Antiguan Ambassador Calls on Harvard to Pay ‘Slavery Reparations’
20th October 2016
Sir Ronald Sanders, the Ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United states, has called upon Harvard University to pay reparations to Antiguans.
Roughly two centuries ago, a man named Isaac Royall, Jr. left land in his will for Harvard to endow a professorship of law, physics, or anatomy. Harvard chose to use this endowment to create a professorship of law which eventually became the foundation for Harvard’s law school.
The Harvard Crimson reports that the “The Royalls were a prominent slave-owning family in the small Caribbean country in the early 18th century” and that Royall, Jr.’s wealth “derived from the Massachusetts farms and a sugar plantation in Antigua he had inherited from his father—properties that relied on and profited from slave labor.
Ambassador Sanders sent a letter to Harvard’s university president last week claiming that some Antiguans are descendants of slaves owned by the Royall family.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.