Harvard’s institutional wealth was built on Southern slave labor and cotton

Evidence

In his report, Mark wrote: “Harvard was literally giving aid and comfort to a belligerent enemy, the nascent Confederacy and those Southern slave-owners whose: (1) primitive, pre-industrial plantation economy would have collapsed in short order without African-American slave labor; and (2) whose primary crop, the World’s finest and most sought-after cotton fiber, fed the voracious Massachusetts cotton mills whose owners launched our First Industrial Revolution, while building and sustaining their alma mater, Harvard.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 820

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Financial architecture of Harvard’s cotton-driven wealth parallels how institutions structurally hold stolen value, relevant to Lanier’s reparations framing.