A Sale That Saved a University From Closing
In 1838, Jesuit priests who managed Georgetown University, then on the verge of financial collapse, sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children from Jesuit-owned plantations in Maryland for a total of $115,000, roughly $422 per person, a transaction worth an estimated $3.3 million in contemporary value. The university used this sale's proceeds specifically to remain financially solvent and open, meaning Georgetown's continued institutional existence through this specific crisis depended directly on the sale of these 272 specific, documented individuals, whose names, including Isaac Hawkins, listed first in the surviving 1838 sale documentation, survive in the historical record precisely because the transaction itself was so thoroughly documented.
Where the 272 Actually Went
Recall from this unit's previous lesson the specific financial detail connecting this sale directly to the broader banking history already examined: between 1838 and 1865, the enslaved people sold from Georgetown's Jesuit plantations were held, according to Georgetown's own historical research, as collateral by Citizens Bank of New Orleans, the same institution this unit's previous lesson traced as a direct corporate predecessor to JPMorgan Chase, meaning this specific university sale and this unit's broader banking material describe, in a precise and traceable sense, the very same underlying financial infrastructure operating across two different kinds of institution simultaneously.
A Reckoning That Took 178 Years
Georgetown's own institutional acknowledgment of this history arrived only in 2016, when university president John J. DeGioia issued a formal public apology, stating directly that "slavery remains the original evil of our Republic, an evil that our university was complicit in, a sin that tore apart families." The university renamed two campus buildings specifically to honor two of the 272 individuals sold, Isaac Hawkins Hall, named for the sale's first-listed individual, and Anne Marie Becraft Hall, honoring a free woman of color who had established a school for Black girls in the Georgetown neighborhood, and began offering admissions preference to documented descendants of the 272. In 2023, Georgetown and the Jesuit order jointly pledged $27 million toward a Reconciliation Fund benefiting descendant communities, providing roughly $400,000 annually toward community-based projects.
Comparable Reckonings, and a Recurring Pattern of Delay
Georgetown's case connects directly to comparable institutional self-examinations at other major American universities. Brown University's own 2002-2006 Slavery and Justice Report, examined in this unit's previous lesson as connected to the FleetBoston lawsuit, produced Brown's own detailed accounting of the Brown family's direct historical ties to Rhode Island's slave trade. Yale University launched its own Yale and Slavery Research Project in 2020, publishing its full findings and a formal institutional apology only in 2024, examining specifically the ties several of the university's early leaders held to the slave trade, and, in 2017, had already renamed its undergraduate Calhoun College, originally honoring nineteenth-century slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, in favor of Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale alumnus and pioneering computer scientist.
Naming Directly What This Pattern Represents
This unit closes by connecting its full arc directly to a pattern this entire project has now traced repeatedly across every one of its component curricula: formal institutional acknowledgment of slavery's role in building specific, named American financial and educational institutions has consistently arrived only after decades, in Georgetown's case nearly two centuries, of documented historical fact sitting available in institutional archives, and the specific reckoning that eventually followed, while genuine and, in Georgetown's case, backed by real financial commitment, remains a subject of continued, legitimate debate regarding whether it constitutes adequate material repair or, in the words some critics examined throughout this project's other curricula have used regarding comparable reckonings, primarily symbolic gesture. This unit's material, connecting Walter Rodney's structural argument about wealth extraction to specific, named American banks and universities whose modern corporate and institutional identity traces directly back to slavery's own financial architecture, establishes precisely the kind of concrete, documented economic case this project's companion African Political Thought curriculum's treatment of Rodney's broader thesis was built to introduce, now grounded in specific American institutions whose apologies, reconciliation funds, and building renamings can themselves be evaluated using the same recognition-versus-material-repair framework this project has applied consistently from Chile's Afro-descendant recognition law to CARICOM's reparations campaign to Ubuntu's application in South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
