By Lauren Lumpkin and Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post — A couple dozen Georgetown University students broke into a chant Thursday outside a meeting of the school’s board of directors, seeking to put pressure on the university to do more to redress historical wrongs. “Respect our vote! Respect our vote!” they called out. A student vote in April overwhelmingly called on Georgetown to create a fund to help descendants of…
A growing number of schools have started to look into reparations and restitution for descendants of the enslaved. But most of these schools have stopped short of supporting actual funds…
A sixty-five-year-old student who is a descendant of slaves that the school once sold wants to make sure “the Jesuits atone for their sins.” By Kitty Kelley, The New Yorker…
By Christine Buckley, UConn Today — Last month, Georgetown University’s undergraduate students voted in favor of a referendum to voluntarily charge each student a fee to be paid into a…
The school still needs to approve the referendum before it could take effect. By Beatrice Peterson, Rachel Scott, Erica Y King and Christen Hill, ABC News — Georgetown University could…
By Wyatt Massey, Frederick News Post — The Rev. Dr. Ernest Campbell said no, James Forman could not speak at his church service the next day. Campbell was the senior pastor at Riverside Church, a predominantly white church on the west side of Manhattan. Forman, a black civil rights leader, wanted to read something to the congregation at the next day’s service on May 4, 1969, according to a history…
By Eugene Mason, PBS — The United States owes African-Americans reparations for slavery, a recent report by a United Nations-affiliated group said. The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that compensation is necessary to combat the disadvantages caused by 245 years of legally allowing the sale of people based on the color of their skin. The U.N. group warned that the U.S. has not confronted its legacy of “racial terrorism.”…
The Black Press USA is the Web site of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), an umbrella grouping of over 200 African-American newspapers spread across the USA. The NNPA has…
To: The Jesuits and Georgetown University, The Jesuits Sold 272 Enslaved People. Georgetown Benefited. We Demand Reparatory Justice. By Legacy of the GU272 Alliance Legal Team — Father Timothy Kesicki, president…
By Alex Carp — According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee…
By Jarvis DeBerry, The Times-Picayune — Imagine discovering that one of the world’s oldest and best candy companies was able to survive to become one of the world’s oldest and best because generations ago it sold as chattel almost 300 human beings, including your ancestors. You may find yourself impressed by the current management’s willingness to apologize for the sins of their predecessors, but what would you make of their idea…