The late Pauline Oliveros is having her moment. How Long Beach Opera is making it even bigger

'Here's our slogan,' Long Beach Opera's interim managing director proudly announces during a recent conversation about the company's upcoming season, 'We're not the Met!'
For an art form hardly accepting of understatement, such a slogan is insurgent understatement. The oldest opera company in the Los Angeles area and America's oldest purveyor of consistently progressive opera is about to embark on the most uncompromising season of any company of its size or supposed mission anywhere. Ever.
Marjorie Beale may be interim in her role as managing director, but she had been board president before she stepped down to help find a new course for the company, which had gone through administrative turmoil over the last few years. A former professor of European intellectual history and critical theory at UC Irvine, she is now a revolutionary opera empowerer.
I'm meeting with her, LBO artistic director and chief creative officer James Darrah and music director Christopher Rountree over a boisterous lunch, and my first question is: So whose idea was it to devote an entire season to Pauline Oliveros?
Rountree: 'I don't know the answer.'
Darrah: 'I don't know that there is an answer.'
Beale: 'It's like it came from deep inside all of us.'
Rountree: 'But there was a moment where it was in the air. And then Jim said to me, 'What if it's all Pauline and nothing but Pauline?' That would be a dream for me.'
Darrah: 'Weirdly it felt like what we should be doing. It's why I came to Long Beach.'
Beale: 'I was overjoyed.'
Another question for Beale: So how many board members has she enraged when even a single production by so experimental a composer surely alarms even the most courageous opera board in this artistically and financially cautious day and age?
'We've only lost one board member,' Beale answers sunnily. She also notes that she spent the holidays sweet-talking patrons and donors with her Christmas cards. Many have apparently come around. 'I would say our board is pretty hardy,' Beale adds.
The LBO team, moreover, is convinced that since Oliveros' death in 2016 at age 84, her relevance has grown to the point where we are in an obvious Oliveros moment. She was a pioneer composer of electronic music. She was a pioneering, shamanistic accordionist. She was a pioneering feminist and lesbian composer. She was a pioneering professor at Mills College in Oakland, at UC San Diego and elsewhere who inspired a significant number of today's venturesome musicians. She has such acolytes as star flutist Claire Chase, who will be music director of this year's Ojai Music Festival. A one-time outsider, Oliveros is taken seriously throughout the musical world.
But opera?
Oliveros was in no way, shape or traditional form an opera composer. She was, though, a brilliant maker of acoustic spectacle. Galvanized by sound in yawning subterranean caverns, she made her calling 'deep listening' as a way to overcome the world's ever-increasing surface noise. She discovered that once drones — be they calming or grating — resonate within our bodies they have the urgent power to alter our very sense of being. She further instructed us to tune into the little sounds of nature.
By exploring situations in which musicians share their profound awareness of how these sounds operate, how they reach others and the pleasure gained from their response, her work proves startlingly dramatic in performance. Given Oliveros' delight in outrage, fine sense of humor, obsession with process and ability to anthropomorphize all sounds, no matter the source, it doesn't take much to turn works, especially those with texts, into full-blown theater.
When Oliveros titled a piece 'Beethoven Was a Lesbian,' as she once did, she wonderfully stimulated (and stymied) the imaginations of performers and audiences alike. The next step becomes opera, whether she called it that (only a couple of times) or not. It's the kind of magical musical thinking, in fact, that led Rountree to form his revolutionary new-music ensemble Wild Up 15 years ago. It's exactly what Darrah, who also heads UCLA's opera program, believes opera needs to move forward.
Beale's response to anyone who says this isn't opera: 'It doesn't matter.' She says that recalling the startling, sheer beauty of Oliveros' works at the Ojai festival nine years ago, when Peter Sellars programmed them at Meditation Mountain. She realized how much they said about healing, about coming together, about recovery. 'I knew we need to do something like this right now,' Beale said.
That same sense of coming together and healing made Oliveros a favored composer among far-flung musicians for Zoom performances during the COVID-19 shutdown, as it did when Oliveros' 'Ringing for Healing' once became part of a street agitprop in New York.
