In the modern era, university-sponsored slavery first received sustained scrutiny in 2003-6, when Brown University (under the leadership of then-president Ruth J. Simmons) confronted its own historical ties to slavery. As Dr. Simmons remarked later: “As institutions that are supposed to be seekers of truth, it would be the height of corruption to lie about our backgrounds, and to try to hide our histories. … So a university today that had slave ties, — maybe that’s uncomfortable. But if you persist in telling a lie about your origins, you are culpable. You are culpable today, and the public has a right to judge you on that basis.”
Since 2006, at least two dozen American colleges and universities have begun investigating their institutional ties to slavery, including Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, the University of Georgia, Ole Miss, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Washington & Lee, and William & Mary.
But perhaps no institutional reckoning with slaveholding has captured the public imagination quite like the one at Georgetown University. Georgetown became ground zero for the university-slavery debate in late 2015, when it became widely known that hundreds of enslaved people (the GU272) were sold from Maryland to Louisiana in 1838 by the Maryland Jesuits, to rescue Georgetown from imminent bankruptcy and to provide financial support for a number of other Jesuit schools.
In recent years, scholarship on the history of slavery has leapt beyond academe to force a societal reckoning. This occasional series explores fresh questions scholars are asking as America confronts its history of human bondage.
Spurred by these public reports, I founded the Georgetown Memory Project in an effort to identify the GU272 ancestors and locate their living descendants. To date we have found 214 members of the GU272 and have identified 7,712 direct descendants, living and deceased. We’ve even identified a small bayou town in Louisiana, called Maringouin, populated almost entirely by descendants of the Georgetown slaves.
GU272 descendants started coming forward in significant numbers in early 2016. Yet the Georgetown administration rejected multiple requests to include any of them in the university’s official Working Group on Slavery. When the group’s report was presented to the public, on September 1, 2016, the convocation featured a nine-minute video that captured for posterity the individual experiences, reflections, and aspirations of — the members of the working group. No GU272 descendants were invited onstage.
Georgetown’s official response to its slaveholding past was stingy, unimaginative, and largely focused on the university itself. The working group’s recommendations and report were widely criticized as unsatisfactory and even illegitimate, for lack of participation by the descendants.
But then something happened: The GU272 descendants began telling their stories to journalists, in ways that have won the respect, admiration, and affection of the nation. Since September 2016, public discussion of university-sponsored slavery has rarely failed to mention the “descendant factor.”
Against all odds, that descendant factor has reshaped public expectations for institutional responses to university-sponsored slavery. A new consensus is beginning to emerge among slavery scholars and researchers on several important topics:
Independence. Universities cannot adequately investigate their own historical connections to slavery. Investigations must be entrusted to independent researchers, experts, and fact-finders. Institutions may participate in the process but must not seek to limit or control fact-finding and outcomes.
Inclusion. A university may occupy only one seat at the table. Descendants must be identified as early as possible and included in deliberations. So too must be representatives of the local community that picked up the pieces left by university-sponsored slavery.
Transparency. Universities must not seek to control the records, stories, or remains of their former slaves. All relevant materials should be entrusted to independent institutions and made permanently available to the general public.
Coordination. Universities must share resources and responsibilities, and remedies should dovetail with, and build upon, remedies adopted by other institutions.
Proportionality. Answering (not just asking) the hard questions is the most important thing a university can do when addressing this situation. The remedies adopted by formerly slaveholding universities must be proportionate to the underlying wrongs they committed. Apologies and memorials are rarely sufficient by themselves. Remedies should promote truth, reconciliation, and restorative justice beyond the campus walls.
Justice. Universities have a duty to fashion remedies that benefit descendants and the communities in which they live. Remedies and resources should not be diverted to bystanders or on-campus groups with “sympathetic” agendas.
Brown University’s approach was groundbreaking in its day. However, that model is no longer an adequate blueprint for institutional responses. Today a new model is required.
At a bare minimum, institutional responses to university-sponsored slavery must not simply reaffirm and reinforce academic privilege. Moments of reckoning and reconciliation must not be converted into yet another occasion for the celebration of academic values, the promotion of academic careers, the expansion of academic budgets, and the advancement of academic priorities. Those responses are improper, based as they are on the assumption that enslaved people and their families may once again be placed in the service of the “larger” mission of the university.
Put simply, institutional responses to university-sponsored slavery must embody a forthright rejection of the privilege that led to university-sponsored slavery in the first place. The public has a right to judge you on that.
Richard J. Cellini is founder and secretary of the Georgetown Memory Project.
