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.
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The enslaved were sold in 1838 to new owners across the country – proceeds of the sale went to the Maryland Province of Jesuits and were used to pay off debts at Georgetown, thus keeping the almost bankrupt school afloat. The school received $115,000 in the sale, the equivalent of about $3.3 million today.
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.
Historic D.C. -based law school Georgetown University is acknowledging its ties to slavery this year by offering descendants of about 300 slaves priority admission.
“Before the American Revolution, there were nine colleges established in the British Colonies, and all of them have direct ties to slavery and slave trade”, said Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at MIT.
The school’s steps go further than those taken by other United States universities that are confronting their past association with slavery, including Harvard, Brown, Princeton and the University of North Carolina. Georgetown’s statement says the school “intends to engage descendants both on campus and in the cities and communities where they live”. In a 2004 interview with Georgetown’s student newspaper, Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions said that legacy and donorship play an important part in the admissions considerations. The slaves were sent from plantations in Maryland to Louisiana.
Jesuit priests connected to the private Catholic university sold 272 enslaved people in 1838, to pay off the university’s massive debts. “I think we’re in a critical moment in our country about race relations and about navigating the long-term consequences of inequality”.
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. This is part of a five-step plan that the University outlined to help build relations among the community. 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.
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In 1838, in order to keep fledgling Georgetown University alive, Jesuit priests sold.272 slaves.
