Descendants of Slaves Given Priority Admissions to Georgetown
As atonement for profiting off of the slave trade.
9.1.2016
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Georgetown University has begun a program to push some students to the front of the admissions line if one strict criterion is met: if they are descendants of the slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits tied to the school.
According to GU president John DeGioia, not only will there be admissions preferences, but the school is also actively seeking the identities of these individuals to recruit them. DeGioia is also calling for all faculty and administration to prepare a formal apology for Georgetown’s profiting off of the slave trade.
From CBS News:
In 1838, two priests who served as president of the university orchestrated the sale of 272 people to pay off debts at the school. The slaves were sent from Maryland to plantations in Louisiana.
In The New York Times on Wednesday, David Collins, an associate professor of history and Georgetown’s chairman of its group on slavery and reconciliation, wrote in the opinions pages that GU is “learning from its sins:”
The history of the Jesuits in colonial Maryland beginning in 1634 has so many proud chapters — of adventurousness in the face of the unknown, of resoluteness in answer to state-sponsored religious bigotry, of creativity and generosity in response to pastoral need. But there is a darker side to that history: Racism, hypocrisy and brutality are part of it, too. Two centuries of Jesuit slaveholding and slave-trading demonstrate that. I will not let the young Jesuits take pride in and inspiration from a select set of uplifting episodes without challenging them to grapple with our history’s offenses as well.
Collins states that thanks to meticulous record keeping by the Jesuits, “We know the people’s names; when they were born, married and buried; whom they were sold with and whom they were separated from. We can trace their family connections, sometimes even to the present.”
“Those 272 biographies sting in a way a statistic of one million can’t,” he added. “This story cries out its injustice against our American tendency to distance ourselves from the ugly realities in our history.”
Until Georgetown rights its wrongs, Collins surmised, “There will be no ‘liberty and justice for all.’”
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