For months now, an astonishing past has been revealing itself, document by document and memory by memory, to Georgetown University and to the descendants of 272 slaves who were sold by Jesuit priests in 1838 to pay the university’s debts. What many people at Georgetown had believed for years — that the slaves all died of fever soon after reaching Louisiana, leaving behind no trace — has turned out not to be true. In fact, hundreds of their descendants live in and around Maringouin, La., near Baton Rouge, and others have been identified all across the United States.
They pushed a college to reckon with its slaveholding past.
Among those at the center of the discoveries have been Karran Harper Royal, 53, a New Orleans public-education advocate and genealogy fan who is married to one of the descendants, and Richard J. Cellini, also 53, a Georgetown alumnus in Cambridge, Mass., who created and raised money for the independent Georgetown Memory Project while the university was still struggling with students’ demand that the names of two priests involved in the long-ago sale be removed from campus buildings. The efforts to encourage a seemingly reluctant university to acknowledge a bleak episode from the early 19th century attracted attention throughout higher education, and the project’s leaders say they hope Georgetown’s experience can serve as a model for other institutions that profited from slavery.
The people who made a mark on higher education — for better or worse.
The Georgetown Memory Project has underwritten genealogical research that has helped locate and bring together the descendants, almost none of whom knew that their forebears once toiled on Maryland plantations that supported Georgetown. Mr. Cellini says the 272 slaves were unusual in that, as a consequence of having been owned by an order of priests, they had both first and last names and were Catholics. They can be traced through parish records, first in Maryland and then in Louisiana, where they also appear in mortgage documents because the plantation owners mortgaged them to buy seed every spring.
“Every baptism, birth, marriage, and first communion was recorded — even the names of witnesses were recorded,” Mr. Cellini says. Other surviving documents include account books that detail minor transactions on the Maryland plantations, such as a slave’s receiving a gallon of molasses to help regain his strength after an illness. It is, Mr. Cellini says, “the largest slave sale in America that is this well documented.”
Ms. Royal, who has just been named executive director of a new “GU272" descendants’ organization, got involved last summer after reading in The New York Times about the slaves and recognizing several names from her husband’s family tree. She estimates that her husband and children are related to as many as 100 of the 272 slaves.
“This Georgetown story, it just grows every day,” she says. “When you’re doing African-American genealogy, you expect to hit brick walls because you can’t go beyond the Civil War, but I’ve had the opportunity to meet descendants in Louisiana and Maryland. It is such a rewarding experience to be part of connecting families up that had been disconnected through slavery.”
Late last summer, Ms. Royal helped create a Declaration of GU272 Descendants, which says the signers want to “involve all of our Georgetown brothers and sisters in an effective and sustained movement to reconcile our Georgetown Family, our nation and our human family from the legacy of slavery.” She read the declaration aloud at a September event during which Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia, announced steps the university planned to take to acknowledge the slaves’ contribution to the university’s survival. The descendants, she noted, had not been consulted about the plans or invited to hear the president’s speech, even though he had visited with some of them in Louisiana during the summer.
“I recognize that they don’t know how to do this,” Ms. Royal says. “There’s no model for interacting with the descendants of people enslaved by the people who started your university.” But she also says that “Georgetown, as a Jesuit institution with strong social-justice values, is in a perfect position to set the tone for other universities that owned slaves.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
