The journalist who first reported on Georgetown University’s history of enslavement urged community members to engage with the university’s complicated legacy at a Nov. 13 Georgetown event. 

In 2016, Rachel Swarns broke to the public the story on Georgetown’s 1838 sale of 272 enslaved people, known as the GU272, and later published a book about them and their families. Speaking on the sale’s 187th anniversary, Swarns argued that retelling the stories of the enslaved people Georgetown sold is vital to the Georgetown community.

Swarns said that, although it is difficult to discuss the history of the GU272, doing so helps community members reconcile Georgetown’s history with its contemporary values. 

“I often say that this is hard history, and that is certainly true,” Swarns said at the event. “But it is also true that this hard history and the decision to reckon with it have brought so many people together, all of us here in this room, all of us here today.”

The Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus sold 314 people, including the GU272, who were enslaved on plantations in Maryland to raise funds for what was then Georgetown College, which was struggling financially. 

The year before Swarns’ 2016 article, then-University President John J. DeGioia (CAS ’79, GRD ’95) announced the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to investigate the university’s history with slavery. 

DeGioia also renamed two buildings that previously honored university administrators who were key to the GU272 sale: Mulledy Hall was renamed Isaac Hawkins Hall after one of the enslaved people part of the GU272, and McSherry Hall was renamed Anne Marie Becraft Hall after a free Black woman who founded a school in Georgetown for Black girls in the 1820s. Isaac Hawkins Hall later became Ida Ryan & Isaac Hawkins Hall, adding the building’s benefactor to its name.

In 2024, the university inaugurated a required first-year lecture, “Race, Power and Justice at GU,” which interrogates the university’s history, based on the working group’s recommendations.

Swarns said the departure of the “Katherine Jackson,” the ship that carried 130 of the enslaved people who were sold to Louisiana, was a horrific moment. 

“There were elderly people, husbands and wives, children, babies,” Swarns said. “You would have seen the crush of the crowd, parents clinging to their children. Babies wailing. Eyewitnesses describe people falling to their knees, begging for mercy. These were enslaved African Americans, the 272 who had been sold and were about to be shipped to Louisiana, far from the world that they knew and the people that they loved.”

Swarns’ journey covering Black history in the United States began when she reported on then-first lady Michelle Obama during her first year in the White House. Swarns said covering the first Black first family was a historic opportunity that signalled a special moment in U.S. history. 

“The first family is typically covered by White House reporters who do bits and pieces when they’re not chasing the president around the briefing room or flying on Air Force One,” Swarns said. “But after that election in 2008, there was a sense in newsrooms around the country that we might want to do things differently. There was a sense that this family, this first African American family, in this house, built in part with slave labor, was going to be written about for generations to come.”

“As journalists, we often like to think of ourselves as writing first drafts of history,” Swarns added. “So when my editors came to me and said, ‘Hey, you want to write about Michelle Obama and the girls for a year?’ I said ‘Sure!”’

Swarns said she knew she wanted to continue studying the history of slavery and Black families when she travelled to Birmingham, Ala., in an attempt to find the tombstone of Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather. Here, Swarns said she realized she was unprepared.

“I spent that afternoon going around with my little papers, absolutely unsuccessfully,” Swarns said. “I found nothing, but I felt like I had been struck by lightning. I felt like there was nothing I would rather be doing than digging through the nation’s history in this way.”

Adam Rothman, a history professor who chaired the working group and introduced Swarns, said Swarns’ research is crucial for working towards justice.

“Some stories are published and then perish,” Rothman said at the event. “But this one endured and grew, fueled by Rachel’s quest to dig deeper, and by the hunger for knowledge, truth, reconciliation and justice among the descendants themselves.”

Swarns said she hoped that by learning about the GU272+, Georgetown community members would engage with the university’s legacy while grappling with the continued impacts of enslavement. 

Avery Hughes-Davis (CAS ’29), who attended Swarns’ lecture, said learning about the GU272+’s history is crucial because it allows Georgetown students to acknowledge and engage with that legacy. 

“We need to figure out how people today are affected by what happened yesterday and in our past to really see where we need to improve and where we need to grow as a university, a society and as individuals,” Hughes-Davis told The Hoya.

Swarns said one of the families the Jesuits sold in 1838 descended from Anne Joice Mahoney, a Black woman who migrated to Maryland in the 1600s as an indentured servant but was forced into permanent slavery. 

“Her contract was burned. She was forced into slavery. She loses everything — everything except her story,” Swarns said. “She tells that story to anyone who will listen, the white people around her, her children and her grandchildren, and those children and grandchildren tell that story and her that story is a simple one; ‘Our liberty was stolen, and we should be free people.”’

Michael Hou (CAS ’29), who also attended the event, said Swarns’ talk showed him that learning about Georgetown’s history can be difficult and require uncomfortable reflection. 

“To get to know the history of Georgetown, you have to dig yourself; you have to explore yourself,” Hou told The Hoya. “These kinds of things aren’t readily available.”

Swarns said that despite the Jesuits’ sale of enslaved people, many Black families chose to remain Catholic after the Civil War.

“One of the things that was most surprising to me when I did my research was learning that after the Civil War, when families could decide where they wanted to worship, many of these families decided to stay,” Swarns said. “They decided to stay with the Catholic church that had betrayed them, that had sold them, that had torn their families apart. Thousands left, yet many of these families stayed. How did they come to that?”

Swarns has not found any documents to help her understand why Black families decided to remain in the church, but said she wonders about their philosophy, especially as a Black Catholic herself. 

“I like to think that they believed that the church did not belong to those sinful white men,” Swarns said. “I like to think that they believed that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit belonged to them too.”