to a chosen occupation of work, and that is how they are commemorated. But still I wonder what they dreamed about, living as enslaved domestics at a prominent institute of higher learning. Could they read and write? Did they yearn for knowledge and education? Did they seek freedom for themselves and their children, or accept their fate as a condition of survival? It is worth noting that around the time of their enslavement at Harvard, 1755, two slaves, Mark and Phillis, were publicly executed in Cambridge for conspiring to murder their master, Captain John Codman. In Edward Holyoke's diary there is an account of four slaves running away from their owner, Mr. Davis, and a slave murdering his master, Dr. Griffin. All around Venus and Titus, Juba and Bilhah there were pockets of active resistance.

Very little is documented about these slaves' lives. There is no documentation of a relationship between Titus and Venus, except that of being enslaved to the same family. Venus is described in Wadsworth's journal as a "negro wench" who was in service to Wadsworth's wife. The account of her purchase by Benjamin Wadsworth is as follows: "Oct. 25. 1726. I bought a Negro Wench (thôt to be under 20 years old) of mr Bulfinch of Boston, Sail-maker, was to give 85 pounds for her; she came to our house at Cambridge this day, I paid no money down for her, but was to pay in a few months...I saw not her Husband, thô he had been discours’d wth before." President Wadsworth’s servant Titus was described as a Wampanoag Indian in First Church records, where he was one of only two non-white people permitted to participate in communion (First Church Cambridge), but his privileges were limited. Faculty notes from 1740 contain a decision to "forbid students from associating with Titus, a 'Molattoe slave of the late Reverend President Wadsworth.'" He was not permitted to enter the Harvard campus after President Wadsworth died, or to be sent there on errands. (Harvard University, Early Faculty Minutes, 1725-1806).

Though the names Juba and Bilhah are paired on the plaque, they likely did not work in Holyoke's household at the same time. Juba's name appears around 1748, and does not appear in Holyoke's journal in any weigh ins with Bilhah. He likely left before Bilhah came to live in the Wadsworth household. He was married to a slave owned by a Harvard professor named Ciceely, and there are several journal entries of him acommpanying Holyoke family members on various errands. Bilhah's name appears several times in President Holyoke's diary, as part of a list of annual weights of individual members of the household including both his family members and the slaves. There is one entry documenting that she gave birth to a son, on October 31, 1761, though there is no male member of household who appears to be her partner. The next entry where her name appears, the household is weighed, and the infant is not listed. The last entry April 24, 1764 is of her death, three years after giving birth. Who was the father of Bilhah's child? What happened to Bilhah's son? Did he belong to her or the Holyoke family? Did he stay with his mother in the Holyoke family as an infant, or was he sold as a capital asset? Who mourned Bilhah when she died?

These scant details about the lives of Titus, Venus, Juba, and Bilhah inspire curiosity, especially in this era of ancestry research and DNA analysis. How do we fill in the blanks in their stories? What country were their ancestors from? What customs did they leave behind? What were their original names? What names did their descendants adopt? Who are their descendants? How did the legacy of the enslavement of Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah impact the lives of their descendants? Are they living in poverty today, or have they achieved the "American Dream"? Perhaps if we could find the descendants of these four slaves, Harvard could make meaningful reparations to them, and restore some of the fruits of their labor back to their families.

There is a book on archive.org called Fair Harvard: A Story of American College Life by William Tucker Washburn. This book gives a much clearer picture about what life might have been like for slaves on campus. There are stories of sumptuous feasts being served by slaves, slaves acting roles for the amusement of their masters, and one appalling story of a slave, nicknamed "The Infant" because of his immense size, chained up and made drunk, then having a dog attack him to the mirth of the students: "The infant had just reason enough left in him to spring back for dear life, when snap went the dog's chain: and as the slave, forgetting that he was bound, turned to run, the dog's teeth buried themselves deep in the the fleshiest part of his person." It's unclear if this is autobiographical or historical fiction. In the wake of the college admissions scandal where wealthy parents paid admissions officers to help falsify qualifications for their coddled offspring, I think ancestors who sacrificed their bodies and lives to slave labor for the benefit of the Harvard community, are worth at least as much as ancestors who profited from that, and donated a few million dollars for a campus building.

