Resources

Websites and Databases

Bookshelf

Colbert, Soyica Diggs, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen. The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Collins, David J. The Jesuits in the United States: A Concise History. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2023.
Curran, Robert Emmett. “‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slave Holdings in Maryland, 1805-1838.” In Catholics in the Old South. Edited by Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1983.
Endres, David J., et al. Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023.
Jackson, Maurice. “Washington, DC: From the Founding of a Slaveholding Capital to a Center of Abolitionism.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology & Heritage 2.1 (May 2013): 40-66.
Menzie Lesko, Kathleen, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibbs. Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community From the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2022.
Murphy, Thomas, S.J. Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838. Studies in African American History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Rothman, Adam, and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, editors. Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. Georgetown University Press, 2021.
Swarns, Rachel L. The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. New York: Random House, 2023.
Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

Lesson plans

Three units of lesson plans for high school teachers on Slavery at School; Slavery and Catholicism; Putting a Human Face on the Domestic Slave Trade: The GU 272

Videos

On April 21, 2016, Dr. Craig Wilder, Professor of History at MIT and author of “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities” offered reflections on “War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution.” The event was part of the 2016 DC Emancipation Day Symposium hosted by the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. Featuring Fr. David Collins, S.J., Rev. Raymond Kemp, Dr. Maurice Jackson (G’95, G’01) and Dr. Craig Wilder

The logbook from the Slave Ship Mary, which was donated to Georgetown University Library in 2017, provides poignant and valuable insight into the Atlantic slave trade. In this video, Georgetown History Professor Adam Rothman and Alana Hendy (SFS ’21) discusses the logbook and its value, and Mary Beth Corrigan, manuscripts consultant in the Library’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections, discusses how the logbook came to Georgetown and how the library is working to preserve it.

Georgetown University held an event in Riggs Library on April 16, 2018, D.C. Emancipation Day, in honor of Anne Marie Becraft and the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Participants in the event included: Marcia Chatelain, associate professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown; Sister Marcia Hall, OSP, vocation director for the Oblate Sisters of Providence; and Diane Batts Morrow, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Georgia. Janice Curtis Greene offered a storytelling performance as Mother Mary Lange, and President John J. DeGioia offered opening remarks. In 2016, Georgetown University named the oldest building on its campus Anne Marie Becraft Hall. Anne Marie Becraft, a free woman of color, founded one of the first schools for black girls in Georgetown in 1820. Eleven years later she became one of the country’s first black nuns with the Oblate Sisters of Providence (OSP) in Baltimore, Maryland, taking the name Sister Mary Aloysius.

On Februrary 24, 2016 the University community gathered in Gaston Hall to commemorate “Black Georgetown Remembered,” which chronicles and celebrates the rich but little-known history of the Georgetown black community from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on primary sources, including oral interviews with past and current residents and extensive research in church and historical society archives, the authors record the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and successes of a vibrant neighborhood as it persevered through slavery and segregation, war and peace, prosperity and depression. This event celebrated the beautiful commemorative 25th anniversary edition of “Black Georgetown Remembered,” which was first published in 1991, with a new introduction by Kathleen Menzie Lesko and a foreword by Maurice Jackson. Moderator: Maurice Jackson (Georgetown University) Panelists: Valerie Babb (University of Georgia), Kathleen Menzie Lesko (Huntington Library), Vernon H. Ricks, Jr (Mount Zion United Methodist Church), Monica Roaché (Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission), and Neville Waters, III (Fifth Generation Georgetowner).

As part of its bicentennial celebration in 1988-89, Georgetown University honors this remarkable community in a documentary video titled “Black Georgetown Remembered.” Through the recollections of the members of the Georgetown black community, some of whom still reside in Georgetown, the documentary pays tribute to a community that thrived amidst slavery, Jim Crow laws, and economic inequity to emerge with a rare strength and identity. It features the remembrances of the decades of the 1940s to the 1950s when the population of Georgetown changed markedly. This video complements the book “Black Georgetown Remembered” first published in 1991 and now available in a 30th anniversary hardcover edition.
Produced and directed by David W. Powell
Executive Producer Kathleen Menzie Lesko
Producer, Story Conception Valerie Babb
Writer Larry Klein
Producer Lorraine Davis-Dantley
Producer Robin Stevens Payes
Research Historian Carroll R. Gibbs
Educational Consultant Ronald M. Johnson
Educational Consultant Joseph M. Murphy
Produced for Georgetown University by Powell, Kritzer & Associates
© Georgetown University