Harvard Law students call for removal of seal
Right now, the Harvard law school seal features three bushels of wheat on a shield. But the design is also the coat of arms for the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder whose estate helped found the school.
A small group of current students hope to change that. They’ve named their movement “Royall Must Fall,’’ and have organized to persuade the school that it should replace what they call a blatant symbol of the slaveholding era.
“These symbols set the tone for the rest of the school and the fact that we hold up the Harvard crest as something to be proud of when it represents something so ugly is a profound disappointment and should be a source of shame for the whole school,’’ Alexander J. Clayborne, one of the law students involved, told The Crimson.
The current movement isn’t the first time people have drawn attention to the seal. As The Crimson pointed out, visiting law school professor Daniel Coquillette recently published a book that details the relationship between the Royall family’s slaveholding and the law school’s endowment.
Coquillette said he understood the group’s intentions, and even went so far as to call Royall “a coward, and a brutal slaveholder,’’ to The Crimson, but said he doesn’t think the school should change its seal.
“As a historian…you just deal with the fact that this guy founded the school and tell the truth about it,’’ he told the paper. “To change things is to act like [they] didn’t happen, and that’s a mistake.’’
At the time the article was published, the movement said they planned to write a letter to the law school dean, Martha Minow, stating their position.
The group told Boston.com they have not yet submitted the letter, but plan to first organize meetings with other students and student organizations in order to broaden their coalition.