Racism, it's Not Against the Law

Our nation has become immune to shock since President Trump, with the "Make America Great Again" mandate, has taken office. While listening to Michael Cohen's testimony this past week on MSNBC I learned that Trump used 129 million dollars in public money to pay for a Trump Links golf course in The Bronx, aside from the other little things his supporters have already dismissed, tax evasion, using charity money to pay for expensive self aggrandizing portraits, colluding with a foreign government to sway an election, paying mistresses for their silence, close to 500 instances of threatening enemies, and racist comments. What really struck me was that the commentators during the break in testimony in the context of Trump's myriad of illegal acts, dismissed his racist comments as "not against the law."

Not having committed a felony should be the lowest common denominator for the leader of our country, as it would be for a cashier at McDonald's. Moral and intellectual fitness should be equally important as a clean criminal record. Of course racism is not against the law. We have freedom of speech in the constitution, the wealth of our nation was built on the backs of black slaves, and for centuries our laws enforced slavery and white supremacy. Racism enforces this legacy. The evolution of social conscience, activism, and civil disobedience has gradually changed the laws to protect the rights of black people, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ population. Changing the law is only one component of sharing power equally. The law does not punish racism, or even racist acts that cause harm, unless it is enforced.

Racism was incorporated into the law in the American colonies as a strategy to divide the races and render the lower classes less powerful against the ruling class. During Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, people of all classes and races united against Governor William Berkeley, driving him from Jamestown, and setting the capitol on fire. Following the rebellion, the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 by the Virginia House of Burgesses prohibited black people, regardless of free status, from owning weapons, black people could not employ white people, court protections were established for a free and legal slave trade, and the apprehension of suspected runaway slaves . The codification of a "white identity" encouraged lower class white people to think they had more in common with the white ruling class than they had with black people. Racism became the fuel to make the lower classes do the bidding of the ruling class.

Almost two hundred years later, in 1857, the Dred Scott Decision in the United States Supreme Court case, Scott v. Sandford, a slave, Dred Scott, attempted to purchase his freedom for himself and his family, but his master refused. After moving through a series of lower courts, his case reached the Supreme Court, presided over by Judge Roger Taney, where in a 7-2 decision it ruled against Dred Scott, establishing that black people, whether free or slave, could not be United States citizens, and could not sue in court, the right to own slaves as property was affirmed in the constitution, and slaves, even if transported to free states by their owners, would remain slaves. Written into this decision was that slaves were an “inferior and subordinate class of being,” and that a permanent and intractable barrier should be erected between slaves (black people) and the white race. Judge Taney summed it up with the infamous quote that black people, whether slaves or former slaves, and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Following the passage of the 13th amendment (1865), which freed the slaves, the 14th amendment (1868), which granted them full citizenship, and the 15th amendment (1870)which gave them the right to vote, full equality was still out of reach. In reaction to these Federal amendments, local and state “Jim Crow laws” perpetuated the legacy of racism for almost another century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal segregation and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.

The election of the first black United States president, Barack Obama was a sign of progress, but if you think we live in a post-racial society, consider how different the national reaction would have been if he had been alleged to have committed any one of the crimes or moral transgressions attributed to President Trump in the Senate Hearings, or if he had been alleged to have made "lawful," constitutionally protected racist comments against white people. The United States was founded on legally enforced racist white supremacy. So saying “racism is not against the law” is a bit of an understatement. The law should not be the only yardstick for what is morally right, as it is only a reflection of the values of the people currently in power. Change did not happen because the people in power willingly relinquished it. People demanded and fought for change, protested, and disobeyed unjust laws. The laws may have evolved to protect the people it originally exploited for free labor, but the attitudes that created those laws still exist. As the case of President Trump illustrates, laws are for the little people, not for the powerful, and they are selectively enforced to maintain the status quo.