Georgetown University confronts its slave history

Georgetown University is one of the premier learning institutions in the world.

I have also accepted the Working Group’s recommendation to provide interim names for Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall – Freedom Hall and Remembrance Hall, respectively – while the working group continues on the work in which they were charged.

Georgetown University will rename two buildings previously named for school presidents who owned and sold slaves, reports the Washington Post.

Mulledy Hall, a student dormitory that opened this year, was named for former university president Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy, who organized the sale of 272 Jesuit-owned slaves to a plantation owner in Louisiana in 1838.

The announcement came after demonstrations last week in Georgetown’s Red Square, where an estimated 250 students and other activists showed solidarity with protesters at Mizzou and Yale University. The sale was controversial at the time because a few of the priests believed the slaves should be freed and others pushed for the slaves’ families to be sold together.

The Washington Post reports university President John J. DeGioia sent an email to the Georgetown community Saturday evening saying he was changing the names based on a recommendation from his Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation. DeGioia appointed the panel of 16 administrators, faculty and students in September to examine slavery-related sites on campus.

What’s more, Queen Adesuyi, an organizer of the protests-which, again, were successful, and achieved something irrefutably good-said their actions gained support from the “momentum” of student protests on campuses around the country.

“As a university”, DeGioia wrote, “we are a place where conversations are convened and dialogue is encouraged, even on topics that may be hard”. On November 13, Georgetown students staged a sit-in in the president’s office that started midday until the office closed at midnight, at which point the students resumed the sit in the following morning.