The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction
Christopher Newman remembers seeing campus police officers as he walked into a human resources office at Harvard University, but he didn’t imagine that they were there for him.
It was July 2024, and Newman had just turned in the results of a two-month-long internship with the Harvard University Archives: an annotated bibliography for the landmark 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative report, which detailed the university’s ties to slavery across three centuries. He completed his project on Friday, 26 July, and on Monday, he said he received an email that HR wanted to meet with him.
After that meeting, the officers escorted Newman out of the building, told him he was banned from campus and denied his request to collect his belongings from his office, he told the Guardian. He said he was told that a flight back home was booked for that afternoon. “I was asking too many questions,” Newman said, “veering off of the proverbial beaten path”.
Newman knew he had ruffled some feathers during his internship. At an event at a local history museum, he had met members of the Lloyd family – descendants of people enslaved by a Harvard benefactor and trafficked from Antigua to Cambridge, Massachusetts – and struck up an acquaintance. Over the course of several meetings with library staff and other interns after meeting the Lloyds, Newman said he brought up the island of Antigua multiple times.
