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Georgetown U.’s Road to Slavery Reparations Was Paved With Good Intentions, Leading to a Can of Worms

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Georgetown U.’s Road to Slavery Reparations Was Paved With Good Intentions, Leading to a Can of Worms
The campus of Georgetown University in Washington on May 7, 2020. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
John Murawski
RealClearInvestigations
Updated:
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In the annals of racial reckoning, Georgetown University’s public atonement for its historical links to slavery has attracted special attention and generous praise.

Since the student newspaper jolted the campus with accounts of Jesuit priests engineering the sale of 272 enslaved people in 1838 to stave off bankruptcy for the college, Georgetown has honored campus buildings after an enslaved black laborer and a black Catholic educator, and pledged funding for health clinics and local schools. The prestigious institution now offers preferred admissions status in perpetuity to descendants of people the Maryland Jesuits once owned.

John Murawski is an award-winning journalist who writes for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) writing about health care, energy, and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.
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