Racism at Harvard: months after protests began, students demand concrete change

Racism at Harvard: months after protests began, students demand concrete change

"For 80 years the family crest of the brutal slaveholder Isaac Royall Jrserved as the official seal of the prestigious Harvard Law School.

Royall, whose endowment founded HLS in 1817, once instructed that 77 enslaved Africans be burned alive at the stake for an insurrection on his family’s Antigua sugar plantation.

In March, student protesters at Harvard notched a decisive victory in their fight to “decolonize” their campus, when administrators announced they would retire the Royall family seal, citing “the prospect that its imagery might evoke associations with slavery”.

Two months later, many of the students who pushed for the change say the decision is bittersweet. The removal of the seal sends a message, they say, but it doesn’t do enough to address the currents of racism on campus.

Portraits of black Harvard Law School professors defaced after campus rally

“In terms of our broader goals of anti-racism on campus it represents probably the easiest thing they could have done,” said Alexander Clayborne, a third-year law student and one of the organizers of the Royall Must Fall campaign to have the seal removed. “It’s the thing they can do that’s probably going to create the least amount of institutional change.”