Tracing the sale of 272 slaves in 1838 by the university’s leaders yields a wrenching question: What is owed to the slaves’ descendants?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html
This case really stands apart from the others. You should read the NYT story. We’re talking a whole different level of shame.
Theses individuals were personally known by the Jesuits-- they were not nameless, hypothetical slaves.
^Not sure what “others” you are referring to GMT, but this event doesn’t seem atypical of slavery or the slave trade.
I was more than a bit shocked by the virulence of some of the comments. Many people believe Georgetown doesn’t owe anything to the descendants of the people they sold, that everyone should forget about it and move on. Someone even compared it to Romans owing the descendants of the Gauls they enslaved. How long ago was that?
I don’t pretend to know the solution but American slavery and it’s repercussions do not deserve to be compared to something as long distant as the Roman Empire!
As privileged members of society who weren’t directly impacted and in some cases…directly benefited from slavery as an institution such as wealth accumulated through generations or social structures which promoted their social and economic dominance at the expense of marginalized groups, they have great incentives to deny and to urge activists/historians to permanently forget one of the most heinous aspects of American history.
Incidentally, another commenter in that article noted how many Americans who argue against the idea of any form of restitution to former slaves on the grounds that descendants shouldn’t be held responsible for the crimes of their forebearers failed to realize how the US felt otherwise even decades afterwards when holding Germany to her repayment of debt for reparations from the Allies’ declared responsibility on her for starting WWI. Germany made her last payment on that debt in 2010:
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2023140,00.html
Folks making such comments also seem to forget or not realize that the Romans were such cruel slavemasters that the slaves ended up playing a critical active part in the Western Roman Empire’s decline.
For instance, the sackings of Rome in 410 AD and 455 AD resulted in the capture and enslavement of many Roman citizens including some wealthy ones at the hands of their former slaves.
@cobrat, the Germany comparison isn’t the same. The repayment of the war reparations by Germany started after WW1 in 1919.
For the Germany reparations to be similar to the slavery reparations, it would be asking Germany to pay for WW2 reparations starting in 2050, when no living German would have been alive during WW2.
Good luck with having people accept paying for the crimes of their ancestors which happened over 160 years ago.
The USA can’t get certain people to pay their current obligation in student or home loans.
Actually, it is in the sense that most Germans who weren’t in senior national leadership positions or even born in 1914 were effectively held responsible by the US for those reparations even several decades after the end of WWI in 1918 or after WWII for that matter.
There’s also the matter that Germany before and during WWI was a militaristic monarchist state which became an effective military dictatorship by 1916 under Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. At that point, even the Kaiser Wilhelm II ended up being sidelined into an effective figurehead.
And Germany made the very last payment on those reparations in 2010…92 years after the last shot was fired in that war. Most German citizens in 2010 or even few decades previous weren’t born during the WWI period or years afterwards. And yet…they were effectively held responsible for those loans into the beginning of this decade.
Germany agreed to pay that money, did they not?
So more of them wouldn’t get killed?
Part of the treaty?
If Georgetown wants to bill itself for hundreds of millions of dollars, it can do so, but I hope it puts a line item in the tuition and fees so current students can see where their money is going. That way they will be able to decide whether they support this use of their money (as the Germans decided they supported the use of theirs).
Would it be their students’ money? Were the payments from the Catholic Church to victims of priest sex abuse coming directly from the parishioners?
Probably more likely that they will make being such a descendent a bigger “hook” in admissions and/or offer enhanced financial aid or scholarships to such descendents, which would cost far less than hundreds of millions of dollars.
The payments made by Germany post reunification were payments made on bonds issued mostly to private individuals and entities to finance the reperations demanded by France. These bonds were issued mostly in the 1920s after the occupation of the Ruhr valley if I remember. I don’t believe Germany paid much if any reperations directly to the US, although the French and British did at least argue that their own debt to the US for war material should be linked to the amount of reperations actually paid by Germany. But to argue that the US was a proponent of German reperations is just historically inaccurate. In fact, the US spent decades trying to get reperations either eliminated or reduced.
The decision was really instigated by one of the two top leaders of the “shadow dictatorship”…General Ludendorff when he found the very operation he planned and implemented which was supposed to “win the war for Imperial Germany” ended up petering out.
Once that happened, Ludendorff realized that it was only a matter of time and basic math before his exhausted and by that point, starving troops* would be overwhelmed and defeated by better supplied Allied forces coupled with greater numbers of organized fresh American reinforcements which the exhausted and war weary Imperial German army would be hard-pressed to resist in the long term.
The German people and the civilian government had practically no say in the matter. Instead, when defeat became imminent, the militaristic leaders effectively dropped the mess into the civilian government and German people’s hands and washed their hands of it.
Worse, they later had the temerity to blame the civilian government and civilian populace for the defeat when the overwhelming lion’s share of responsibility was on the top military leaders…Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Especially when they could seemingly claim the German military was never really totally defeated on the battlefield.
A factor which lead the Allies in WWII to insist on nothing less than a complete unconditional surrender to avoid a repeat of this.
- British Naval blockade was very effective in keeping food out of Germany while the German u-boats weren't as effective in their attempt to blockade and starve out Britain.
Probably I’d offer them citizenship in one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
Some people think that the people who fought and died in the Civil War somehow “paid back” our debt to the slaves. I wonder if the Irish immigrants used as cannon fodder by Gen. Grant would agree? No, I don’t wonder, they wouldn’t agree. And then there’s this:
Is this supposed to be a joke???
Maybe they’re referring to Dubai?
That would be an empty gesture, honestly.
The vast majority of these descendants would surely not be able to sniff admissions at Georgetown (just like the majority of HS seniors in the country), so Georgetown would offer what… an extra $10k to 10 kids? Why should only the descendants that can gain admissions to the school get something?
That would be something to make the privileged class feel like they are doing something and get some good PR while not actually doing anything. Would be pretty offensive, if that’s what they decide, IMO.
FWIW, $200 compounded annually at 5% interest, for 175 years (1840->2015), is just over $1 million.
272 slaves in 1840, if each generation has 2 kids = how many descendants?
1865 ~550
1890 ~1,100
1915 ~2,200
1940 ~4,400
1965 ~9,000
1990 ~18,000
2015 ~36,000
yes? no?
At $1 million each, that would put Georgetown on the hook for $36,000,000,000 for the 2015 generation alone…
I have no idea how much slaves were bought / sold for.
The article says that in today’s dollars, Georgetown made $500,000 on the sale. Cornelius Hawkins sold for $900. If Georgetowns ill gotten gains are to be divided among thousands of descendants, the amount to each would be very little.
They sold some of their slaves earlier in the 1830’s for $16,000 and the remainder in 1838 for another $115,000. I have no idea what that would be worth in today’s dollars but it sure seems like $131,000 back then would be worth more than $500,000 today.
^ ^
According to westegg’s admittedly simplistic inflation calculator, $16,000 in 1830 would equal $358,906.66 in 2015 dollars. $115000 in 1838 would equal $2,582,236.36
IMO based on comparing historical prices in the US…many journalistic calculations of US inflation tend to be underestimates. Even Westegg’s figures which seem higher than what one poster reported reading as the current market value of slaves in 2015 dollars seem to be a bit of an underestimate IMO.
However, Westegg does account for a deflationary period between the end of the Civil War and the 1880’s which was reflected in lowering prices in that period and increasing hardships for folks who took out loans in that period.