Reconciling Georgetown's Slaveholding Past: A Way Forward
By Valeria Balza
In 1838, amid serious financial trouble, Georgetown University sold 272 slaves—including pregnant women and 2-year-old children—to plantations in Louisiana. In recent months, the Jesuit institution’s historical participation in slavery has been the source of intense discussion.
As the university grapples with its past, the Initiative hosted a dialogue on October 12 titled “Georgetown, Slavery, and Catholic Social Thought,” where panelists addressed
the historical implications of this tragedy and how Catholic social thought and
Jesuit values can help provide healing at Georgetown and beyond.
John Carr, director of the Initiative, moderated the discussion and noted at the beginning that the university’s Catholic identity can shape its moral response as it begins to reconcile with its past actions.
“Great evil was done, but great good can come from that, because of who we are, what we believe, and how we act,” he said.
The conversation also featured James Benton, the Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Fellow at the university, who said, “We’re now trying to transition from understanding of the past, to trying to think how to apply it to the present and future…We’re at the start of a very long process.”
Benton is a member of the Working Group in Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, which recently recommended that “the university offer a formal, public apology for its historical relationship with slavery,” and that Georgetown engage with the descendant community in an active and sustained manner.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain, another member of the working group and associate professor in the Department of History, also offered her insights. “This working group isn’t just an opportunity for people to trace their individual family history,” she said. “This is a call to rethink all of the practices that we have with us today as an institution that rely and thrive on inequality.”
While Georgetown continues to make amends, Dr. Diana Hayes, emerita professor of systematic theology at Georgetown University, explained how Catholic Social Thought’s key tenant of human dignity can pave a way forward.
Ayodele Arubela reflected on the words of Diana Hayes in a contribution to the Initiative’s Catholic Social Thought Matters blog, writing: “This inherent dignity should inspire our work by virtue of the reality that all human beings were created in the image and likeness of God, and thus reminds us that forms of oppression resulting from the social construction that is race cannot stand when we invoke our unity as one human family.”
Several perspectives were offered on where reconciliation actually stems from, and what is required. Current CST Fellow Max Rosner shed light on this conversation in his interview with another student, Conor Maytnier, who served on the working Group: “[Reconciliation] is about moving forward, and in a way that changes our understanding of our past. [It] gets at this notion of, ‘Where do we go from here?’ which stems from an understanding of where we were.”
Valeria Balza (SFS'18) is a junior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service.