The University has offered to give admission edge to descendants of these slaves. that were sold.
It's about time...
The will create an institute to study the history of slavery at the school and it will rename two buildings that had honored presidents who oversaw the 1838 sale of 272 slaves, who had worked on church-affiliated plantations in Maryland.
"This original evil that shaped the early years of the republic was present here," Georgetown President John Degioia told an audience that included descendants of the slaves.
The university will hold a mass of reconcilation "in which we will seek forgiveness for our participation in the institution of slavery, specifically for the sale of 272 children, women and men who we should regard as members of our community."
The steps go further than those taken by other U.S. Universities that are confronting their past association with slavery, including Harvard, Brown, Princeton and the University of North Carolina.
But some criticized as inadequate the decision to give the descendants of the sold slaves the same admissions preference as the children of faculty, staff and alumni.
"We remain hopeful that we can forge a relationship with Georgetown that will lead o 'real' atonment," Karran Harper Royal, an organizer of a group of descendants, said in an email.
She added that the school should have offered scholarships to slaves' descendants and included them on the panel that made the recommendations.
The 18,000-student university will also create a memorial for slaves whose work benefited the school, including those sold to plantations in Louisiana to pay off Georgetown's debts.
Descendants of the slaves will be included in a group advising on the memorial.
The school will rename its Freedom Hall for Isaac, the slave whose name led the list of those to be sold, and Remembrance Hall fo Annie Marie Becraft, a black educator. The buildings had previously been named after the presidents who gave a pass to sell the slaves.
Students at dozens of U.S Universities protested last fall over the legacy of racism on campus. The protests led to the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri and prompted many schools to review their diversity commitments.
"Georgetown, being a Catholic institution, really can't escape the moral problem of that history because it's come to challenge its Catholic identity," said Craig Stephen Wilder, a history professor at the Massauchusetts Institute of Technology.credit: Ian Simpson/Yahoo news
