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{shortcode-7b0d78f749b7c9782f39de42e5139c59e2b30f27}ichard 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 Cellini have that full list — and they’re working to find more.

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.

With Harvard’s internal team disbanded, its research being shared, and the effort happening in at least five places, it remains to be seen how the work will conclude — and by whom.

HSRP ‘2.0’

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.

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Cellini said he is open to working with Harvard and that he has contacted several affiliates about collaborating on descendant research. However, he has not attempted to notify University administrators about his descendant outreach or asked to collaborate with them on that effort.

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. Without their trust, he claimed, “they might give you misinformation just to throw you off the track.”

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Cellini believes his public statements on Harvard — in his opinion pieces and to reporters — will help build trust with descendants when they Google him after his outreach.

“Some people said, ‘Well, why when you were HSRP director did you write op-eds that were critical of the administration?’ And I would say, ‘Well, those op-eds weren’t written for the Harvard administration. They were written for tens of thousands of Black families across the country who will ultimately make a decision whether or not they trust me,’” Cellini said.

“One way I can demonstrate that I’m trustworthy is by publicly declaring my principles and my approach to this work even at the cost of potentially offending members of Harvard’s central administration,” he added, referring to both his op-eds and his statements to reporters.

For Cellini, this trust is more than professional — it is personal. Cellini said he’s built “dozens” of close relationships with the descendants of enslaved people through his work at Georgetown and Harvard. Many of them, he added, are now his “Black cousins.”

“Frequently, they call me ‘cuz,’ and I call them ‘cuz.’ So, they’ll call me cousin Richard,” said Cellini, who is white. “We become some part of the extended family at that point.”

He said Harvard’s “segmented, stratified” research process — taking place without actively reaching out to descendants — was not “very human or very natural” by contrast.

“You can’t really study Black families without engaging with Black families,” he said. “It would be like studying cancer without engaging with cancer or it would be like studying art without engaging with art. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.”

For instance, Cellini said descendant families sometimes have “kin keepers,” often middle-aged women that maintain the family’s history and can help fill gaps in his research.

Cellini declined to answer questions about which descendants he had contacted or to share any of their contacts with The Crimson, citing privacy concerns.

Efforts Outside Harvard

But Cellini isn’t the only outside researcher interested in Harvard’s legacy of slavery.

A group at the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute, which includes several Harvard affiliates, has also made forays into Harvard’s legacy of slavery, and they plan to publish a report later this summer.

Their research is being conducted in collaboration with the descendants of Tony, Cuba, and Darby Vassall, who were enslaved by the Vassall family of Cambridge. The Vassall family, which consisted of several Harvard alums, owned several plantations in the Caribbean which relied on enslaved laborers.

The project aims to catalog the history of “enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals” at Longfellow House, according to a document obtained by The Crimson. The house, built for John Vassall Jr., was briefly George Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War and was the longtime home of famed poet and Harvard professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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Their project lists the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative as one of its partners, according to the document.

The team, led by Harvard African and African American Studies lecturer Carla D. Martin, has visited Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda, where the Vassall family enslaved individuals at sugar, rum, and cacao plantations.

Martin declined to be interviewed for this article, citing funding uncertainty and a desire to get permission to publicize from descendants.

F. Warren “Ned” Benton, a co-director of the Northeast Slavery Records Index, is also interested in studying Harvard’s ties to slavery.

His initiative, housed at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is trying to identify those enslaved by the alumni of the colonial colleges, including Harvard. NESRI publishes its findings on its website, including a report specifically about individuals enslaved by Harvard alums.

Benton said the project’s “whole attitude is towards transparency” and that, because it is funded through grants and an endowment that supports its technological needs, it is set up “to be resilient and survivable.”

Though NESRI focuses on Harvard alums as opposed to Harvard faculty, staff, and leadership — as Harvard itself is focusing on — there is considerable overlap between those groups.

And a third effort is from the government itself.

In 2023, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 convened a task force on reparations, composed of six prominent lawyers and activists. The group aims to trace the impacts of slavery on the city since 1638.

Historical researchers at Tufts University and Northeastern University will compile a report for the task force, which its members will then consult to provide recommendations for “reparative justice solutions for Black residents.”

Wayne W. Tucker, a former HSRP researcher who is now working with the task force, said that even though the work isn’t focused on Harvard, it is “absolutely” related “given that almost all of the upper class white people in Boston and the surrounding area were Harvard alumni or Harvard overseers or whatever.”

“It’s impossible to talk about slavery in Boston and not talk about people affiliated with Harvard,” Tucker said.

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.