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Georgetown students took up the mantle of healing this wrong years ago. Students voted on a resolution to pay reparations to the descendants of those slaves and the Georgetown Memory Project is working to identify the descendants and secure admission/tuition assistance for them. https://twitter.com/jessekellydc/status/1274409271845937152
The school has renamed two buildings that were previously named after University Presidents that arranged the sale of 272 slaves. They will be renamed after Isaac Hall, one of the enslaved men who was sold, Anne Marie Becraft Hall, after a black educator and nun.
There are also working plans to build a memorial to the people who were sold to fund the university in the 1838 sale. What’s happening at Georgetown isn’t a “cancellation” it’s a community coming together to acknowledge and rectify a deep historical wrong.
Obviously there is still a ton of work to be done. Georgetown is not a perfect place, it is an institution plagued by racism, but hopefully the Memory Project will serve as a door for more conversations about the way Georgetown treats it’s students, faculty, and staff of color.
