DeGioia also laid out further plans for reparation, including offering preferential admissions status to the descendants of the slaves sold in 1838 as well as ones whose labor benefited the university, creating an institution for the study of slavery, and erecting a public memorial to honor the slaves.
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According to NBC News, DeGioia said today that Georgetown “will offer an admissions edge to descendants of slaves as part of a comprehensive atonement” for the school’s past actions.
Almost two centuries after Georgetown University profited from the sale of 272 slaves, president John DeGioa has taken unprecedented steps toward atonement.
Most notable among the new policies is the preferential consideration that will be given to aspiring Georgetown students who descended from the slaves sold in 1838.
The school’s steps go further than those taken by other USA universities that are confronting their past association with slavery, including Harvard, Brown, Princeton and the University of North Carolina. Some of the profit, about $500,000, was used to help pay off the university’s debts when it was going under financially. Two campus buildings will also be renamed, one for an enslaved Black man, and the other for a Black educator who belonged to a Catholic religious order.
Additionally, when addressing charges that he provide special admissions privileges to the descendants of Georgetown slaves, DeGioia stated that his school “will provide the same care and respect to the descendants of slaves” as it would to any other minority group. For the 1838 sale, slaves were taken from the Maryland plantations and shipped to estates in Louisiana. After expressing concern, a group of black student leaders were invited to speak to DeGioia’s chief of staff about the building’s name, a student told DCist previous year. “It needs to be a part of our living history”. Utilizing these resources, organizations such as the Eastern Washington Geneological Society and the Georgetown Memory Project have been able to successfully identify up to 200 of the slaves sold those 200 years ago, and believe there could be thousands of surviving descendants in America today. Georgetown officials did not respond to a question about whether they kept a list of descendants.
“We hope that the two buildings will stand as a reminder of how our University community disregarded the high values of human dignity and education when it came to the plight of enslaved and free African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, the working group wrote in its report.
Earlier this year, Harvard University put up a plaque in commemoration of slaves who had lived and worked at the university. They also call for a formal apology from the university for the school’s “historical relationship with slavery”. Almost two centuries after Georgetown’s slave sale, America is still grappling with the legacy of slavery, which was formally abolished in 1865.
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Georgetown’s new admissions advantage goes beyond what most colleges have done to atone for their pasts, Wilder said.
