Antigua and Barbuda Asks Harvard University for Slavery Reparations

Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, called on Harvard University “to demonstrate its remorse and its debt to unnamed slaves from Antigua and Barbuda” whose lives were abused to establish the Harvard Law School (HLS), reported Caribbean News Now earlier this month.

In a letter to Professor Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, Sanders recalled that the bequest of Isaac Royall Jr to Harvard College in 1781 for the first endowed professorship of law in 1815 came from the labor of human beings enslaved on Royall’s plantation in Antigua.

The ambassador said he was sure “that Harvard University, like all other institutions with a consciousness of right, has been inspired by the recent acknowledgment and atonement by Georgetown University for the sale of 272 human beings in 1838 to save the University from collapse.”