Georgetown University will offer preferred admission to descendants of slaves forced to labor for the school as part of the university’s effort to atone for its slaveholding past.
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According to a statement sent to BuzzFeed News, Georgetown University president John DeGioia will make a formal announcement of his plans later Thursday.
According to The New York Times, two campus buildings will also be renamed in memory of an enslaved African-American man and an African-American woman who founded a school for young Black girls.
Georgetown’s investigation started in August, and the student body began putting pressure on the university previous year to open a dialogue about its history with slavery. Born into slavery in Georgia in 1830, Healy’s father was an Irish-American plantation owner who fell in love with his African-American slave, Mary Eliza. In response to the study’s findings, the school created an on-campus Slavery Memorial that recognizes the schools link to the slave trade.
DeGioia said he planned to apologize for the wrongs of the past “within the framework of the Catholic tradition”, by offering what he described as a Mass of reconciliation in partnership with the Jesuit leadership in the United States and the Archdiocese of Washington. But those are first steps only; as the university acknowledges, more will be needed.
Slavery ties are prevalent in many higher education institutions.
“We remain hopeful that we can forge a relationship with Georgetown that will lead to “real” atonement”, Karran Harper Royal, an organizer of a group of descendants, said in an email. The committee said that it was likely that all of the earliest buildings on campus were built with slave labour.
Also, the university will create an institute for the study of slavery, and give preferential status in admissions to descendants of the slaves it once kept.
In 1838, in order to keep fledgling Georgetown University alive, Jesuit priests sold.272 slaves. So far there was no indication the school would offer scholarships or any other kind of financial assistance to these applicants. 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 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 a year ago. The “participation” DeGioia made reference to was the school’s sale of 272 men, women, and children in 1838.