What does matter to Darrah and Rountree is the discovery of potential for opera. 'We need to build the Black Mountain College of opera in L.A.,' Darrah says, referring to the experimental North Carolina college that hosted noted artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage.
'It's like Jamie Barton comes to us and doesn't sing Azucena but Oliveros,' Darrah says. Lest LBO be mistaken for New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Met mezzo-soprano who starred as the gypsy in Verdi's 'Il Trovatore' will sing whatever animal is needed in Oliveros' 'El Relicario de los Animales,' which will be mounted at Heritage Square Museum on Feb. 15 and 16.
A graphic score for female vocalist and 20-member instrumental ensemble invites musical gestures for channeling the sonic wonderland of animal life and nature into mystical harmonic space. Darrah has added a second singer, Brenda Rae, a soprano also noted for her performances of more standard repertory, who will double as a percussionist.
'Relicario,' which was first given as a concert work at the 1979 CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, will be the first of LBO's so-called three Oliveros operas. As a preseason tryout of the Oliveros idea last summer, the company presented one of Oliveros' best-known works, 'bye bye butterfly,' a haunting eight-minute electronic piece from 1965 that uses a recorded bit of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' and is often interpreted as a metaphor for women's place in society. Puccini's heroine here is overwhelmed by oscillating sine waves. LBO turned this into an enthusiastically engaging group improvisation.
In December, as a preview to the season, LBO staged 'Earth Ears' in San Pedro at the Angels Gate Cultural Center. It began outdoors, and the first thing Darrah and Rountree discovered was an amazing five-second echo in which instruments resonated from the cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes miles away. For the performance inside, the room was decorated with shredded paper (Prairie T. Trivuth will be designer for all the Oliveros productions), and instrumentalists scattered about the room and among the audience interacted in rigorous ways indicated by the score but also with just enough freedom that anything could happen.
Rountree says he was confronted with figuring out what Oliveros' rules allow. 'Do they force musicians toward introversion and introspection or push back against that? Is that tension even allowed to exist?' he asked himself.
'At the rehearsal, everyone was doing the rules, and the effect was a kind of shimmering. It felt like night music, like the piece was going to a place. But when we finished the rehearsal, it could not go to that place. I thought, if it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It would go where it wanted or always stay on the horizon.'
But during the performance, a jazz-like solo here, a different kind of response there, led to what became a grand theatrical moment. You could feel a collective awe from the audience.
'The work is about commitment and presence,' Rountree concludes, 'so why not just commit completely to the work. The only way to engage is to go fully underwater.'
The other two productions will be 'The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts,' a collaboration from 2001 with poet Moira Roth, more a concert piece to be turned into an opera in April on the Queen Mary in Long Beach; and 'The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera' in July (venue still to be determined). This is Oliveros' most operatic piece and was given as a work in progress by Yuval Sharon and the Industry at the Hammer Museum in 2013, when Rountree and Wild Up participated. The LBO production will be the West Coast premiere of a chamber (or pocket) version with a libretto by Oliveros' partner, Ione.
Beyond that in the next two seasons, Beale says, the company will present the premiere of an opera by Shelley Washington as well as some traditional opera. Darrah is eager to stage Mozart's 'Così Fan Tutte.' There had been some talk of including 'Cosi' this season with Oliveros additions, but the company didn't want to compete with Los Angeles Opera's production of Mozart's opera in March or Yuval Sharon's Detroit Opera staging in April. Darrah promises his own innovations.
In the meantime, Beale says she is determined to use Oliveros as 'a kind of giant reset.'
Walking out of 'Earth Ears' with Darrah and Rountree, she saw the sun set over the ocean, and the three of them just stood and looked.
'I thought to myself, this is the first time that we've done something that wasn't in some way influenced by what was in the past,' she says. 'Now we're looking forward to what we're going to do together.
'We're really doing what we say we're about. We're not holding back. We're not hiding in the corner. We're just going for it.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Time Business News

