In 2015, a stain on Georgetown University’s history that few but historians knew burst forth into the public: in 1838, the indebted college was spared from closure when its Jesuit administration authorized the sale of approximately three hundred people they held in slavery to buyers in Louisiana. Facing Georgetown’s History invites readers to grapple with this “original sin” of the nation’s oldest Jesuit university, its broader history of slaveholding, and its contemporary implications. The compilation, edited by Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, has two sections, “History,” and “Memory and Reconciliation,” containing essays, journalism, speeches, and historical documents. None of the essays is new, having been republished from other volumes, and most of the historical documents are available online at the Georgetown Slavery Archive, curated by Rothman and Mendoza. The sources have been republished with a light editorial hand, perhaps to allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Further editorial work, however, may have aided general readers not familiar with Jesuit terminology or experts in the history of this era, might have offered interpretive aid to understanding the selected primary sources, or might have alerted the reader to factual errors or claims recent scholarship has revised. The volume’s merit is that the sources are compiled in one place, offering a primer on the subject, a teaching tool for classrooms, the Georgetown community, and the vested public to engage the complexities of this history and its legacies.

Lauret E. Savoy’s foreword introduces the significance of this volume, both from her perspective as a historian and as a person who discovered her own ancestral ties to this history as a descendant of people sold in 1838. “Part i: History,” offers a grounding in the historical context of slavery and race as it relates to Georgetown. It opens with Craig Steven Wilder’s 2016 “War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution,” in which Wilder advances his thesis articulated in Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled Histories of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), arguing that Georgetown was an outgrowth of the revolutions sweeping the Atlantic and benefited from slave economies. Wilder emphasizes that “financial concerns rather than moral considerations brought an end to slavery in the Maryland Province.” Although Wilder does not address that Jesuit slaveholding continued on a smaller scale in Maryland after the 1838 sale, his is among the first works to acknowledge that “neither the Jesuits nor the antebellum Catholic Church disengaged from human bondage with the Maryland sale; rather, both followed the westward movement of plantation slavery in search of influence and affluence.” Robert Emmett Curran’s 1983 “‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805–1838” focuses on the Jesuits’ moral failure, describing poor conditions and rampant immorality on the Jesuits’ plantations, whose financial decline motivated the Jesuits to sell their bondspeople en masse. As his title suggests, Curran leaves the misleading impression that Jesuit slaveholding ended in 1838. Elsa Barraza Mendoza’s essay “Catholic Slave Owners and the Development of Georgetown University’s Slave Hiring System, 1792–1862” provides an important look at an understudied aspect of this history, bringing the conversation to what enslavement looked like on Georgetown’s campus itself, where the college’s practice of hiring enslaved people from a close network of affiliates differed from the Jesuit plantations that owned several families and individuals. Finally, James M. O’Toole’s 1996 “Passing: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920” was included because Patrick Francis Healy, president of Georgetown from 1873 to 1882, the son of an Irish slaveholder and an enslaved mother of African descent, passed for white. While this aspect of Georgetown’s history with race and slavery should not be overlooked, the article appears somewhat out of place, especially as only about two paragraphs are devoted to the man who became known (contrary to his own self-identification) as Georgetown’s first African American Jesuit president.

“Part ii: Memory and Reconciliation,” compels readers to reflect on questions of ethics, morality, justice, reconciliation, restitution, reparation, and atonement. Beginning with Ira Berlin’s “American Slavery in History and Memory” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “A Case for Reparations,” as context for the evolving national conversations on slavery, memory, and atonement, it walks through the contours of the contemporary response to Georgetown’s history, beginning with student protests over Mulledy Hall, named after a Jesuit instrumental in authorizing the 1838 sale; to the convening of Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation; to the demands made by descendants for inclusion in the decision-making process; to the Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope held on campus; to the evolution of dialogue moving beyond Georgetown University alone to select representatives of the descendant community, the Jesuits of the United States, and Georgetown, mediated by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Four sub-sections entitled “Essays,” “The Working Group,” “The gu272 Descendants,” and “Reconciliation and Reparation,” examine responses to Georgetown’s history. The selections cross-reference each other well, enabling readers to view sources that an account invokes without having to look beyond the volume.

The work, published by Georgetown University Press, does not shy away from critiques of institutional responses or lack thereof. Alondra Nelson’s examination of the gu272 [= Georgetown University 272 enslaved people] descendants as a case study for how genetic analysis is being used for identity formation and the recovery of ancestral heritage also crucially warns of the risks of using dna testing to establish legitimacy and a voice in racial repair work, where coercive measurers potentially endangering descendant communities are employed. Moreover, dna is used to control who is considered a member of the descendant community and eligible for all the benefits of its membership, even though enslaved communities and their descendants formed kinship beyond blood ties. Of greatest value is the range of descendant voices. Readers hear from Maxine Crump, Karran Harper Royal, Sandra Green Thomas, Jeremy Alexander, Mélisande Short-Colomb, Jessica Tilson, Debra Tilson, Cheryllyn Branche, Rochell Sanders Prater, Charles Hill, Orlando Ward, Melissa Kemp, and Joseph Stewart on what impact this knowledge has on their sense of identity and heritage, their faith and conceptions of family, and what they believe ought to be done.

Mendoza’s epilogue exhorts readers not to forget the names and experiences of enslaved people who made Georgetown University what it is today but rather to engrain what they suffered and what they aspired to in the campus community’s collective memory and discourse. In providing a space where enslaved people and their descendants’ stories are told, Facing Georgetown’s History is necessary to anyone seeking to understand this history and current reckonings with it. The pairing of past and present offers an opportunity for descendants, students, faculty, staff, alumni, Jesuits, members of the Georgetown community broadly, and other vested members of the public to deeply engage with contemporary implications of Georgetown’s enslavement and sale of people. It compels readers to consider how this history continues to affect the campus community, its surroundings, and a diaspora of descendants of enslaved people as the legacies of slavery persist today and mutate into new forms of racism and inequity. The work invites us to contend with questions of the efficacy of reconciliation, atonement, apology, and reparation and to consider what an inclusive, encompassing, and effective response to this history’s lasting ramifications looks like.