By Marcia Chatelain
A group of Georgetown University students in 2019 began wearing buttons that read For Elizabeth, or For Isaac, or For any array of other names. These adornments could have been mistaken for student government campaign buttons. But instead they pointed to a pivotal moment in Georgetown’s history: these were the names on the inventory of a bill of sale from 1838.
That transaction, facilitated by Jesuits Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry, wrought the sale of 272 people in order to raise funds to meet Georgetown’s financial obligations. The product of a long, complex history of Jesuit slaveholding and of intramural U.S. Catholic debates about slavery, the sale became a constant topic of campus interest. It was brought to light after the 2015 convening of the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, which researched and shared Georgetown’s history with slavery, developed ideas for memorializing the legacies of slaveholding, and recommended ways the University could uplift racial justice today.
By the time students began wearing their buttons in 2019, there was evidence of small strides forward. Georgetown began infusing the history of slavery into its narrative. Networks of descendants of the 1838 sale reconstituted family trees and organized for their collective interests. Some descendants enrolled in Georgetown and eventually became alums. Residence halls that once honored Mulledy and McSherry were renamed. The University’s Special Collections Library became the source for an array of scholarly and creative pieces produced by committed students.
Yet for some, the progress was too slow, too confined to the campus community. And it overlooked a key question: What is owed to the descendants of the 272?
For students who created and wore those buttons, the answer to that question was simple: Reparations. In fact, they organized a successful student referendum that, if implemented, would have collected a $27.20 fee per semester per student to build a reconciliation fund that would allow descendent-beneficiaries to use as they saw fit. University leadership ultimately rejected the result of the referendum, however, and the fund never materialized, leaving student activists deeply disappointed.
Still, this student effort did inspire people at Georgetown and beyond not only to ask what is owed, but to also to imagine a debt that can never actually be repaid.
So, what is owed? That’s a difficult question. Georgetown answered it partially by granting legacy admissions status to descendants. Further, the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States has committed $100 million for a foundation that will devote resources to racial justice initiatives, education, and elder care. Fortheir part, though they have not yet succeeded in attaining their goal, students have continued to argue that a portion of their tuition dollars should be earmarked for these efforts.
But the still more difficult question is this: Can the debt accrued by slavery ever really be repaid? As a faculty member, I’ve thought a lot about questions around the cost of college, about how much debt is too much, and how young people’s lives are often hampered and weighed down by the imperatives of dollars, cents, interest rates, fines, and penalties. But on this side of my involvement in Georgetown’s Working Group, and with special thanks to student activists, I now think about debt differently. Unlike a student loan, the debt that emanates from slavery cannot be retired, no matter how dutifully we may attend to repaying it.
Another thing I have realized is that confronting the legacy of slavery at a university, within a church, or really within any community can be so difficult, in part, because slavery’s afterlives can appear to be both brutal and beautiful. Most people recognize the horrific pain caused by the traffic in human persons. But people also experience a disorienting dissonance when they try to imagine that their beloved and well-manicured alma mater, the place they often credit with some of their greatest successes in life, has also been the site of inhuman suffering. This dissonance makes the work of racial justice much more challenging.
Accompanied by Robert Hussey, S.J., Onita Estes-Hicks, Leroy Baker, and Sandra Green Thomas (above-left) were among the descendants of the 272 enslaved people sold by Georgetown University in 1838 who attended a Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope where Georgetown and the Jesuits apologized for their participation in slave trade. Photo courtesy of USA Today.
Furthermore, today we tend to orient our work, in and outside the university, toward the attainment of specific goals—degrees earned, promotions secured, accounts resolved. In this context, gathering momentum behind the radical possibility of reparations for slavery is difficult because it does not comfortably fit with our preference for goal-oriented courses of action. After all, if our debt can never really be repaid, how can this debt represent a clear goal for us to conquer?
Finally, discomfort with confronting slavery’s legacy today, including the ongoing devaluation of Black life and the race-based economic exploitation of capitalism, can tempt us—maybe especially those of us in higher education—to see our endeavors around slavery as assignments that can be completed. Reports drafted and published. Money redistributed. Programs managed and evaluated.
Yet the substantive grappling with slavery’s legacies—whether in the pursuit of reparations, or the paying of reparations, or both—requires a sober recognition that a zero balance on this debt is simply not a possibility, certainly not in a lifetime.
Instead of a goal, then, what we need is a grace. A grace that sustains people today in the challenging work that goes beyond achieving specific goals. A grace that honors those 272 whose names are known to us, and honors their progeny, too. A grace that allows people today to see their lives as deeply intertwined both with the lives of those who lived so long ago and those who are yet to live so far into the future.
Marcia Chatelain is professor of History at Georgetown University. She won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in history for her book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Georgetown University.