an hour ago

• Time Business News

Masquerade Ball Dresses: The Art of Dressing for Disguise in the 18th and 19th Centuries

For centuries, few social occasions offered women the same freedom of expression as the masquerade ball. Wrapped in mystery, glittering in candlelight, and filled with playful intrigue, masquerades allowed guests to step beyond the rigid expectations of everyday society. At the heart of these grand events were the costumes themselves, and especially the Masquerade Ball Dresses that offered women a rare chance to blend historical fashion with personal fantasy. Though masquerade balls originated as part of Carnival traditions in Renaissance Italy, they became deeply woven into the social fabric of European aristocracy during the 18th and 19th centuries. Across grand palaces, ornate theaters, and exclusive private salons, they created temporary spaces where identity could be concealed, challenged, or reinvented entirely. The Setting: Where Fashion Met Fantasy Masquerade balls were elaborate affairs, often held in ornate venues filled with music, dancing, and lavish décor. They attracted royalty, nobility, and the wealthiest members of society who eagerly embraced the opportunity to wear costumes inspired by mythology, history, or faraway lands. The anonymity of the mask added an element of suspense, allowing participants to play roles they might never adopt in everyday life. While men might dress as kings, soldiers, or mythical creatures, women's costumes were particularly elaborate. For many, the creation of Masquerade Ball Dresses was an event in itself, blending courtly fashion with inventive themes and ornate details that set these garments apart from conventional eveningwear. offers a rich source of inspiration for those who wish to explore the artistry, elegance, and history of these extraordinary costumes. 18th Century Styles: The Height of Opulence During the 1700s, masquerade ball dresses reflected the extravagant tastes of the Rococo period. Silhouettes followed the prevailing court fashion but allowed for even more dramatic flourishes. Panniers widened skirts to breathtaking proportions, while luxurious fabrics like silk taffeta, velvet, and brocade shimmered in candlelight. Bodices were tightly fitted with low necklines, revealing the décolletage, while sleeves might be short, puffed, or layered with ruffles. Elaborate embroidery, metallic threads, and gemstone embellishments added depth and texture. Lace trims, satin ribbons, and artificial flowers brought even more dimension to the gown. Rather than simply replicating current fashion, many masquerade ball dresses drew from historical or theatrical references. Some women arrived dressed as classical goddesses, while others chose pastoral themes, dressing as shepherdesses or maidens from imagined pastoral landscapes. Exotic costumes inspired by Ottoman, Chinese, or Egyptian styles also became fashionable, reflecting Europe's fascination with distant cultures during this era. Victorian Interpretations: Formality Meets Imagination By the 19th century, as masquerade balls continued to evolve, the style of Masquerade Ball Dresses also shifted in step with Victorian fashion. While still elaborate, the silhouette changed dramatically. The massive side panniers of the previous century were replaced by crinolines in the 1850s and later by the bustle silhouette of the 1870s and 1880s. Victorian masquerade dresses maintained the tradition of elaborate embellishment, often featuring rich fabrics like satin, silk faille, and velvet, trimmed with lace, pearls, and intricate beading. However, these gowns often balanced fantasy with greater modesty in accordance with Victorian values. Necklines remained low but were typically framed with lace or tulle. Sleeves varied from fitted long styles to dramatic puffed shapes, depending on the period. Themes continued to draw from history and mythology, but Victorian masquerades also reflected growing interest in literary characters, medieval revivalism, and romanticized historical periods. For women attending these events, the opportunity to temporarily embody queens, fairies, historical heroines, or mythological figures offered a rare chance to play with identity while remaining within socially acceptable boundaries. The Mask: Essential Symbol of the Masquerade While the gowns themselves were extraordinary, the mask was equally central to the masquerade experience. Women often wore delicate eye masks made of lace, silk, or papier-mâché, sometimes decorated with feathers, sequins, or tiny jewels. The mask's ability to obscure one's face without fully hiding one's identity offered a subtle thrill. It created a charged atmosphere where whispered conversations, bold flirtations, and carefully veiled observations became part of the night's entertainment. In some cases, masks were designed to match or contrast with the dress itself, completing the ensemble with a unified sense of artistry. The balance of recognition and anonymity provided endless intrigue on the dance floor. Preparation and Presentation: A Labor of Detail Unlike standard eveningwear, a Masquerade Ball Dress often required months of preparation. Dressmakers worked closely with their clients to design costumes that expressed both creativity and status. Historical research, careful material selection, and intricate craftsmanship were all essential to producing a gown that could stand out amid a ballroom filled with equally ambitious creations. Wealthier women sometimes commissioned full themed ensembles complete with wigs, capes, and props. Others assembled costumes by modifying existing gowns, adding detachable embellishments that transformed them into suitable masquerade attire while remaining functional for future occasions. The Decline and Legacy of the Masquerade By the turn of the 20th century, the popularity of formal masquerade balls declined as social norms shifted and modern entertainment took new forms. Yet the fascination with masquerades and their opulent costumes endures to this day. Vintage fashion enthusiasts, historical reenactors, and costume designers continue to draw inspiration from these extraordinary events. The Masquerade Ball Dress remains a symbol of artistic freedom within the constraints of rigid social structures, where creativity and craftsmanship allowed individuals to momentarily step into another world. Final Thoughts: Dressing for Imagination Masquerade balls offered more than a chance to dance. They provided an opportunity to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, allowing women to inhabit identities that might otherwise remain inaccessible. The dresses worn to these events stand as rich historical artifacts, revealing not only the evolving aesthetics of fashion but also the enduring human desire for transformation, mystery, and playful disguise. At the legacy of historical costuming continues to inspire. The timeless appeal of masquerade ball gowns reminds us that fashion, at its most enchanting, offers a portal to worlds of elegance, creativity, and endless imagination. TIME BUSINESS NEWS

