Georgetown received considerable national attention last year when it offered preferential admissions treatment for the descendants of 272 slaves sold in 1838. It also published an apology, announced the creation of an institute on slavery, and renamed two buildings (including one, Issac Hayes Hall, after the first of the sold slaves). It appears however that the school has hit an impasse with the descendants who feel that Georgetown has not done enough and are demanding reparations. It is not clear if the reparations are in addition to the $1 billion demanded earlier from the University for a foundation.
While the university accepts responsibility, the 272 slaves were actually owned and sold by Maryland Jesuits, including two prominent Jesuits who served as president of Georgetown. The money was used to pay off the school’s debt. These enslaved persons included grandparents and pregnant women as well as a child and infant. Families were divided and accounts refer to people being dragged on to ships.
The sale was arranged by The Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy, who served as president of Georgetown from 1829 to 1838. He returned as president from 1845 to 1848. The Jesuits were receiving diminishing income from Maryland plantations and the school was in financial crisis. Mulledy proceeded in June 1838, to negotiate a sale with Henry Johnson, whho was a member of the Marylad House of Representatives, and Jesse Batey, a landowner in Louisiana, to sell slaves. The bill of sale was dated June 19, 1838, and stated: “Thomas F. Mulledy sells to Jesse Beatty and Henry Johnson two hundred and seventy two negroes, to wit.” The agreement allowed for discounts for any slaves deemed to be infirm. The sale produced $500,000 for Georgetown in today’s money.
The sale however was controversial even at its time. While Mulledy assured his superiors that the Louisiana owners promised to let the slaves practice their faith, many were outraged and he was called to Rome. He was eventually removed from the presidency and the following year Pope Gregory XVI barred Catholics from engaging in “this traffic in Blacks … no matter what pretext or excuse.”
There are 200 descendants identified as part of the GU272 Isaac Hawkins Legacy group and their representatives criticized the actions of the university as “symbolic gestures” and have retained an expert to calculate reparations. The methodology used in such calculations can be controversial. Thomas Craemer, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut calculated the amount of unpaid and forced labor of the descendants’ ancestors, their subsequent incomes as well as the inheritance that descendants could have received. This figure is then projected for growth over a couple hundred years.
Lead counsel Georgia Goslee indicated that talks are at a standstill. She has publicly objected that
“restitution has been conspicuously absent from the actions taken by the school so far to reconcile with the descendant community . . . Our message today to Georgetown, to the Jesuits: Stop. Stop devaluing the descendants. Stop abusing their patience . . . For elder descendants, time is precious, and they have earned the right to demand meaningful action, not just words from Georgetown leaders, and for the younger descendants whose wealth building opportunities have been crippled by the legacy of Catholic slavery, restitution is a vital lifeline to a better future.”
What do you think? Should Georgetown pay reparations to descendants as an essential part of any resolution of his great historical wrong?
How would manumission fit in to all this?
I demand reparations from Omarosa. I don’t know how some Al Gore insider like her gets to be as famous as she is for literally doing nothing but I’m certainly owed something for it.
I demand reparations from The View. When I go to a dental appointment it is often on in the waiting area and is certainly more annoying than the zwee zwee zweeeeeeeeeeeee sound of the dental tools.
I demand reparations from Mika and Joe, and Maddow too. They are all about sharing the wealth, right?
Offer to give them Georgetown University and its debts.
Does everyone here note that even far Leftist Jon Turley cannot bring himself to write an article about Mueller’s recent “announcement” of “criminal charges” against “13” Russians? Why didn’t he?
Because even a rank amateur posing as an knowledgeable attorney like Jon Turley knows that the Mueller-Rosenstein “announcement” is a complete joke and a distraction to try to get the public’s attention away from the FBI’s total failure to again protect the American public in the Nikolas Cruz mass-murder case. (PS. ANY agency that would continue to employ vile political hacks like Strzok and Page is automatically a total failure.)
But, you gotta love Mueller and his team for coming up with exactly “13” Russians. Sound much more conspiratorial and mystical than merely announcing only 11. And MuellerCo couldn’t very well make an “announcement” about 12 Russians. That number 12 has associations with “The Dirty Dozen,” who were heroes.
The Deep State consists of real jokers. But make no mistake about it. Their mission is a deadly, anti-American one.
Off topic and incoherent.
Off topic sure. Incoherent, not at all. Turley is a legal scholar. Indictments are legal things. What don’t you understand?
I was writing about Ralphie.
Um yeah, so go back and re-read my post in the context of your response to Ralph.
Leftists like Benson and Andrew hate reality and hate the truth, and, in fact, are hardwired as Leftists to reject any facts or evidence. They are programmed to accept only Leftist propaganda.
Certainly you aren’t calling me a leftist Ralph!
Ralphie is a feudalist.
Devine rightist.
I see no difference between feudalism and socialism.
