In a speech scheduled for Thursday afternoon, DeGioia is also expected to discuss plans to rename two buildings on campus: one for an “enslaved African-American man and the other for an African-American educator who belonged to a Catholic religious order”, according to the Times.
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Georgetown University has announced that it will give admissions preference to the descendants of 272 slaves that it sold in an attempt at reconciliation for profiting from human trafficking in the 19th century.
It’s not clear if any of those descendants live in Maryland.
With these unique resources at their disposal, Georgetown has officially announced it will be offering preferential treatment to the descendants of families in the original sale.
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.
Last September Mr DeGioia assembled a 16-member working group of scholars, students, alumni and administrators to consider how the university should address its history.
But whether the initiatives result in meaningful change remains to be seen, he said. Spokesman Nick Alexopulos said in a statement the university is “deeply committed to human dignity and equality”. “That what we’re doing now to engage with this history will endure decades from now”, Rothman said in a press release. The hostile environment, they argued, was a direct product of Georgetown’s historic ties to slavery.
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 past year. The university in Northwest Washington rented enslaved people to perform work at the institution.
The university committee that made recommendations says it’s “likely that all of the earliest buildings on campus. were built with slave labor”. But in recent years, often amid pressure from students, some colleges have sought to confront their pasts.
Preferential treatment for descendants of those sold into slavery is to be considered in Georgetown – and if the report’s recommendations are carried out, it would go beyond the responses from other slave-trading universities such as Brown in Rhode Island, Harvard in MA, and the University of Virginia, which have yet to apologize.
But in November, a group of students felt that their demands weren’t being met, and they assembled a protest on campus.
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But Georgetown’s step, to consider the enslavement of ancestors as part of the admissions process, may be unprecedented, The New York Times reports. But replicating it would be impossible at most other schools, he said, because few records were kept at the time that could be used to trace descendants.
