| Around the country, we have been seeing cities, museums, college campuses, and other institutions consider the consequences of their histories with racism in a present-day, politically correct country wrought with racial tensions. From Princeton University to Columbia University, Brown University, and the University of Virginia, it’s significant that many universities have acknowledged their role in the perpetuation of slavery, or at least how their employees were part of the slave trade. As noted by the New York Times editorial board recently, and debated earlier in the decade, for some, like Harvard University and Georgetown University, that involvement is damaging enough that it requires paying reparations to descendants of the slaves they once bought, sold, or employed.
“In 1838, the Jesuits running the college that became Georgetown sold 272 African-American men, women and children into a hellish life on sugar plantations in the South to finance the college’s continued operation. On that fact, there is no dispute,” wrote the board. “The fact that some of their descendants have already been found makes this a particularly salient case in the emerging effort to confront one of history’s worst crimes against humanity.”
Last week, the Times ran an engrossing piece on the Georgetown’s history with slavery when it was the recognized Catholic institution of the day, run by Jesuit priests. To this day, Georgetown is still a Catholic-affiliated university. As reported by Times, the 1838 sale of slaves stands out to historians because of its large size and that it was worth $3.3 million. As opposed to other schools, whose connection to controversial or racist public figures may be only tangential, what’s so troubling about Georgetown and similar universities like Yale or Brownthat participated in the slave trade is that the revenue from the sales subsidized scholarships or paid the schools’ debts. Given that some of the success of these universities today was built on the backs of slaves, it seems to some morally imperative that they repay their ethical debts to their descendants.
“At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked,” wrote the board in its editorial. “When the school fell into trouble, the sale of the African-American men, women and children staved off its ruin.”
The issue of Georgetown’s slave history caught the attention of alumni after students protested last fall. At that point, alumni like Richard J. Cellini believed the university owed the slaves and their families CLICK HERE FOR MORE
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New York Times editorial board calls for Georgetown University to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves - TheBlackList
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