Portraits of black Harvard law profs are defaced
Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s portrait was defaced by black tape, along with the portraits of other black law professors. Photo from the Twitter feed of Harvard Law 3L Jonathan Wall.
Harvard law students are expressing frustration and sadness after learning on Thursday that portraits of black law professors had been defaced with black tape.
Harvard University police opened an investigation, and Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow held a meeting attended by at least 350 people, according to student tweets. The Boston Globe, WCVB5, Think Progress and the Business Insider have stories.
“This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime,” first-year law student Michele Hall wrote at Blavity. “The portraits of black professors, the ones that bring me and so many other black students feelings of pride and promise, were defaced. Their faces were covered with a single piece of black tape.”
The vandalism occurred a day after Harvard students marched to support students on other campuses who are seeking racial justice.
Minow wrote to students that she was “saddened and angered by this act.” Students reacted by adding Post-It notes next to the portraits that voiced support for the faculty members.
During the meeting called by Minow, students said they felt psychologically unsafe and expressed frustration, according to tweets by law student Kendra Albert. Some students talked about a campaign to change a coat of arms on Harvard’s seal because it belongs to the Royall family, who first made their fortunes through slave plantations in Antigua. It was Isaac Royall Jr. who bequeathed part of his estate to Harvard to found the first law professorship.
Students have added post-its with positive notes about the faculty members whose portraits were defaced. pic.twitter.com/m026DVs4DD
— Kendra Albert (@KendraSerra) November 19, 2015The students opposing the seal wrote an open letter to Minow on Wednesday at the Harvard Law Record. Isaac Royall Jr. and his family were responsible for the torture and murder of 88 slaves in Antigua in the mid-1730s, a bid to remind enslaved people of the supremacy of slaveholders, the students wrote.
“Thus, Harvard Law School was founded on the exploited labor, broken bones, and ashes of enslaved human beings,” the open letter said. “The law school adopted the Royall family coat of arms as its crest in 1936 as part of a fundraising campaign. The law school existed without this crest for almost 120 years, and has only borne this symbol of racial atrocities for the past 79 years.”
The Royall Chair of Law is still a named professorial position at Harvard Law. It is currently held by Janet Halley, who delivered a speech with extensive details about the Royall family’s slave-holding legacy when she accepted the appointment in 2006. For example, in 1737, the family burned their overseer Hector alive in retaliation for his supposed role in a thwarted slave rebellion.
