By Daina Ramey Berry — People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was all a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Slavery has been in the…
By Edna Whittier, The Roanoke Times — In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate Japanese Americans who were in internment camps during World War II. Offering a formal apology it paid $20,000 to each surviving victim and their heirs. In 2004, the State of Virginia established the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship fund setting aside $1 million (with another $1 million contributed by philanthropist John…
By Sara Weissman, Diverse — Georgetown University recently announced that it would fundraise $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of 247 slaves sold by the school’s Jesuit founders in 1833, after students voted to make a reparations fund in April. The money will go toward funding community projects like schools and health clinics for the over 4,000 living descendants. The official decision, publicized last week, comes on the heels…
The iconic, progressive ice cream company is in favor of a House Bill that would develop reparations proposals—a sign that attitudes towards a once-radical answer to racial parity are shifting. Story Transcript JACQUELINE LUQMAN: This is Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News Network. Reparations for African Americans or the descendants of Africans brought to the US to be enslaved is a socially and politically charged topic. Widely discussed and advocated within…
By James Pasley, Business Insider — In 2016, former first lady Michelle Obama declared as a sign of how far the nation has come: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” She was talking about the White House. And as the first African American first lady speaking to the Democratic National Convention, she struck a chord. Some fact checkers and political pundits may have raced…
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 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 — Mélisande Short-Colomb knows her begats. Three years ago, she received a Facebook message from a genealogist, asking if she was related to the Mahoney family of Baton Rouge. Like a Biblical scholar ticking off Old Testament lineage, she typed…
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 fund benefiting the descendants of enslaved people that the university sold to save itself from financial ruin in the 19th century. The move came in response to the university’s lack of action on the recommendation of its own Working Group…
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 become the first college in the nation to mandate a fee to benefit descendants of slaves sold by the university nearly 200 years ago — a debate that takes place against the backdrop of a broader political conversation unfolding on the 2020 presidential campaign…
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 of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, said of the sale of the 272 enslaved people, “We have greatly sinned… we are profoundly sorry.” Similarly, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said, “Slavery [was an] evil that our…
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