Excerpt from Georgetown's Philodemic Society recording members debating slavery, either from late 1830 or early 1831.

*A timeline of key moments in the consciousness raising efforts about the history of slavery at Georgetown*
1970s 1980s	More than a century after Emancipation, a small number of scholars began to write and publish about Jesuit slaveholding, including Peter Finn (1974) and Emmett Curran (1981). These accounts focused on the historical material collected in the Maryland Province Archives, material that was almost exclusively written and preserved by the Jesuits. As a result, these first accounts focused on Jesuit perspectives and preserved the memories of the Jesuit priests about the enslaved.
1990s	Georgetown's American Studies Program launched the Jesuit Plantation Project, an early digital humanities project through which AMST majors created digital versions of archival texts, posting and sharing this data publicly. In 2004, Patricia Bayonne-Johnson and Onita Estes-Hicks used the JPP site to connect their ancestors Nace and Bibby Butler to the architect of the 1838 sale, Fr. Thomas Mulledy, S.J. The Butlers were among the more than 272 people sold by Mulledy and the Jesuits in 1838. Bayonne-Johnson and Estes-Hicks would have shared their discovery more widely, but Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans forced the Hicks family to focus on survival and recovery over the next several years.
2014 2015	As you read about in the orientation, Georgetown student Matthew Quallen (F'16) published a series of articles in The Hoya in 2014 about the history of Jesuit slaveholding, reminding members of the Georgetown community (students, faculty, staff, alumni) about this history and its legacies. In 2015, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia charged the Working Group for Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to research this history and its legacies and to make recommendations to the University about how to begin to atone for the institution's early dependence on slavery and the sale of human beings. While the Working Group was made up of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and Jesuits, it did not include any of the descendants of the GU272.
2015	In November 2015, Richard Cellini (C'84) launched an effort to identify living descendants via genealogical research. (You can find the genealogical database here.) Working with Louisiana-based genealogist Judy Riffel, Cellini ultimately was able to identify and contact thousands of descendants. This effort became formalized as The Georgetown Memory Project, an effort independent of the University, which has to date identified more than 10,000 direct descendants. At the same time, descendants began to connect, to organize, and to remember their ancestors. Keep reading to explore the many ways in which they did and continue to do so.
2016-present	In 2016, journalist Rachel Swarns began to publish a series of articles in The New York Times about the history of Jesuit Slaveholding, beginning with "272 Slaves Were Sold To Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe to Their Descendants?" (April 16, 2016). In this and succeeding pieces, Swarns identified and interviewed living descendants of the GU272, sharing their perspectives and memories with a national and international readership. Swarns recently published The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (2023).

Back to Memory Work Overview