I demand reparations from Germany and England: my German ancestor was forced to be a mercenary in the Revolution. I’ll take it in American dollars however.
I demand reparations from Great Britain. They starved my Irish ancestors, and sold some Irish into slavery in Barbados.
I DEMAND reparations for Stormy Daniels! And besides, surely there must be a Stormy Daniels angle to this story that Jon Turley has neglected? He’s really slipping lately.
Its getting old, Ralphie.
Enough incoherence and hysteria.
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
– Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
Slavery is, was, and shall always be only wrong from every perspective, period. That said, I believe the below points are defensible, and incinerate the arguments favoring reparations:
Every American black citizen descended from slaves is a direct beneficiary of said slavery. They enjoy the fruits of the hard, horrible, now illegal, work performed by said slaves, every bit as much as does every other American with non-black race ancestors.
In Africa or whatever nation from whence the slaves were collected, the first person to use force in the process of collecting said slaves was usually or always someone from the same nation where said future slaves were collected. Considering this first and most crucial and critical contact was not performed by Americans, a considerable ratio of blame accrues to the slaves own original kinsmen.
Notice none of said slave descendants desires to leave their American freedoms an luxuries in favor of their ancestor’s homeland. Conversely, if given the choice, all or most of said “homebound” relatives in foreign lands from whence the slave ancestors came would prefer to trade their homeland citizenship for American citizenship. If this single point does not incinerate the justification for reparations, then nothing would convince these freeloading jackals.
Whites have in the past and continue to be enslaved.
Whites died to end slavery (legally ended in the UK before the US Civil War). .
This lovely and beautiful very black woman who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, writes a gorgeous, well written blog on the fights for freedom in justice in Africa. She says that African blacks are so sick of their horrible post-colonial life of “freedom” that many cry out for a new colonialism. It turns out that life under their new black shareholders is worse than life under their white shareholders! Don’t argue with me, argue with her of your higher authority on this subject! Recently deposed black President Mugabe lived in a 25 bedroom palace on 44 plush green acres, and amassed almost $2B in foreign held wealth, while his black subjects ate dirt. Really a bummer for lazy white rich Progressives about Africa: no more whitey to blame! But of course, the black dictators of Africa still blame whitey for their black subject’s suffering. Just like America’s alleged ME ally, the Al Saud Krime Syndikate blames the US for every ill suffered by their Muslim subjects (the government even finances Madrasas where they teach Muslim children from birth, DEATH TO ,AMERIKA!”) https://www.facebook.com/mlnangalama
Here’s Dave Chapelle’s take on reparations:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2pveof
It’s clear the po’ fo’ks today clamoring for reparations don’t understand simple mathematics and basic genetics.
Let’s assume that Slave Zero in 1810 had three children that survived to reproductive fitness. Let’s also assume a generational time of 20 years (i.e., the time required for a generation to achieve reproductive fitness) and a mean generational reproductive brood of three progeny. Let’s also assume some quack liberal judge approves this ludicrous and absurd idea and grants an award of $1,000,000 in “reparations” to the progeny of Slave Zero.
Generation 10 now contains 59,049 members and individual settlements equate to $16.94 per member. (Oops, forgot about lawyers’ fees – make that about $10 per member after fee payouts.)
It’s a simple mathematical model. Bump the mean brood size to four and were at 1.04 million members by Gen 10 and a mean payout of $.95 (oops, lawyers fees – make that 66¢ per member).
Somebody better get these folks a calculator. Ms. Goslee is the only one who’s gonna be rich.
Interesting. Note the disparity that would naturally follow. If Slave A from 1810’s lineage is traced as yours, and then Slave B from 1859’s lineage is also traced, the descendants of Slave A would receive less than those of Slave B even though more slavery was endured in the Slave A lineage than the Slave B lineage. On top of that, how would manumission fit in to all this?
You forgot the accumulated interest.
Reparations are due, and not just from Georgetown. So much of this country was built by slaves where the white establishment benefited greatly and the slaves not at all.
Throughout our history we have managed to keep Blacks, descendants of slaves or free, oppressed. After the Civil War, freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule, the acres coming from confiscated plantations. It was a broken promise and the land was returned to the white landowners. Slavery was replaced by sharecropping which kept the former slaves in poverty and the white landowners still profiting from the efforts of their former slaves. Jim Crow laws demanded segregation all things
Blacks were discouraged and even prevented from voting.
Education of Blacks was second rate.
At every turn, Blacks were denied many of the wealth-building tools that whites took for granted and by an attitude of entitlement.
Banks participated in maintaining segregation and preventing any wealth accumulation by Black by red-lining residential areas so that Blacks were kept out of the most desirable areas. WWII vets of color, even the new Buffalo Soldiers (commanded by white officers) who served with distinction against the Germans in Italy, were red-lined out of the many new housing developments that were built with preference for (white) vets.
