Georgetown University sold my family’s ancestors and needs to do more to atone

In 1838, Isaac Hawkins and Nace and Biby Butler - ancestors of my husband, Kenneth - were sold to plantations near Baton Rouge by the Jesuit priests of Georgetown University, along with 272 other men, women and children who had been enslaved on Jesuit plantations in Maryland. Thanks to DNA testing, I now know that some of my ancestors in the Queen and Mahoney families were among them, too.

The sale, worth about $3.3 million in today’s dollars, helped the institution then known as Georgetown College pay off debts that threatened to bankrupt it. And like countless others in our nation’s history, it also ripped apart black families and sent people as young as 1 and as old as 80 to labor in the fields of the Deep South.

Recently, Georgetown began to try to make amends. Prodded by courageous students who led campus protests last year, the university has announced that it will formally apologize for its role in the enslavement of African Americans, giving preferred status in admissions decisions to descendants of the people the school sold, creating a memorial to them on campus and pushing its professors to study ways to address lasting racial injustices.

I am part of a group of nearly 500 descendants of Georgetown’s former slaves who are pushing the university to do more. We are committed to organizing all of our Georgetown brothers and sisters in a sustained movement to reconcile the nation with the legacy of slavery. Our goal is to unshackle the hearts and minds of those who were never physically in bondage but who still live and work today under that terrible system’s vestiges. This is the beginning of a huge conversation in this country, and we want to help our Georgetown family be a pivotal player in it. We have invited Georgetown to partner with us to support a new organization, the GU272 Foundation, to promote reconciliation, education and uplift for the descendants and all of mankind. We want this foundation to serve as a model for other institutions and result in meaningful actions to address the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.

We hope that Georgetown will recognize the commonality of our goals and partner with us to facilitate them. We look forward to Georgetown embracing us as an important part of its family.

For descendants who go on to attend Georgetown, the university must offer scholarships, not just a leg up in admissions. The foundation we partner with Georgetown to create will support the educational aspirations of descendants regardless of where they go to college. Our ancestors’ lives propped up the university generations ago at a time when most students didn’t pay tuition. If Georgetown is going to atone for its part in slavery, descendants shouldn’t have to pay, either.

We are encouraged that the recommendations from the working group included support for genealogical research to find more descendants. The Georgetown Memory Project, a group founded by university alumnus Richard J. Cellini, has found more than 2,500 who have already been documented. There could be thousands more.

Genealogy is very difficult for African Americans to do. Many of us cannot go beyond the Civil War when we’re going back in time - discovering the lives of people who were considered property is a complicated process. For those of us whose families were part of the Georgetown 272, the careful records kept by the Jesuit priests who ran the school can be a bittersweet gift. There are times when I have been sitting at my dining table until 5 in the morning researching my family and my husband’s family, and I get excited - and then I almost feel guilty for being happy that our family’s past is easier to find, thanks to the meticulous Jesuits. Tracing their records brings me back to the pain and sadness of my ancestors’ lives, but I’m still so happy that I can do it. For Georgetown to put some of its vast resources into helping descendants in their genealogy research will be a great help.

More than that, though, the university needs to work with us as it attempts to address the damage it did all those generations ago. If Georgetown is about true healing and reconciliation, it has to be done with us. University officials did not initially even invite descendants of the former slaves to last week’s announcement of the findings of a working group on how to atone for the sale. That was painful - when I learned about the event, and realized we hadn’t been part of the study and deliberations that led up to it, I felt like it was 1838 all over again. That’s a mistake we hope the college won’t repeat. Though I live in New Orleans, I was able to attend because I was already planning to be in Washington last week for a genealogy conference. Some fellow descendants joined me to read our group’s declaration at the school’s presentation.

This country needs a healing, and Georgetown, as a Jesuit institution, is perfectly positioned to be a role model. Other institutions - not just universities, but banks and major corporations - had roots in slavery, too. We want to help people understand that just because there was an Emancipation Proclamation, that doesn’t mean the legacy of slavery doesn’t have an impact today.

Nace Butler, my husband’s ancestor, had a son named Nace Butler Jr., who was one of a handful of slaves who hid out in the woods and waited while the rest of the Georgetown 272 were led to the ship that would take them south to Louisiana. His entire family was sold away, but he didn’t go. He lived out the rest of his life on St. Inigoes, one of the Jesuit plantations in Maryland. He must have continued to serve the Jesuits into freedom, because he died in 1888 and is buried there.

Nace Butler Jr. must have had to dig down deep into himself to serve those people who sold his family away from him. Now the descendants of those men, women and children who were sold are drawing on the strength of ancestors like him. And we are determined to turn our ancestors’ insistent survival into an unwavering commitment from the entire Georgetown family to work to reconcile our nation’s ugly past.

Royal is an education advocate in New Orleans and the co-host of “Nurturing Our Roots,” a TV show about genealogy.