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A nearly six-decade-old initiative to digitize records of the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trades is moving to Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the University announced earlier this month.
The initiative, called SlaveVoyages, is currently housed at Rice University and contains records of nearly 221,000 people involved in the slave trade. After undergoing a multi-year transition process, the project will live at Harvard “in perpetuity,” Hutchins Center Director Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. said at a conference while announcing the move.
Emory University professor emeritus David Eltis, a founding member of SlaveVoyages, said the University’s takeover of the project was “a bit of a lifesaver” after financial uncertainty created by the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding.
SlaveVoyages has received approximately $550,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities since February 2022. This month, the Trump administration slashed more than 1,200 of the organization’s grants and has shown no signs of stopping its larger assault on higher education.
Rice professor Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, who manages SlaveVoyages at Rice, said Harvard had found a donor to support the project and that it will have its own endowment to “sustain the project indefinitely in the future.”
Harvard is a longtime backer of the SlaveVoyages project. Domingues da Silva said Harvard “was the main supporter of the project” when the first version, hosted on a CD-ROM, was distributed in 1999. In 2022, it joined a six-institution consortium that helps finance the effort.
“We feel the project is now going back to its original home,” he added.
The Hutchins Center will “intermediate the dialogue” between scholars contributing research to the project, web developers maintaining the technical elements of the database, and external funding agencies, according to Domingues da Silva. Harvard will select an internal director to replace Domingues da Silva in 2027, he said.
“By cofunding the project with the Hutchins Center, the initiative can help amplify knowledge-sharing and visibility, empower scholars and students worldwide, while also reaffirming our commitment to truth,” Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich said in a University press release. Bleich oversees Harvard’s internal initiative to reckon with its historical ties to slavery.
Domingues da Silva said the initiative also hopes to expand its efforts to track the slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Asia while at Harvard.
University of Texas in San Antonio professor Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, a former Hutchins Center fellow and SlaveVoyages contributor, said the project helped researchers determine that 12.5 million Africans left the continent on slave ships and that 10.5 million of them actually arrived in the Americas.
“Before the existence of the database, everything was based on speculation,” he 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.
