The university will hold a Mass of reconciliation “in which we will seek forgiveness for our participation in the institution of slavery, specifically for the sale of 272 children, women and men who we should regard as members of our community”.
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And the school’s connection to slavery is both broader and deeper than the one well-documented sale. The slaves were uprooted from the Maryland plantations and shipped to estates in Louisiana as part of the massive-but-little-known Slave Trail of Tears.
But the biggest gesture may be the offer of preferential admission status to the descendants of the 272 sold slaves.
In a letter to the university community in April 2016, DeGioia outlined archival research to search for decedents of slaves as a primary focus over the a year ago.
Healy Hall, the flagship building of Georgetown University’s main campus in Washington, D.C., is seen on September 30, 2011.
The working group had also recommended that Georgetown explore the feasibility of offering financial assistance for those students as well.
Karran Harper Royal, an organizer of a group of descendants, said Georgetown should have offered descendants scholarships and included them on the panel that made the recommendations. The buildings will now bear the names of an “enslaved African-American man and the other for an African-American educator who belonged to a Catholic religious order”, the Times reports. The buildings had been temporarily renamed to Freedom Hall and Memorial Hall while waiting for their final names.
There has recently been problems with logging in with “The Bakersfield Californian” option for commenting. “It was a pretty complicated network Georgetown was part of”.
Georgetown University will make an effort to atone for its slave-owning history by providing preferential status to descendants of the slaves it sold, The New York Times reported.
Like many colleges of the era, which offered the equivalent of college-prep coursework, Georgetown later evolved into a full-fledged college, then a university, with a law school, medical school and other professional specialties.
At the end of his letter, DeGioia said this is just the start for Georgetown. Georgetown began its panel on the subject past year with the intention of outreach to the descendants of the slaves it profited from. What’s not spelled out, however, is how Georgetown will verify if an applicant is such a descendant.
A major recommendation of the report involves giving affirmative action to the descendants of slaves who had been sold by the university in 1838 to pay for some of the college’s debts.
You can read the full report from the working group below, and the statement from the university here.
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The university has addressed its history with slavery before, but recently, a committee appointed to determine how the university should address its history found that slavery was deeply rooted in Georgetown’s founding.
