Facing Georgetown's History

About this book

"This volume is a collection of essays, articles, and documents intended to introduce readers to the history of Georgetown University's involvement in slavery and recent efforts to confront its troubling past. Georgetown's early history, which is closely tied to that of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in Maryland, is a microcosm of the whole history of American slavery: the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the contradictions of liberty and slavery at the founding of the United States; the rise of the domestic slave trade to the cotton and sugar kingdoms of the Deep South in the nineteenth century ; the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war, and slavery's persistent legacies of racism and inequality. Georgetown is also emblematic of the complex entanglement of American higher education and religious institutions with slavery. Copious archival materials - literally, "receipts" - document that history down to the sizes of shoes distributed to enslaved people on the Jesuit plantations that subsidized the school. Today, Georgetown's efforts at recovery, repair, and reconciliation are part of a broader contemporary moment of reckoning with that history and its legacies. Universities are uniquely situated to conduct that reckoning in a constructive way through research, teaching, and modeling thoughtful, informed discussion. We hope that this volume will contribute to that effort at Georgetown and beyond"--