Yet still, Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Steven Wilder said Georgetown’s efforts to address its slave history goes beyond what any other university has done so far.
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The transaction was one of the most thoroughly documented large sales of enslaved people in history, and the names of numerous people sold are included in bills of sale, a transport manifest and other documents. Now, the school plans to award preferential status in admissions to the descendants of those 272 slaves, as well as the descendants of other slaves whose work benefited Georgetown, according to The New York Times. After expressing concern, a group of black student leaders were invited to speak to DeGioia’s chief of staff about the building’s name, a student told DCist a year ago.
“The question of how effective or meaningful this is going to be will only be answered over time”, Wilder said, according to the Times.
Georgetown’s reconciliation efforts were unprecedented among USA universities, said Craig Stephen Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology. The university released a report calling on its leaders to offer a formal apology for the university’s participation in the slave trade. The school received $115,000 in the sale, the equivalent of about $3.3 million today.
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.
“Georgetown, being a Catholic institution, really can’t escape the moral problem of that history, because it’s come to challenge its Catholic identity”, he said.
Mr DeGoia confirmed that the university will unveil a memorial to the slaves whose toiling in the fields of Jesuit plantations in Maryland helped benefit the institution.
Georgetown University will be offering an admissions edge to descendants of enslaved people sold to fund the school, officials announced on Thursday.
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 previous year. DeGioia traveled to Louisiana and elsewhere during the summer to meet descendants of Georgetown’s slaves.
For a college that charges its students an average of $50,000 a year for tuition, I think not-and neither does The New York Times. The Society of Jesus had actually opened its first school in southern Maryland in 1640, almost 150 years earlier. But those are first steps only; as the university acknowledges, more will be needed.
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Part of this history includes the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved people who worked on Jesuit plantations in southern Maryland.
