“We have greatly sinned,” declared Timothy Kesicki, S.J., to a packed audience in Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, on April 18, 2017.1 The president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, Fr. Kesicki apologized for the Society’s complicity in the history of slavery and for the specific act of the notorious sale of roughly three hundred people owned by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838. He was joined on the stage by Georgetown’s President John J. DeGioia, and members of the “GU272” descendant community, the living descendants of the people sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838. Together, they participated in a ceremony intended to recall the history of slavery in the past and advance the prospect of reconciliation in the present. It was a powerful moment I had the privilege to witness in person.
The event arose from two years of intense wrestling with the legacies of slavery at Georgetown. At the start of the 2015–16 academic year, President DeGioia launched a Working Group for Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to study Georgetown’s historical connections to slavery and to make recommendations to him about how the school could acknowledge this aspect of its past. President DeGioia was responding not only to the reopening of a newly renovated building on campus named after Thomas Mulledy, S.J. (1794–1860), a former president of Georgetown (1829–38, 1845–48) who had been the chief architect of the 1838 sale, but also to broader social anguish and strife sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown (1996–2014) in Ferguson, Missouri, and the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.2 What happened next at Georgetown is probably well known to readers of this journal. After months of research and discussion on campus, revelations of the identification of living descendants of the people owned and sold by the Maryland Jesuits hit the front page of the New York Times, and a local story became national, and even international news.3 History had come to life.
There is much to say about these extraordinary events, but what I want to emphasize here is the relationship between scholarship and public knowledge. Most people did not know the history. Despite the existence of substantial scholarship on the Jesuits and slavery, the mere fact that the Maryland Jesuits owned and sold people came as a surprise and a shock to many in the Georgetown community and the broader public. That is one reason that the Working Group launched the Georgetown Slavery Archive (slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu) to make original archival materials documenting this history more accessible. It is also why the Working Group, in its report, recommended a vigorous program of education to make this history better known beyond the small circle of specialists.4