Universities Have Responsibility to Address ‘Original Evil of Slavery — Georgetown President

Almost two centuries after Georgetown University profited from the sale of 272 slaves, it will embark on a series of steps to atone for the past, including awarding preferential status in the admissions process to descendants of the enslaved, university officials said Thursday.

The Roman Catholic school, founded by the Jesuit order in 1789, announced the plans after its president, John J. DeGioia, received a 104-page report from a working group he convened a year ago. “There were slaves here on this hilltop until emancipation in 1862”.

The school sold 272 slaves who were working plantations in southern Maryland to pay down its debts in 1838, according to CNN.

The slaves were sent from Maryland to plantations in Louisiana, where they “laboured under terrible conditions on cotton and sugar plantations”, according to the Georgetown report, entitled Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation.

The transaction was one of the most thoroughly documented large sales of enslaved people in history, and the names of numerous people sold are included in bills of sale, a transport manifest and other documents.

“We want a partnership”. But Craig Steven Wilder and Alfred L. Brophy, two historians who have studied universities and slavery, said they knew of none that had offered preferential status in admissions to the descendants of slaves. “We will provide the same care and respect to the descendants [of slaves]”. Princeton University’s first eight presidents owned slaves.

However other schools have acknowledged their own ties to the slave trade. Almost two centuries after Georgetown’s slave sale, America is still grappling with the legacy of slavery, which was formally abolished in 1865.

“It goes farther than just about any institution”, he said. However, this would be impossible to replicate at most other schools, because few records were kept at the time.

Officials at the University of Virginia and Brown University said they have had little success tracking descendants of slaves connected to their campuses.

On Thursday morning, a university committee released a report that also called on its leaders to offer a formal apology for the university’s participation in the slave trade.

DeGioia said he planned to apologize for the wrongs of the past “within the framework of the Catholic tradition”, by offering what he described as a Mass of reconciliation in partnership with the Jesuit leadership in the United States and the Archdiocese of Washington.

Crystal Walker-a 2016 Georgetown alumna who was part of the working group-was one of the students who organized demonstrations on campus last fall, pushing for the buildings to be renamed and adding urgency to the working group efforts.

The university will also create a memorial to the slaves, who were sold by university presidents, and establish an Institute for the Study of Slavery and its Legacies to continue research into the history of slavery.