Georgetown has not indicated if it will award scholarships to the descendants of the enslaved – a possibly raised by the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, a committee DeGioia constructed previous year to address the university’s relationship with slavery.
Advertisement
The steps announced this week stopped short of calls for scholarships for the descendants of slaves, but the university claims its efforts won’t end with Thursday’s announcement.
The reconciliatory moves are the outcome of a year-long, 16-member working group at Georgetown including students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Georgetown’s fellow Ivy League universities, Brown and Harvard, and the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, have publicly recognized their ties to the slave trade, but have not gone so far to give preferential status in admissions to the descendants of slaves.
The news of the 1838 slave sale – first reported by The New York Times – shocked many at Georgetown, which had one of the first African-American university presidents in the U.S. Some of those being: naming halls after former slaves, developing a public memorial, offering an apology for the University’s historical relationship to slavery and engaging with descendants.
Georgetown officials said on Wednesday that they are planning on taking several courses of action to rectify previous misdeeds, perhaps most notably announcing that it will give preferential treatment to descendants of slaves who apply to the university, according to The New York Times. It will also rename two buildings that had honored presidents who oversaw the 1838 sale of the 272 slaves, who had worked on church-affiliated plantations in Maryland.
“As a community and as individuals, we can not do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history”, he said.
The steps go further than those taken by other US universities that are confronting their past association with slavery, including Harvard, Brown, Princeton and the University of North Carolina. Proceeds were used to pay off Georgetown debts.
“It goes farther than just about any institution”, he said.
The university set up a project to see how it could make restitution for this involvement in the slave trade.
Advertisement
DeGioia said he isn’t concerned about financial limitations of the initiative. The letter links to the report that the working group has been working on and provides insight on some of the initial steps that will be taken.
