The president of a leading university seeking atonement for profiting from 19th century slaves was publicly confronted by their descendants on Thursday and told: “Nothing about us without us.”
John DeGioia, president of Georgetown University in Washington, had just given a speech in which he pledged to make a formal apology for the 1838 sale of 272 slaves and give preference in admissions to their descendants.
But then a group of descendants, who complain that they have been left out of the process and “rushed” to the event after not receiving invitations, rose from their seats and joined DeGioia at the front of the university’s historic Gaston hall.
Polite but firm, Joe Stewart said he objected to an earlier comment by the Rev David Collins, chairperson of the university’s working group on the issue, that the faces of the slaves were invisible and would have to be imagined.
“One of the working group said what was missing from this scenario was the faces of the slaves,” Stewart said. “Here are the faces. These are the faces. Here are the direct descendants of the 272.”
Standing alongside him, Karran Harper Royal then read a joint declaration on behalf of more than 300 descendants, who are located in Louisiana, Maryland and elsewhere.
Stewart thanked DeGioia and his team for their efforts. But he continued: “Our attitude is that all of this evolved from the pain and suffering of the 272 people we talked about and we are those faces and our attitude is: nothing about us without us.
“If reconciliation is gonna take place as it has to, it needs to start at home and you don’t start reconciling by alienating.”
Stewart, a retired Kellogg’s employee from Battle Creek, Michigan, added: “We want a partnership. We are not interested in conflict, we are not talking reparations, we’re talking about how this university can be an asset to the world in healing some pain and healing racism that is just destroying our society, our one human family.”
DeGioia stood with head bowed respectfully throughout the comments and joined in the applause of audience, then thanked Stewart for his attendance and trust. “We know we can’t do our best work alone,” the president said, promising to engage the descendants in the design of a memorial and help them trace long lost family members.
The incident was a stark reminder of the gap between reconciliation as an abstract concept and a flesh-and-blood reality. The presentation had included a glossy video with uplifting music celebrating the work of the 16-member panel, whose report runs to 19,000 words over 102 pages. Gaston Hall itself, with its elaborately painted walls, stained glass windows and wood cornicing is named after William Gaston, the college’s first student, who owned numerous slaves but also supported the abolition of slavery.
DeGioia met several families of descendants this summer. He said he accepted the panel’s call for the university, run by the Roman Catholic Jesuit order, to give a full apology, and that this will “draw upon the resources of our Catholic tradition” and “offer a mass of reconciliation in which we will seek forgiveness”. He expressed hope this step could begin the journey of reconciliation, “an ongoing journey”.
The 18,000-student university will create an institute to study the history of slavery and its legacies. A new department of African American studies will enroll its first students this autumn.
Georgetown will also rename two buildings, one after Isaac, the enslaved man whose name is the first mentioned in documents of the sale, the other for Anne Marie Becraft, a free African American woman who founded a school for black girls in the Georgetown neighbourhood in 1827.
The buildings had previously borne the name of presidents who oversaw the 1838 sale for $115,000, or roughly $3.3m in today’s dollars, to pay off debts. The 272 slaves were sent from Jesuit plantations in Maryland to Louisiana, “where they labored under dreadful conditions”, and families were broken up, according to the report.
DeGioia announced that the university will give their descendants the same admissions preference as the children of faculty, staff and alumni. But he stopped short of promising the full scholarships that some have called for.
Even so, the measures go further than those taken by other American universities – such as Harvard, Brown, Princeton and the University of North Carolina – that are coming to terms with their past association with slavery.
“The most common response that I received was, ‘I had no idea the Jesuits had slaves,’” DeGioia said of the moment he announced his plan a year ago. “There is a disconnect between what is known and what is alive to us, alive in a way in which we understand ourselves, our history and our university.”
He added: “As a community and as individuals, we cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history.”
The working group said all of the earliest buildings on campus were probably built with slave labor and the university’s reliance on slaves went further than initially believed.
Royal, 53, an education advocate from New Orleans, welcomed the attention to the issue but felt excluded. “I’m pretty bittersweet,” she said in an interview. “I’m glad something is happening but I look forward to something happening with us.”
Fighting back tears, she added: “We don’t even have a seat up front. We were not invited, but we came anyway.”
Royal said: “An apology is absolutely meaningful but we really want to forge a partnership of working together towards healing and reconciliation. That has to be done with all of us as equals.”
Sandra Green Thomas, a special projects director for the city of New Orleans, said of the report: “It had a lot of really nice symbolic gestures in it but there were some things that I, in particular, and other descendants were looking for that were absent.”
“I think it’s difficult for them to make conclusions about reconciliation and how best to reconcile with the group of people and institution when they’re not including the people who were affected by that institution and were, quite frankly, enslaved by that institution.”
