A new book chronicles how Georgetown, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States, profited from the sale of enslaved people.
,” from 2022, Imani Perry describes taking a tour of a historic home in Annapolis, Maryland. Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, is joined by two other people: “a young White couple recently graduated from Georgetown University . . . smartly but casually dressed, with studiously respectful countenances.
, engaged a team of researchers, and raised money from alumni. He described his efforts in an e-mail to a staff member at the, which that person forwarded to Swarns, who wrote a series of articles about the controversy, starting with astory invited readers who thought that they might be descendants of the two hundred and seventy-two to get in touch with the paper.the university made public
I attended the liturgy with colleagues. We sang the hymns and said the prayers. We asked for forgiveness for, in the words of the university, “the participation of our predecessors in the national tragedy of slavery, for the failure of moral imagination and conviction to call into question the perpetuated evil, and for the privilege and benefit accrued from their complicity.
By 1804, forty-one people were enslaved at St. Inigoes. A tax-assessment document, which Swarns quotes and paraphrases, suggests that they bore the wounds of enslavement: “Charles, fifty-one, had a broken arm. Will, sixty-three, was described as ‘a cripple.’ Tom, sixty-seven, was blind in one eye. Dorothy, forty-nine, was described as bedridden ‘for life,’ while Cate, sixty-two, was ‘always sick & helpless.
With another Jesuit, Thomas Mulledy, McSherry ran Georgetown College, where a combination of expansion, a drop in tuition fees, and unpaid debts put financial pressure on the school. They pondered a mass sale of people who the order kept enslaved at White Marsh and St. Inigoes.
Brown, Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other colleges and universities profited from slavery and have sought to make public amends. What makes Georgetown’s history different from theirs? In Swarns’s account, it is Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit heritage.
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