A Painful Legacy

Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which once profited from the sale of hundreds of slaves, recently announced it would issue a formal apology, create an institute for the study of slavery, and award preferential admissions status to the slaves’ descendants.

“This community participated in the institution of slavery,” Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia, said in August. “This original evil that shaped the early years of the republic was present here.”

Georgetown’s plans put it at the forefront of a debate about what obligation—if any—colleges have to make up for their past connections to slavery. Most universities founded before the Civil War had some involvement in the slave trade. Southern colleges often owned slaves; and even in the North, where gradual emancipation began in the early 1800s, schools like Harvard University in Massachusetts and Brown University in Rhode Island continued to help some of their brightest graduates land work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, and administrators in the South’s booming slave economy.

“Plantation owners looked to these schools for college-educated men to help staff their society,” says Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “so graduates went south, where there was wealth because of slavery.”

Debates about how to address ties to slavery are now under way at schools like the University of Maryland, Emory University in Atlanta, and Princeton University in New Jersey. The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson and built by slave labor, named a new dormitory after two of the school’s slaves in 2015. Last spring, Harvard Law School retired its seal because the three bushels of wheat on it represented a slave-owning family that helped found the school (see box below). And in December, Yale University in Connecticut said it may rename its undergraduate college named for pro-slavery U.S. vice president John C. Calhoun.

The debates are helping shine a light on a history that’s often been downplayed: Though slavery was embedded in Southern society, many institutions in the North also benefited. For example, insurance companies allowed slave owners to insure their slaves as property, and banks lent plantation owners money for their operations.

Indeed, how to atone for a painful past is a question being asked not just by colleges and not only in the United States. German companies have paid more than $4 billion to Jews and others forced into slave labor during the Holocaust (see page 16). And in September, the French government paid $11 million to Holocaust survivors who were sent to concentration camps via the state-owned railway. 

 In the U.S., though many have applauded the discussion of slavery and higher education on campuses that had long avoided the topic, not everyone is happy about it. Some have criticized efforts to atone, saying that we can’t hold people from the past to today’s moral standards. George Washington was a slave owner, they note; should we rename Washington, D.C.?

“I think it’s a waste of time,” says Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank. “Except in extreme circumstances, our focus should be on moving forward.” The way to remember slavery, Clegg adds, is not “to airbrush it out of our history” by renaming things.

Historians have long known that a slave sale once helped keep Georgetown afloat. In 1838, faced with mounting debt stemming from unprofitable Maryland plantations, Georgetown’s president, Reverend Thomas Mulledy, sold 272 slaves owned by the Jesuit* order that ran the school. The sale raised $115,000—more than $3 million today—and saved the university. 

But the sale broke many families apart. Most of the slaves ended up on plantations in Louisiana, where they endured “dreadful conditions,” according to a recent Georgetown report.

In 2015, Georgetown students held protests calling for the university to rename buildings named for Mulledy and William McSherry, a former Georgetown president who was also involved in the slave sale.

DeGioia formed a committee to study and address past slavery ties. Within months, in November 2015, the university agreed to rename the buildings. 

The school’s plan to offer preferred admission status to descendants of the slaves it sold is unprecedented. But so far, Georgetown hasn’t offered special financial assistance, and some worry that the costs of attending—more than $66,000 per year—will keep many of the descendants out.

“I think it’s a good start, but they need to do more,” says Melissa Kemp of Massachusetts, whose fourth great-grandmother, Louisa Mahoney Mason, was a slave owned by the Jesuits. “If Georgetown really wants to level the playing field, it can offer aid to low-income minorities and descendants, and scholarships for college prep courses and Jesuit high schools.” 

Like the descendants, Georgetown students have given the university mixed reviews for its efforts. 

“It’s promising, but I’m still a bit skeptical,” says Mackenzie Foy, an African-American sophomore at Georgetown. “Allowing advantages for students who are descendants is unprecedented, and I’m really proud of that, but I’m concerned that the conversation stops there, because that should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end.”