Swarns is an associate professor of journalism at N.Y.U., and the author of two previous books on Black history, ancestry, and genealogy. “The 272” grew out of a series of articles that she wrote while reporting for the New York Times, where she remains a contributor. Georgetown, which was founded in 1789, is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States. The sale of the two hundred and seventy-two people and the school’s historical involvement with slavery has been a topic of scholarly inquiry in recent decades, particularly by Jesuit historians, but it began drawing broader attention only in 2015. That September, following the publication of several articles about the university’s history of enslavement in the student newspaper The Hoya, Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia, assembled a working group to examine the university’s role in the practice of slavery and provide recommendations on how best to acknowledge and address its legacy. Later that fall, Georgetown students demonstrated on the university’s campus in Washington, D.C. They urged the school’s administration to rename two buildings, Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall, that bore the names of Jesuit priests who had arranged the sale of the enslaved people while serving as the school’s presidents. In those same months, Richard J. Cellini, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown in 1984, was following developments at the university and wanted to learn what had happened to those enslaved and track down their descendants. Cellini founded a nonprofit organization, the Georgetown Memory Project, engaged a team of researchers, and raised money from alumni. He described his efforts in an e-mail to a staff member at the Times, which that person forwarded to Swarns, who wrote a series of articles about the controversy, starting with a piece that was published on the front page of the paper on April 17, 2016. A sidebar to the Times story invited readers who thought that they might be descendants of the two hundred and seventy-two to get in touch with the paper.
That June, the Georgetown working group delivered its report to the president, which the university made public in September, along with steps to implement a number of its recommendations. The university renamed the two buildings that bore Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry’s names: one for Isaac Hawkins, the first of the enslaved people named in the record of the 1838 sale, and the other for Anne Marie Becraft, a free Black Catholic woman who established a school for Black girls in the Georgetown neighborhood in the eighteen-twenties. It arranged for descendants of the two hundred and seventy-two to be granted consideration in admissions akin to that given to any applicant who is “a member of the Georgetown community.” It established a center to study slavery and its legacy, which began activities this spring. And it prepared a public apology for its participation in the institution of slavery.
