Rachel L. Swarns

The university plans to use the money to support community projects such as health clinics and schools. The announcement came six months after Georgetown students voted in a nonbinding referendum to impose student fees that would have raised about $400,000 a year to support the descendants.

Georgetown officials said students would play “a substantial role” in the new initiative but would not be required to pay additional fees. The university plans to seek voluntary contributions from alumni, faculty, students and philanthropists.

“We embrace the spirit of this student proposal,” wrote John J. DeGioia, Georgetown’s president, in a letter to the university community, adding that officials would “ensure that the initiative has resources commensurate with, or exceeding the amount that would have been raised annually through the student fee.”

Georgetown officials described the decision as one step in a dialogue with the descendants, who are seeking $1 billion for a foundation that would finance educational, health, housing and other needs. DeGioia said the university would continue to participate in those talks along with the Jesuits, who established and ran Georgetown and organized a slave sale in 1838 to help save the college from foundering.

Conversations about reparations for slavery have spread in just a few years from activist circles to college quads to the halls of Congress. Georgetown is the third institution to take such a step in the past two months. This month, Princeton Theological Seminary announced it would spend $27 million on scholarships and other initiatives to make amends for its ties to slavery.

In September, Virginia Theological Seminary, which relied on enslaved laborers, created a $1.7 million reparations fund. And last year, the Catholic sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart created a reparations fund to finance scholarships for African-Americans in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where the nuns had owned about 150 black people.

At Georgetown, college officials relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance the school’s operations, university officials said. The 1838 sale — worth about $3.3 million in today’s dollars — was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests.

DeGioia said the university would begin funding community programs in 2020 and described the new fund as part of the university’s efforts “to respond to the question: How do we address now, in this moment, the enduring and persistent legacies of slavery?”

But Shepard Thomas, a descendant of one of the enslaved people in the 1838 sale and a student leader who helped organize the spring referendum, criticized the decision to raise the money through charitable contributions instead of student fees.

Thomas said he feared that descendants would ultimately end up with less financial support, and noted that the university’s plan would not allow individual descendants to receive assistance with medical bills, housing or scholarships.

“That isn’t sufficient,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

Is Georgetown's $400,000-a-Year Plan to Aid Slave Descendants Enough?

Joining a wave of American institutions moving to offer a measure of restitution for their ties to slavery, Georgetown University announced Tuesday that it would raise about $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of the 272 enslaved people who were sold to help keep the college afloat nearly two centuries ago, officials said.

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Rachel L. Swarns

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Is Georgetown's $400,000-a-Year Plan to Aid Slave Descendants Enough?