A Georgetown student's demand in 2014 was effectively the first shot in what has become a four-and-a-half-year debate over how the school should atone for its slave-holding past
In September 2014, a Georgetown junior published a, the student newspaper, with the headline: “Georgetown, Financed by Slave Trading.” It unearthed a known but largely forgotten history: that the esteemed Jesuit university had saved itself from financial ruin in 1838 by selling 272 enslaved people.
Top: Graduate student Elizabeth Thomas, her brother, Shepard Thomas, a junior, and Mélisande Short-Colomb, a junior, all descendants of the slaves in the 1838 sale, stand outside Anne Marie Becraft Hall. Bottom: Dr. Marcia Chatelain, an associate professor of history and African American studies and Dr. Adam Rothman, an associate professor of history, were both members of the working group impaneled by university administrators to study slavery and its legacy.
Mélisande Short-Colomb, of New Orleans, is a descendant of the GU272 and a sophomore at the University. One side of her family, the Queens, were part of an 1810 Supreme Court case where Francis Scott Key represented them in their bid for freedom. | André Chung for Politico Magazine poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201904/1719/1155968404_6024059900001_6024060390001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404"Rothman takes no public stance on the referendum so as not to intrude in an initiative that he sees as belonging to the students. But he does encourage them to know their history. “A partial truth is not the truth,” he told me on a recent morning in his office.
Shepard and Elizabeth Thomas were the first descendants admitted to Georgetown under the new admissions policy, adopted in 2015, which treats those with proven connections to the 272 as legacy students. | André Chung for Politico Magazine The precedent-setting measure, which they have termed a “reconciliation fee,” would create a nonprofit governed by a board of five descendants and five students who would allocate the funds collected from the $27.20 fee assessed each semester and funnel them into projects that help cover descendant needs. For instance, there’s talk of providing eye exams free of cost and laying the groundwork for a scholarship foundation for descendants to attend college, not just Georgetown.
Many return to the question of who bears the true responsibility for righting the wrong.
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