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.