Yahoo

a day ago

• Yahoo

Harvard hired a researcher to uncover its ties to slavery. He says the results cost him his job: ‘We found too many slaves'

Jordan Lloyd had been praying for something big to happen. The 35-year-old screenwriter was quarantining in her apartment in North Hollywood in June 2020. Without any work projects to fill her days, she picked up the novel Roots, by Alex Haley, to reread. The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley's ancestor, who is captured and sold into slavery in the Gambia and then brought to Virginia, where he is forced to labor on a plantation. It was adapted into an Emmy-award winning television series in the 1970s, and while reading it again, Lloyd thought to herself, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they could make another Roots?' A few days later, out of the blue, she received an email from an undergraduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The email was short. The woman introduced herself as Carissa Chen, a junior at the college studying history. She was working on an independent research project to find descendants of enslaved people connected to the university. By using historical records and modern genealogy tools, she had found Lloyd. Related: Harriet Tubman's church in Canada was a crucial force in the abolitionist movement. It's still standing today 'I have reason to believe through archival research that you could be the descendant of Tony and Cuba Vassall, two slaves taken from Antigua by a founding member connected to Harvard University,' the email read. 'Are you available anytime for a call?' The note linked to a website containing a family tree that Chen had created, tracing the lineage of people enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr, an Antiguan planter and businessman whose endowment would eventually create Harvard Law School. Chen hadn't expected to find any living descendants, she told the Guardian, but through dogged research, she managed to uncover 50 names and found Lloyd through an old website she had made when she had first moved to Los Angeles. 'It all felt too specific to be a scam,' Lloyd recounted, so she agreed to a call that would eventually blow open everything she thought she knew about her family history, linking her with one of the nation's most prestigious institutions and launching a phase in her life that would be colored with equal parts joy and pain. Though it contradicts a common perception of colonial New England, enslaved people were brought to work in northern cities in North America as well. In her book New England Bound, the historian Wendy Warren records the remarks of one European traveler who noted in 1687 that 'there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [enslaved people]'. As the country's oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard's history is inextricable from the history of transatlantic slavery. The enslaved labored in campus buildings, university presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage, and the school's wealth grew through a circle of donors intimately connected to the plantation system in the Caribbean, the American south and the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Harvard began, informally, to research its relationship to slavery as early as 2007, when the history professor Sven Beckert started leading undergraduate research seminars such as the one Chen took. In 2016, then Harvard president Drew Faust acknowledged the university was 'directly complicit' in slavery and, in 2022, the university released an official report, Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which detailed its history over more than a hundred pages. Harvard is not the only academic institution with this burden. Currently more than 100 universities across the world are investigating their ties to slavery, the vast majority of which are in the US. A small subset of the universities researching their ties to slavery – approximately five – have committed to conducting genealogical research and identifying living descendants. Religious denominations such as the Episcopal church and the Evangelical Lutheran church and more than a dozen cities and four states have also begun researching their legacies of slavery. The California state reparations taskforce published a 1,000-page report two years ago, and state legislators have been developing – and passing – reparations-related initiatives. The Guardian, founded in 1821 in Manchester, England, began its own process in 2020, when its sole owner, the Scott Trust, commissioned independent academic researchers to uncover its links to transatlantic slavery. It revealed that the newspaper's founder, John Edward Taylor, and nine out of 11 of his financial backers had direct ties, mainly through Manchester's cotton industry. In 2023, the Scott Trust apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and committed to a 10-year restorative justice program, with millions earmarked for descendant communities. That year, the Guardian also launched an ongoing series called Cotton Capital, which explores the legacies of slavery globally. The 2022 Harvard report included a list of recommendations by the presidential committee: develop educational partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, create a public memorial, and – perhaps most contentiously – identify living descendants of people enslaved by university staff, leaders and faculty. The announcement was accompanied by a $100m endowment