Like many campuses, Georgetown University is scrutinizing its historical ties to slavery. But unlike most, it’s going beyond plaques and apologies — actually tracking down the descendants of slaves it sold in the early 19th century to keep its doors open.
It all started last fall, as chronicled in an article published on Saturday in The New York Times, when student organizers urged the university to do a better job of investigating its troubled past. A working group charged with doing just that recommended several measures, including renaming buildings and erecting historical markers.
Meanwhile, a project led by an alumnus and chief executive of a technology company, Richard J. Cellini, went much deeper. Mr. Cellini recently established the Georgetown Memory Project, which guides research from eight genealogists to trace where the descendants of the slaves who were sold ended up. Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown and member of the working group, has been busy on a similar project with students.
Most major universities agree they have an ethical obligation to acknowledge their historical connections to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But what does that look like? Should institutions go beyond markers and memorials to, say, pay reparations? Can they?
Edward L. Ayers, president emeritus of the University of Richmond and a historian of the South, says historical markers are still important, but Georgetown’s action has had the “highest level of engagement” he has seen so far as universities and colleges find ways to come to terms with a thorny past.
Many colleges are wrestling with how to acknowledge either their funding of the slave trade or how they relied on enslaved people to construct campus buildings, Mr. Ayers says. “It’s not enough to talk about people in the abstract,” he says. “We need to talk about [slaves] as individuals, and that’s what Georgetown is doing.”
Georgetown is part of a consortium of dozens of universities that are posing those questions to one another and sharing ideas. The consortium, Universities Studying Slavery, was established in 2015 by scholars at several Virginia universities. It has since expanded to include such universities as Georgetown and the University of South Carolina.
Washington and Lee University
The group met most recently in early April at Washington and Lee University. There, members discussed recent developments such as a new plaque at the university that explains the pivotal moment in its entanglement with slavery — how John (Jockey) Robinson gave the university, then Washington College, his estate and its 84 slaves in 1826. A decade later, the college made more than $22,000 — roughly half a million dollars in today’s currency — for the sale of many of those slaves, although several elderly slaves remained in its possession until the 1850s.
“It’s hard to trace lineal descendants because our record ends when those slaves are sold to an owner who transports them to Mississippi,” says Barton A. Myers, an assistant professor of history at the university and member of a special working group studying the history of African-Americans there. The university is considering how to incorporate that history in the form of more educational plaques, in campus tours, and on a website detailing key historical events.
Beyond that, though, practical concerns arise: for instance, whether a university owes or could afford to pay reparations to slaves’ descendants, says Theodore C. DeLaney, a member of the working group who is also director of the Africana-studies program and an associate professor of history.
“I don’t know what the endowment of Georgetown is like, but what can you do in regards to settling a debt?” he says, adding that there are likely to be many more descendants of those slaves than a university could afford to give reparations to. What is more important, he says, is to establish a full history and conduct constructive conversation with students, faculty members, and alumni.
University of Virginia
In 2013 the University of Virginia established a commission on slavery and the university. As part of the work that followed, the university has played a leading role in the consortium of colleges tackling similar issues, says Maurie D. McInnis, vice provost for academic affairs and a professor of art history at UVa. The university’s dedication to the issue is appropriate, she says, because its history with slavery is so riddled with paradox.
“You have the man who wrote our nation’s ideal — all men created equal — who fails to live up to that,” she says, referring to Thomas Jefferson. “You have an institution he establishes to ensure American democracy but that is also dependent on slavery. You have really the paradox that is at the heart of American history.”
The university also recently experimented by teaching a course on the institution’s historical ties to slavery. Interest was overwhelming, Ms. McInnis says, and the course had to be capped at 45 students with a waitlist of many more. Because researchers have been so active on the question of historical ties, she says, the course was taught by a number of faculty members, including herself.
The university owned fewer than five slaves, Ms. McInnis says, but at any given time there were up to 100 people enslaved there. They belonged to faculty members and “hotel keepers,” or those who would have been responsible for dining, laundry, cleaning, and other services at the university. Researchers at UVa have not been able to find any records of those enslaved by hotel keepers, largely because they were people of lower socioeconomic status who generally did not keep such records, says Ms. McInnis. Through county records, however, she has been able to locate a number of documents related to slaves owned by faculty members.
“What happens to those enslaved people after a death is that the trail grows cold,” she says, adding that researchers are continuing to trace that lineage but have not had much success.
Brown University
Brown University is not a part of the consortium, but it has been a pioneer in addressing questions of reparations and memorials on its campus.
Over a decade ago B. Anthony Bogues sat on a task force convened by Ruth J. Simmons, who was president at the time, to investigate Brown’s historical ties to slavery. Brown led the way, he says, in concluding that slavery was a crime against humanity and that universities had an obligation toward restorative justice.
Mr. Bogues is now director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and a professor of humanities and critical theory. The center, created in 2012, focuses on promoting scholarship about how slavery shaped American society, and hosts exhibitions, public forums, and educational initiatives that explain Brown’s history. One of those efforts is adding material to freshman seminars that describes Brown’s participation in the slave trade as well as overarching themes of slavery in the world. The courses will begin this fall.
The university also created a memorial to slaves at Brown. The university’s first president, James Manning, owned a slave, although it isn’t clear whether it was during his time as president. As Rhode Island was the epicenter of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the time, Mr. Bogues says, that was not uncommon.
Many other universities have sought advice from Brown’s center, Mr. Bogues says, and the university continues to welcome new partnerships with other colleges that want to take a similar tack.
Clarification (4/19/2016, 11:38 a.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly implied that a Washington and Lee working group had considered whether the institution should pay reparations to descendants of former slaves. The group’s work has been confined to discussion of the institution’s history.
