How Colleges and Foundations Can Lead the Way on Reparations for Enslaved People

The slavery-reparations debate has once again reached a critical point. Demands for racial justice have knocked a global pandemic right out of the headlines across much of the world.

Reparations can take many forms and cover millions of Black Americans who have suffered economic and social injustices because of the legacy of slavery.

But one approach to help close the wounds of slavery is already underway at a handful of colleges and could be vastly expanded quickly to serve as a model for how foundation executives, philanthropists, and everyday donors can come together to make reparations. Working together, we can finally achieve a unified, voluntary response to the evils of slavery, one that can reach millions of Black Americans — and also spark ideas for other ways for philanthropy to play a leading role in providing reparations.

For the past two decades, colleges have been putting scrutiny on their own roles in the slave trade. Brown University and Georgetown University’s work has stood out. Both institutions have publicly acknowledged that they once owned or rented specific enslaved people — individuals that have been identified by first and last name. Georgetown has gone even further, officially acknowledging its moral obligations to thousands of living descendants discovered over the past five years by independent researchers using rigorous genealogical methods.

And in the past year, long before the murder of George Floyd, even more significant action has happened. In September 2019, Virginia Theological Seminary created a $1.7 million reparations fund for descendants of enslaved people who [SP4] once worked there. In mid-October, Princeton Theological Seminary set aside $27.6 million for scholarships for students descended from slaves. Just [SP5] two weeks later, Georgetown University unveiled a $400,000 annual fund to support community-based projects that benefit the descendants of people once enslaved by Georgetown.

Now is the moment for hundreds of other institutions to join in the work and collaborate to make a lasting contribution to racial transformation and healing at the national level. Financial reparations can and should be paid by private universities and their supporters, using private resources to act on private convictions. Foundations can make incentive grants; universities can channel their own resources; and alumni donors and their allies can contribute dollars, too.

Guiding Principles for Meaningful Action

Three fundamental principles should undergird efforts by colleges to provide reparations. First, reparations should be direct: The funds should be paid to families who were actually harmed by slavery, and not just shifted from one university pocket to another (by, for example, increasing funds to one academic department and offsetting them with cuts to another). Second, reparations should be proportionate to the underlying harm inflicted: Apologies, memorials, and curricular changes are not going to cut it. Third, they should be rendered in a form equivalent to what was taken: Money was from stolen from Black people, and money must be paid in return.

Most important, university reparations should be aggregated. The evil of American slavery transcended institutional boundaries, and so, too, must the remedies. More than 700 colleges operating today were founded before 1890, with proceeds tainted by slavery. No one needs 700 working groups, leading 700 dialogues, about 700 legacies.

The best approach would be to create a permanent, independent institution for the investigation and remediation of antebellum human trafficking. If the 709 U.S. colleges created before 1890 followed Virginia Theological Seminary’s example and donated just $1.7 million apiece to the cause, this institute would be initially capitalized with $1.2 billion in assets — placing it among the 30 largest foundations in the United States, and the 40 largest foundations in the world. This endowment would grow over time, with contributions from others.

How to Persuade Colleges to Give

How can we persuade colleges that they need to act? Foundations and big donors can set the tone through their grants for this purpose, but ordinary people have an important role to play as well. Approximately 7 percent of U.S. adults are enrolled in four-year colleges or graduate programs. Roughly 31 percent more are alumni of those colleges and programs. Many of us have some pull at a college or know someone who does.

And there’s no shortage of institutions to influence. Nearly one-quarter of America’s 3,000 colleges were founded before 1890, a cutoff date still well within the economic plume of slavery.

It makes sense that universities (bodies with perpetual existence) would provide leadership on this issue. To quote Brown’s 2006 “Slavery and Justice” report, universities “are institutions that value historical continuity, that recognize and cherish the bonds that link the present to the past and the future [SP7] .”

In the words of one Brown University president in 1914, “Have we entered so new a world that we have no further connection with the generation in which these colleges were born? To think so would be to show ourselves without the sense of either historic continuity or moral obligation.”

What Do Slave Descendants Want?

Many Americans might wonder whether the descendants of people harmed by university involvement in human trafficking might recoil from voluntary reparations paid by universities that once profited from enslaving their ancestors. As a white Republican businessman (and the grandson of Italian immigrants), I didn’t have a clue. So five years ago, I decided to ask them.

I founded the independent, nonprofit Georgetown Memory Project in late 2015, when a senior member of Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery dismissed the prospect of identifying the 272 enslaved people sold by Georgetown University in 1838. “As far as we can tell, all of them quickly succumbed to fever in the malodorous swamp world of Louisiana,” he told me by email.

Over the past five years, operating with no financial support from Georgetown University or its founding religious order (the Maryland Jesuits), the Georgetown Memory Project has identified 230 of the enslaved people sold by Georgetown and traced 9,982 of their direct descendants. More than 5,000 Georgetown descendants are alive today. I’ve met hundreds of them in person.

When learning their family history for the first time, Georgetown descendants most often experience feelings of deep reverence and love for their enslaved ancestors. Our Black brothers and sisters understand full well that the truth can break your heart and heal it too. Most Black Americans know their families helped feed and clothe the nation. The descendants I’ve met from Georgetown’s slaves know they helped build one of America’s greatest universities. As Lucille “Peaches” Victor, a Georgetown descendant from Maringouin, La., put it, “My goodness, I am so much more than I thought.”

All of Use Owe a Debt to Slaves

And what about Americans as a whole? Many Americans object to providing reparations on the ground that they themselves had nothing to do with slavery, and their ancestors were not American slave owners.

That’s true: Most living Americans are descendants of immigrants who entered the United States after 1865. Others are descended from Union soldiers, abolitionists, and shopkeepers or farmers who never owned slaves. And yet, we all reap benefits made possible by the people who were enslaved here. Shouldn’t we also assume responsibilities attached to those benefits? Most people recognize that benefits often come with burdens.

Recent progress on slavery reparations is a testament to the vision and values of American universities. But it’s also a testament to the patience, strength, and resilience of Black families. Though under no obligation to do so, our Black brothers and sisters have consistently shown us how to overcome our shared history of slavery: They seek reconciliation, not vengeance. Like other oppressed but irrepressible people around the world, the Georgetown descendants have adopted a saying: “They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.”