for 'implementation'. The person the university tapped to lead the descendant research is a man named Richard Cellini, who has a kind of mythological status in the world of institutional accountability and slavery research. By his own admission, his skill lies primarily in selecting talented researchers, and 'keeping them happy'. The university, it seemed, was fully committed to beginning a process of discovery and atonement, putting resources and brainpower behind a project that could set the tone for institutions around the country, and the world. If successful, Harvard could demonstrate that truth-telling and reconciliation are possible on a large scale, that an institutional culture around silence and historical revisionism can be overturned, and that light can shine into even the deepest cracks. But that would ultimately not be the case. Not yet, at least. When I visited Cellini in the archives of the Harvard Business School in mid-February, he was bent over a 19th-century ledger book, trained on a set of records with a magnifying glass. He is a trained attorney and tech entrepreneur, and though jovial and quick to joke, he becomes stoic when speaking about his research. In 2015, he started an independent project at Georgetown University in Washington DC to locate the descendants of 272 enslaved people sold by Jesuit leaders in the mid-1800s to raise money for the university. Cellini said he was driven by a sense of moral outrage upon learning about the sale, as well as a curiosity to see what he could find. Along with 10 other researchers, they would eventually locate more than 10,000 direct descendants. Cellini's effort, called the Georgetown Memory Project, remains independent although the university has given preferential consideration during the admissions process to descendants and created a 'reconciliation fund' for their benefit. In the winter of 2022, before the Harvard report was made public, Cellini said he was approached by the former president of the school, Larry Bacow, and a dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who asked him if he could do the same thing for Harvard. When he started the research, Harvard had already identified the names of 70 people that had been enslaved with ties to the university. Over the course of the past three years, working alongside American Ancestors, the country's pre-eminent genealogical institute, Cellini and his researchers have identified more than 900 people that had been enslaved by university affiliates (faculty, staff and people in leadership positions) and nearly 500 of their direct living descendants. It wasn't long after the work began to pick up steam that Cellini started running into trouble. In March 2023, he said he was asked to meet with the project's executive director, Roeshana Moore-Evans, and the Harvard staff member overseeing the initiative, the public health professor and vice-provost for special projects, Sara Bleich. These informal meetings were held in a boardroom in the student center, a tall glass building overlooking the gates of Harvard Yard. It was here and during extended phone calls that Cellini claims he was told repeatedly by Bleich 'not to find too many descendants'. 'At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,' he said. Cellini told Bleich that was 'ludicrous', he said. Was he supposed to falsify the evidence, to destroy it, to ignore it? 'I asked for guidance, and the answer was that she didn't know,' he said, 'but we shouldn't report too many descendants.' Bleich denies this. 'The university never issued a directive to him to limit the number of direct descendants that could be identified through the work,' she told the Guardian during a phone interview. Moore-Evans declined to comment on the meetings. In the process of trying to get additional funding for the project, arguing that the amount of work had increased tenfold because of all the additional names that were being uncovered, Cellini met with the finance director for the president's office, Patricia Harrington, this past fall. Harrington wouldn't give him a clear answer about his funding request, telling him, 'Unfortunately you keep finding more slaves,' he said, and that 'every new person is a source of guilt and shame for Harvard'. A spokesperson for the university said: 'Any assertion that Patricia Harrington disparaged the work of the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, including descendant research, is false.' Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely. The early days of discovery were a golden time for Lloyd and her immediate family. Together with Lloyd's father, Dennis, and Chen, they would meet over Zoom and swap stories. Her dad was sharing parts of family history that Lloyd had never heard before: about his soft-spoken mother and his dad, who owned a flower shop in a neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown. 