In 1838, Jesuits sold 272 enslaved Africans to help keep Georgetown University open. Now, as the school reckons with its past, a descendant of one man sold at that auction wants to open a conversation about slavery.
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00:00Wow, this is turning into something, as I just felt it bubbling up, like, wow, this is something.
00:07I found it. I found what I was looking for. I found my legacy.
00:30I was taking the genealogy course at church, and someone texted me an article from the New York Times.
00:41And they basically said, you and I share some of the same ancestry. I think you need to read this article.
00:46I was on the phone with my father simultaneously as I was searching, because when you hear about slavery,
00:54you don't really necessarily think your family. And here it was, he was forced to think, this is my family.
01:04This is real now.
01:24We went down to Georgetown, and it was an extremely emotional trip.
01:29At one point, after seeing the sign and seeing the building, I just broke down and cried, because for me it was like, okay, this is a lie.
01:38It was good to see that they made the decision to put the building in his name.
01:47In the building, there's not a plaque, not a nothing, explaining why this building is named after this man.
01:54That we didn't appreciate.
01:56You want to be happy because now you've made this breakthrough, but in your happiness, you're angry, but you don't really know who to be mad at.
02:23With the university itself, them attempting to do whatever they could to make it right for the descendants of those slaves would be the right thing to do.
02:46I want everyone here to know that we cannot remove the historical pre-context to our current context.
02:54The direct quality of life of these individuals who were used as objects and equipment for our university can be directly tied to the decisions that our Georgetown faculty of the time created.
03:07Personally, I'm just going to be voting no. I empathize with the cost, with the idea of paying reparations, but I don't think that it should be coming from the students.
03:17I think that the university is the one who made this mistake several years ago, and I think that the university is responsible for paying these reparations.
03:23The Jesuits got the money, they got to pay for it.
03:37It's important to know your ancestry because your kids need to know it.
03:52Back then, that was just a common practice. We were enslaved. We weren't seen as human. We were seen as property.
04:00I think a lot of times when you bring up slavery, people just don't want to talk about it. They want to run out of the room, and I think there's a lot of guilt, but I think it's time for us to bring it out and talk about it.
04:12Let's just talk about it.