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Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade APM Reports Documentary Transcript

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Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade APM Reports Documentary Transcript Part 1 Melisande Short Colomb: I'm going to be the oldest not-18 year old…to ever be a part of a freshman class at Georgetown University. [Laughs] Stephen Smith: That's Melisande Short Colomb. She goes by Meli. She's a chef in New Orleans, she's 63-years-old, and she’s the mother of grown children. This fall Meli is moving into the dorms and starting classes at Georgetown University in Washington DC. That's the same school whose Jesuit leaders once owned some of her relatives. CBS News report: Georgetown University is offering an act of contrition for its complicated past. The nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit college announced yesterday it will give preference in admissions to descendants of 272 slaves it sold nearly two centuries ago. Last year, Georgetown announced that it would give "legacy status" to people who are descended from the slaves who were sold to get the school out of a financial bind. That gives the descendants a leg up when they apply to the school. Meli didn’t Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 1 of 43 know she was a descendant until the summer of 2016, when she got an email from a genealogist. Here’s what it said. Meli: I need to tell you that your three times great grandparents, Abraham Mahoney and Mary Ellen Queen, were part of the sale of 272 people by the Jesuits to Louisiana, in 1838. Meli was stunned. She knew those names. Her grandmother had told stories about Abraham Mahoney and Mary Ellen Queen, and about ancestors back in Maryland who had sued for their freedom. She realized her grandmother had been passing down crucial family history, and she wished she’d done more to learn about it. Meli: I felt a little bit of guilt because I’d stepped away from it. And I hadn't pursued it. And in that way I felt like I'd let my grandmother down. It was also hard to think about what Georgetown University and its Jesuit leaders had done to her ancestors. Meli: I was hurt and angry. I think all of those things that you feel when you know the person who sold your family and the reasons why you were sold. Meli started keeping track of what Georgetown was planning to do about descendants like her. She was watching online when university president Jack Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 2 of 43 DeGioia announced the plan to offer the descendants the same preference in admission that it offers to the children of its alumni. Jack DeGioia: We provide care and respect for the members of the Georgetown community – faculty, staff, alumni - those with an enduring relationship with Georgetown. We will provide the same care and respect to the descendants. Meli remembers telling a friend she might apply. The friend said, “Do it.” Meli: And I started the process, and it wasn't easy... I don't have parents taking care of my finances and keeping my life in order, and I didn't have anybody to sit down at the table with me and fill out all of the online applications. I'm a chef. I deal in boiling oil and sharp knives. But she got her application in. And then waited to hear. Finally, in June, Meli got a letter from the school. Meli: So I cracked it open a little bit with one eye closed and saw that “We are happy to…” and then I snatched it out of the envelope and gave it to my best friend and told her, “Read this to me.” [Laughs] And I was sitting there crying. Really, I was. Because there was no, you know, I'm not 18. So for Georgetown to do this it is special and it does mean something. And I do feel like I have been touched by grace. Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 3 of 43 Meli is now an official member of the class of 2021. When we last talked she was looking forward to Freshman Convocation. Meli: And I'm wearing my cap and my robe, without the tassel. And then in four years, we're going to put them all back on. And we're going to graduate as a class. And they are going to influence me for the rest of my life and I am going to influence them. Meli says can feel her ancestors with her. Meli: And they are so proud and they are so happy and they're so with me on this. And my one desire today, as it was last month and a year ago and will be on graduation day in 2021, is that I wish I could change places with my grandmother. And she could have this, because this is her glory and her story. [Crying] I just happened to be the one here to tell it, and to live it. Georgetown is covering Meli Colomb’s tuition, room and board. Still, she and other descendants wonder if the university should be doing more for them. What about the people who may not want to attend Georgetown, or who can’t get in? For the past two years Georgetown has been wrestling with complicated questions about how to publicly acknowledge and make amends for its historic ties to slavery. And the school is not alone. [Music] Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 4 of 43 From APM Reports, this is “Shackled Legacy, Universities and the Slave Trade.” I’m Stephen Smith. Over the coming hour, we’ll explore how some of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious universities, including Harvard and the University of Virginia, are examining their deep connections to the slave economy and debating how to atone for them. Historian Craig Stephen Wilder has written a book that shows how the rise of higher education in the US is linked directly to the rise of American slavery. Craig Steven Wilder: There are eight colleges established in the colonial period: Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Rutgers and Dartmouth. No college survives the colonial period without attaching itself to the slave economy. And these attachments to the slave economy aren’t trivial. For example, it's not that Yale happened to have a couple of trustees who were slave owners or slave traders. Wilder: It's actually that Yale inherited a small plantation in Rhode Island – a slave plantation - that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships, and that it aggressively sought out those opportunities to Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 5 of 43 benefit from these slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world. Scores of American colleges and universities have historical connections to the slave trade, especially along the eastern seaboard. Brown University in Rhode Island was the first to confront that legacy in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to probe Brown’s extensive relationship to slavery. To her, the reasons were obvious. Ruth Simmons: As institutions that are supposed to be seekers of truth, it would be the height of corruption to lie about our backgrounds and to try to hide our histories. Secondly, that since we in the business of research, that we ought to be best in class in unearthing these histories. And third, that we are, of course, teachers. And what better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth … uh and to essentially tell the full story. Dozens of schools have been investigating their own stories. We’ll begin this hour with Georgetown. Producer Kate Ellis looks at how descendants like Meli Short Colomb learned the truth about their ancestors … and at what Georgetown is doing to make amends. Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 6 of 43 Kate Ellis: This story starts with a protest. Leader: It is our duty to fight for our freedom! Crowd: It is our duty to fight for our freedom! Leader: It is our duty to win! Crowd: It is our duty to win! In 2015, Georgetown students demanded that two buildings on campus be renamed. The buildings were named for Jesuit priests who had orchestrated the sale of 272 slaves. A Georgetown alum read about the protests, and it made him curious. Richard Cellini: You know 272 men women and children were sold by Georgetown University to Louisiana in 1838. And my question simply was well what happened to them? [Music] Richard Cellini runs a company he started in Cambridge, MA. He attended Georgetown as an undergraduate and law student. Cellini is white and didn’t think much about race issues until he learned about the Jesuits’ slave sale. Cellini knew that Georgetown had formed a working group to investigate this history and he sent Shackled Legacy Transcript – APM Reports Page 7 of 43 a note to someone in the group to ask, what happened to the slaves once they were sold? The person wrote back that the slaves had all died when they got to Louisiana. This made no sense to Cellini. Cellini: It just struck me as statistically impossible. I mean even the Titanic had survivors. We should mention here that the University itself has never officially said that the slaves died; they’re quite vehement about that. But that was the belief of at least one member of the working group who emailed Cellini.
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