'People will open up to a stranger in a way that's more honest and unfiltered, wanting to be thorough in a way that you would never with your family,' Lloyd said. Chen, in turn, detailed the findings of her research to the Lloyds and they began to fill in their histories, tracing connections to the colonial period and height of the 'triangular trade'. Lloyd's ancestor seven generations back, Cuba Vassall, was three years old when she was forcibly moved from Antigua to a suburb of Boston along with her family by Isaac Royall Jr, in 1737. The Royalls were the largest slave-owning family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, owning nearly 70 enslaved people who labored on a 500-acre plantation just north of Boston, as well as controlling more than 100 people on their plantation in Antigua. Before long, Lloyd's ancestors were transferred to another wealthy Cambridge family, the Vassalls, for whom they labored in an elaborate Georgian mansion currently known as the Longfellow House, near the campus of the then growing Harvard University. The Vassalls owned plantations in Jamaica where more than a thousand people were enslaved. Edward Taylor was a Harvard graduate, along with his brother Lewis, who once paid for a portion of his tuition with a large barrel of sugar, one of the most lucrative commodities produced by enslaved people. Cuba's original enslaver, Isaac Royall Jr, didn't have any direct ties to Harvard while he was living, but he endowed a professorship in his will, likely to ensure his legacy would live on as a member of the colonial elite. The seal of Harvard Law School was the Royall family crest until 2016, when students protested to demand its replacement. The Royall professorship was retired in 2022. At the Longfellow House, Cuba met and married a man named Tony, originally from Jamaica, who was also enslaved by the Vassalls. They had six children, including Lloyd's ancestor Darby. During the American revolutionary war, the royalist Vassalls fled and the house was occupied by George Washington, who used it as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. According to one anecdote, Washington asked then six-year-old Darby to work for him, who replied he wouldn't work without wages. After the war, Tony and Cuba petitioned the state to stay in a small dwelling on the property, where they cultivated a piece of land for farming. They had both spent 60 years of their life in slavery, Tony wrote in the 1781 letter, and 'though deprived of what makes them now happy beyond expression yet they have ever lived a life of honesty and have been faithful in their master's service'. He appealed to the court's sense of morality, writing: 'They shall not be denied the sweets of freedom the remainder of their days by being reduced to the painful necessity of begging for bread.' His petition to stay in the house was refused, but Tony was given an annual pension, one of the earliest examples of a formerly enslaved person receiving compensation. Tony's son Darby went on to become an important figure in the burgeoning free Black community of Boston. He was an activist throughout his life, supporting the abolitionist movement, becoming a founding member of the African Society of Boston and adding his name to a state petition to protect Black people against the Fugitive Slave Act, along with his daughter and son-in-law. At the end of his life, Darby chose to be buried in the Vassall family tomb underneath Christ Church in Cambridge, which Lloyd and her family went to visit last June. The tomb is in the basement, in a low-ceilinged crypt locked behind heavy black metal doors, and a couple inches of a curved brick structure, peeking above the granite dust floor, is the only indication. A dried flower arrangement that Lloyd left is still there, a tidy pile of lavender, white chrysanthemum and clover. Making these connections and being able to visit her ancestor's grave brought Lloyd a deep sense of 'internal certainty and peace and comfort and groundedness', she said. 'I would want that for everyone whose family is somehow affiliated.' Yet the joy and excitement comes with a 'deep sadness'. 'Why hasn't this been resolved?' she wondered aloud during an interview phone call. 'Why did no one in my family know?' Lloyd's only contact from the administration, she said, was an 'icy' interaction with Brown-Nagin during a group call, and she has heard nothing since. 'Naively, I was expecting them to be very welcoming and excited to facilitate discussion,' she said. 'I was hoping they would be warmer, more open to reconcile the long history.' The university says it has not begun the outreach process. Since the initiative was announced, the university has given out more than $4m in grants to local organizations and built out partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, such as the Du Bois Scholars Program. 'This is by far the hardest job that I've had,' Bleich, who oversees the Harvard Legacy of Slavery initiative, said. 'We are very serious about this, and we are very sincere.' In late January, as he was pulling his car into the parking lot of Harvard Business School, prepared to begin another day of research in the university archives, Cellini received a call from an HR person that said him and his team were fired, effective immediately. He was never given an explanation, he said, and a university spokesperson told the Guardian 'we cannot comment on personnel matters'. The genealogy research, the university announced after Cellini's firing, would be continued through an 'expanded partnership' with American Ancestors, the genealogy non-profit that had already been working closely with Cellini's team. 