A portion of the profit, about $500,000, was used to help pay off Georgetown’s debts at a time when the college was struggling financially.
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The 104-page report, which comes from Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation makes the university’s history with people held in bondage publicly accessible through multimedia including an archive, a historical timeline and campus discussion over the issue of enslavement.
Georgetown, a Jesuit school founded in 1789 in the U.S. capital Washington, is one of the oldest universities in the United States.
Other US schools are beginning to address their own historic complicity with the slave trade, but no other university is known to have offered an admissions advantage.
The school was also supported by plantations of Jesuit priests, which had hundreds of slaves.
The school also plans to build a memorial for the slaves, create an institute on slavery, and name two campus buildings after African-Americans. The slaves were sent from Jesuit plantations in Maryland to Louisiana, “where they labored under terrible conditions”, and families were broken up, according to a report issued by the school committee. But the university stopped short of suggesting they be given financial aid.
“This community participated in the institution of slavery”, DeGioia said, addressing a crowd of hundreds of students, faculty members and descendants at Georgetown’s Gaston Hall.
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.
Georgetown will also erect a public memorial to the slaves whose labor benefited it, The Times reported. It will rename McSherry Hall as Anne Marie Becraft Hall in honor of Anne Marie Becraft, “a free woman of color who founded a school for black girls in the neighborhood of Georgetown in 1827”.
Craig Steven Wilder is an historian and the author of a book called Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.
DeGioia is expected to make an official announcement on Thursday, months after meeting with descendants of those sold by the institution.
“This report helps us get to our next phase and our next series of initiatives and outreach to think about how this history animates our future”, says associate history professor Marcia Chatelain.
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The men, women and children were sent to plantations in Louisiana and Georgetown received the equivalent of $3.3 million in today’s dollars.
