I’m not in favor of reparations but what he’s asking could bankrupt the Jesuits so in all honesty I don’t know what I’m rooting for here.
I think the guy’s asking for a billion dollars.
In a public ceremony, the Jesuits and Georgetown apologized for selling 272 enslaved Black people to three Louisiana plantations in 1838, in a $115,000 transaction that kept then-struggling Georgetown from having to close its doors. Several generations of Wright-Trusclair’s family were enslaved by the Jesuits, including his grandparents’ grandparents.
“It is our very enslavement of another, culminating in the tragic sale of 272 women, men and children that remains with us to this day, trapping us in an historic truth for which we implore mercy and justice, hope and healing,” Father Timothy Kesicki, then the leader of the Society of Jesus for Canada and the U.S., told descendants at the ceremony.
But Wright-Trusclair is one of many descendants who say the Jesuits’ apology and the atonement gestures that followed were not enough. Some are frustrated that the Jesuit order chose to focus mainly on the 1838 sale, instead of detailing deeper history that is not widely known: The Maryland Jesuits entered the slavery business in around 1700, and the revenues from their five plantations funded the founding of Georgetown in 1789, as well as dozens of other Jesuit universities and high schools.
Further, the Jesuits enslaved more than one thousand people over more than a century and a half, not just 272 people. And in modern times, records show that the church has generated tens of millions of dollars from the sale of properties and plantation lands that were once cultivated by the enslaved ancestors of people like Wright-Trusclair.
According to the Georgetown Slavery Archive, by 1700, Jesuit priests had purchased enslaved people and established tobacco plantations on more than 12,000 acres along the Potomac River in southern Maryland. Over the next 164 years, the Jesuits enslaved about 1,100 people, according to Sharon Leon, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University.
I am not in favor of mandated reparations. The Jesuits have already announced a number of donations and scholarships for those whose ancestors were enslaved. But if we get to the point where courts mandate monetary reparations it will never end.
Hey, let’s talk about Yale’s connection with the slave trade or how about IBM’s connection to the Nazis. This could go on forever.
But I’ll admit that the idea of the leftie Jesuits being hung on their own woke petard sounds a wee bit enticing as a spectator. But I must resist these temptations. I must, right?
