Georgetown Confronts Its Ugly Past - The New York Times

"Georgetown University is taking a series of historically important steps to atone for the acts of 19th-century Jesuits who held African-American men, women and children in slavery and sold 272 of them to Southern sugar plantations to keep the college that became Georgetown operating.



The new measures include naming a building for one of the men who was sold and giving preferential admissions treatment to descendants of those who were enslaved. These are important milestones in the journey toward reconciliation, but before completing its plans, the university needs to confer closely with descendants whose families were broken by the 1838 sale and who deserve a significant voice in the reconciliation effort.



Many universities have ties to slavery. But the Georgetown sale of African-Americans is distinguished by its size, its direct relationship to the financial health of the university and the fact that the names of the enslaved were recorded, which made it possible for genealogists to track down their descendants.



Last year, Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia, established a working group on slavery and reconciliation — made up of professors, students, alumni and others — and asked it to recommend how best to recognize the university’s debt to human bondage. The group would have benefited from input from descendants, but it was nearing the end of its work when it became aware of them. At the very least, it should have conferred with them on the contents of the report, which was released Thursday.



The report recommends that the university offer an apology for its participation in slavery, build a public memorial and rename a university building for a person listed only as “Isaac” in the 1838 document of sales. Critics of the proposed name — Isaac Hall — rightly point out that using the first name alone repeats the racist condescension of slave holders who commonly refused to acknowledge the surnames of the human beings they owned. Beyond that, the Georgetown Memory Project, a nonprofit group that has been tracking descendants, maintains that Isaac understood his surname to be Hawkins. His descendants should clearly be allowed to decide how his name is used."





Georgetown Confronts Its Ugly Past - The New York Times