Befitting a scholarly establishment, Harvard’s 134-page report, which incorporates two appendices, is dense, detailed and even “stunning,” because the college’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, mentioned in an e-mail saying the initiative to college students, school and employees.

It says that enslaved individuals have been an “integral” a part of the college in its early days. They lived within the president’s residence on the Cambridge, Mass., campus and have been a part of the material, virtually invisible, of every day life.

“Enslaved women and men served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard college students,” the report says.

Whereas New England’s picture has been linked in common tradition to abolitionism, the report mentioned, rich plantation homeowners and Harvard have been mutually dependent.

“Properly into the nineteenth century, the college and its donors benefited from in depth monetary ties to slavery,” the report mentioned. “These worthwhile monetary relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accrued their wealth by way of slave buying and selling; from the labor of enslaved individuals on plantations within the Caribbean islands and within the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing trade, equipped with cotton grown by enslaved individuals held in bondage.”

In flip, the report mentioned, the college profited from loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers and plantation suppliers, and from investments in cotton manufacturing.

Early makes an attempt at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders, who prized being a faculty for the white higher crust, together with rich white sons of the South, the report recounted.