Georgetown University’s shameful past and the necessity for decolonising the university

In June 1838, facing unmanageable debts at its college in Georgetown, the Jesuit province of Maryland sold 272 slaves in its possession. The funds generated by the sale (anywhere up to $115,000) ensured the survival of the college at a time when the Jesuits’ rules prohibited charging students for tuition. In effect, the bodies of black children, women, and men were sacrificed so that white men could continue to study free of charge. On September 2 of this year, in a widely covered move, a working group on slavery and memory at Georgetown University released its report on a shocking event in the history of the university.

The two Jesuits who between them arranged the sale of the slaves, like a great many of the Jesuits in the Maryland province, were Irish Americans: Thomas Mulledy, SJ, and William McSherry, SJ. The sale was not uncontroversial at the time, and the Superior General of the order in Rome argued for manumission of the slaves instead of their sale. But Mulledy insisted that the only financially viable option was sale. All of the Jesuits’ slaves were sold to a US congressman from Louisiana and a couple of other slave owners, and Georgetown’s and the Jesuits’ official part in the institution of slavery came to an end.

But the extent of Georgetown’s complicity with the trade in and exploitation of human bodies is much greater than the headline-grabbing sale suggests—the founding of Georgetown College, as it was then called, was financially underwritten by the fact that the Jesuits could lay claim (though clandestinely, as the order was banned at the time) to 12,000 acres of land in Maryland, along with 300 slaves to work the land. It is likely that the first buildings on the college’s hilltop campus were built with slave labour, and the Jesuits frequently rented slaves from agencies in the town of Georgetown. Most of the students on campus came from slave-owning families (80% of the alumni of the college who fought in the Civil War fought on the Confederate side), and many brought their slaves with them to campus.

Georgetown University is not alone among higher educational institutions in the US in either benefitting from or recognising its entanglement in the “peculiar institution” of slavery. In the past 10 years, universities and colleges like the University of Virginia, Emory University, The College of William and Mary, Brown University, and others have begun to seek ways that they can come to terms with, and perhaps also atone for, their pasts.[i] The idea that universities founded 200 or more years ago would have a past littered with the bodies of slaves can hardly be surprising—the whole history of the US is stained by slavery. It is, as Georgetown University President John DeGioia said in his remarks on September 2, the ‘original sin’ of the entire country, and one that has never fully been recognised.

We need only look at some of the history of the District of Columbia area to get a sense of how pervasive slavery was in the everyday life of the early years of the US: George Washington had 350 slaves on his plantations just outside DC; Thomas Jefferson brought some of his slaves to the White House; two-thirds of the craftsmen who built the original Capitol building were slaves; and at one point there were so many enslaved black men and women in DC that the educator Horace Mann dubbed the city ‘the Congo of America’. By the 1830s, when Mulledy and McSherry sold the Jesuits’ slaves, DC (comprising the slave-trading cities of Georgetown, Alexandria, and Washington) was by far the largest slave market in the world.

Georgetown University itself has, in the modern era, been institutionally aware of its shameful past at least since the 1980s, when a historian at the university documented the Jesuits’ plantations and slaves at the time of the founding of the university. Now, after knowing about the extent of its complicity for years, the university has finally seen fit to engage critically with its own past and to roll out a series of mitigating measures: constituting a working group on slavery and memory; renaming buildings formerly named for Mulledy and McSherry; founding an institute for the study of slavery; finally establishing a department for African-American Studies; and agreeing to give preferential admissions treatment to the descendants of the original 272 men, women and children. These are all necessary responses, and they have mostly been welcomed, but why did they take so long, and what impelled the university to undertake these measures now?