Reparations for Black Americans? Harvard case shows history’s horror



















  • In 1783, Belinda Sutton, a woman formerly enslaved to wealthy Harvard benefactor Isaac Royall, petitioned Massachusetts for reparations, illuminating what many historians see as the long-fought battle for reparations that continues today.
  • Between the university’s founding in 1636 and the end of slavery in the commonwealth in 1783, Harvard faculty, staff, and leaders enslaved more than 70 individuals.
  • The Royall family generated a sizable portion of their wealth from a plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

Near the close of the American Revolution, Belinda Sutton told of how enslavers snatched her from her parents at around 12 in an African hallowed grove, transported her across the Atlantic Ocean, and bound her to Harvard benefactor Isaac Royall, Jr. 

Sutton, by then a free woman, shared her story as part of a 1783 reparations petition to the Massachusetts General Court after decades of “ignoble servitude.”