'They're the world's best genealogists,' Cellini said. Based on his team's research in the Harvard archives identifying school leaders, faculty or staff who owned enslaved people and the names of the people they enslaved, American Ancestors would then search 'downstream', as Cellini put it, for living descendants. In this new agreement, the organization has taken over all aspects of the research. The initiative received its first public blow last spring, when two university professors on the committee to create a memorial stepped down, saying in an open letter the university had attempted to 'dilute and delay' their efforts to reach out to descendants. The committee was formed in 2023, based on one of the recommendations of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report to 'honor enslaved people through memorialization'. In a statement made to the student newspaper, a spokesperson for the university said it 'take[s] seriously the co-chairs' concerns about the importance of community involvement and of taking steps that will enable Harvard to deeply engage with descendant communities'. A couple weeks later, the executive director of the initiative, Moore-Evans, stepped down, after reporting conflicts with the university administration to HR. She told the Guardian that she left for 'personal reasons'. Cellini suspects the reason he was fired is simple: 'We found too many slaves.' The university was afraid that identifying descendants would bankrupt the university and so each name that his team identified was 'expensive', he said. The work that he oversaw is 'just the tip of the iceberg', he added, estimating that the numbers of living descendants could be about 10,000 people. Cellini had just come back from Antigua a couple days prior, where his team had visited the site of the Royall plantation as well as four other plantations with ties to the university. They also found a hundred additional names of enslaved people with ties to the university in public archives, he said. Cellini and his team met with the prime minister and governor general of Antigua, who had expressed interest in working with the university to explore this connection. Cellini said he detailed his meetings with the politicians to the university, but those requests were never answered and he was fired shortly after. The Antiguan ambassador to the US, Sir Ronald Sanders, wrote a letter to the university after learning that Cellini was fired, writing that the decision was made 'without consultation or notification'. The country wants 'real engagement and meaningful action that befits the benefits that Harvard derived', he wrote. 'We would not expect a cash payment from Harvard,' a spokesperson added. 'However, so well-endowed a university with expertise in a number of areas can be helpful to our country.' The cabinet discussed the possibility of Harvard funding ancestry research to identify descendants of Antiguans that were brought to colonial Massachusetts, and seeking the university's assistance in public health matters to address the high rates of chronic illness on the islands. A spokesperson for Harvard said a letter had been sent in response, but refused to elaborate. The spokesperson for Antigua said, 'I have not seen a response,' and could not confirm if a response had been received. The Royall plantation, which likely stretched across 200 acres down to Port Royal Bay, enslaved more than 100 people. Only the ruins of the sugar windmill remain, on private property. The stone structure stands a hundred feet tall on a grassy field bordering some woods. Here, enslaved people lived and worked on a plantation, feeding sugar cane into metal rollers through a dangerous and physically exhausting process to make syrup. 'It's pretty visceral,' Cellini said about visiting the site. 'This is where lives were spent and exhausted and consumed for the production of sugarcane, for the wealth of the British empire.' Ever since being contacted by Chen, Lloyd has felt the weight of her family history and a sense of responsibility. Her ancestors repeatedly petitioned for their freedom, for their rights and their humanity. Darby and his sister Flora had both been separated from their family by their enslavers as young children. Tony Vassall bought his daughter's freedom, and when his enslaver died by injuries sustained at the battle of Bunker Hill, six-year-old Darby walked 10 miles home to his family. The family had been staunch abolitionists and activists, suffered through bondage, and fought for their freedom. Lloyd struggles with where that leaves her. 'I just don't know where to begin,' Lloyd said. She considers taking to social media, calling the administration and making demands. Should she protest? She doesn't know. Lloyd's sister, who declined to be interviewed for this article, went to Antigua and Lloyd said she's also interested in going. 'I would go anywhere to talk to anyone at this point,' she said. 'Except Harvard, because there's no one I really trust there right now.' 'I feel like I'm still close to the explosion,' she said. 'My ears are still ringing.'

USA Today

a day ago

• USA Today

Connections hints, clues and answers on Saturday, June 21 2025

WARNING: THERE ARE CONNECTIONS SPOILERS AHEAD! DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT THE JUNE 21, 2025 NYT CONNECTIONS ANSWER SPOILED FOR YOU. Ready? OK! Have you been playing Connections, the super fun word game from the New York Times that has people sharing those multi-colored squares on social media like they did with Wordle? It's pretty fun and sometimes very challenging, so we're here to help you out with some clues and the answer for the four categories that you need to know: 1. Group. 2. How you might describe someone's tough appearance. 3. Think map. 4. Think fruit. The answers are below this photo: 1. Company 2. Stocky 3. Starts of European countries 4. Apple products Play more word games Looking for more word games?