Where Blacks set up their own prosperous communities, it took little to bring white rage and privilege down on them where whole communities were burned out, Atlanta, 1906; Chicago and Washington DC, Knoxville TN, 1919; Greenwood, OK, 1921; Rosewood, 1923. And woe be to the uppity individual Blacks who wanted more. The nearest tree would silence him. Even now, communities of color are targeted for oppression by police and by community councils and fearful white neighbors. While it may be that it is Blacks who are now doing the rioting, it is almost always due to years of oppressive and sometimes violence put on that community by police or other community institutions.
Slavery of minority populations, including poor whites, continues as private prisons now use inmates to produce products for corporations that get cheap labor while the prison owners get the bulk of the contract money.
At every turn, the dominant white society has deliberately worked to keep the descendants of former slaves from an equitable position in our society.
Yes, slavery has, and does, exist in other places. Groups other than African Blacks were slaves here, e.g. many Irish came as indentured servants with the ability to buy their freedom and, due to their light complexion were able to assimilate. But our history of slavery and continued oppression of people based on the color of their skin is ours. It’s shameful. Reparations are long overdue. I am not sure how the reparations should be paid but I’m sure that there are a number of ideas that would work.
@bettykath – thanks for the great laugh! I literally did a spit take with my morning coffee!
And don’t forget blacks, themselves! They are working overtime to keep themselves poor, too! I mean you don’t think a 77% illegitimate birth rate is accidental, do you??? And education? Here, listen to a teacher explain it to you:
There is a lot more at the link, but I doubt you will read it.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
American Renaissance? Seriously? I guess that birtherism was simply too passive aggressive for true aficionados of racism. You have now embraced full throated white supremacism. I do not know your personal situation, but I deem it a testament to Divine Mercy that prominent members of your sisterhood such as Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are sufficiently self-absorbed to forego reproduction.
Sooo, you don’t like the source? Eau Contraire! Methinks that you don’t like what they write about because it causes you all that Cognitive Dissonance.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
150 years after the Civil War the responsibility is obvious.
Not to some people! They are still blaming slavery for black chicks popping out illegitimate kids in 2018! Can you even imagine someone being that frigging stupid???
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Yes I can.
Do you know a former slave?
Georgetown set itself up for this shakedown with its virtue signaling and self-flagellation. They wanted to flaunt their liberalism by unnecessarily apologizing for something that happened almost 200 years ago, so this is what they get. The professional mooching class is not satisfied with your apologies and offers of free education. They want cash, baby, cash. They want Cadillacs and $200 sneakers. They’ll piss through the “reparations” in no time, and be no better off, but unless Georgetown can grow a backbone and tell them to piss off, the shakedown demands will continue.
No, I bet Georgetown is going to make some kind of monetary settlement. Probably around $10 million or so, which will pay off the black lawyers, and give a few thousand to the poor victims of slavery from the 1830’s.
One, it will make some of the spineless Liberals at Georgetown feel good about themselves;
Two, it will set up other institutions for this kind of shakedown, the reporting on which will advance the DNC Racial Narrative that it is white people’s fault that black people are broke, not their own trashy and low class behavior.
That is my prediction. They are just down to quibbling over the amount of the shakedown payment.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Offer a free hut in Africa along with a one way ticket. Problem solved.
Aren’t we all owed reparations from Native American tribes for introducing the world to tobacco and the negative health effects associated with smoking, dipping, etc?
While it is Georgetown’s decision whether to foolishly grant “reparations”, I suggest they keep a few important points in mind:
– There is no living former slave in the United States today. There is no one alive in America today that have a parent who was a slave. Nor do they have a grandparent or even a great-grandparent who was a slave. Nobody in America today has ever personelly known a former slave.
– If reparations are granted, it would be necessary to render payments based on one’s proximity to slavery. If Person A can trace their roots back to, let’s say 1820, then Person A has 43 years of slave time in the family tree. If Person B can trace their roots back to 1859, Person B has 4 years of time. If Person C’s parents arrived here from Ghana in 1973 then Person C has zero time. Person A then would get the greater sum, Person B a lesser sum, and Person C nothing. I’d love to see how that would sit with pro-reparations advocates.
– Along with reparations based on slavery, would other groups also be entitles to payments? Asian-Americans for example, were vital toward expansion out west but were often maligned. My ancestors, white people, often worked as sharecroppers. Who all is entitled to reparations?
– Lastly, it is fair to ask whether from reparations payments should be deducted the accumulated public costs associated with any number of federal, state, and local programs designed to remedy the effects of an abhorrent practice that ended 155 years ago and that no living American has experienced.
All freed slaves and their descendants must have been and must be deported. On the date of issuance of the unconstitutional Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, the Naturalization Act of 1802 was in full force and effect requiring citizens to be “…free white person(s)…” The legal status of non-white slaves changed from that of “property” to “illegal alien” requiring immediate deportation.
____________________________________________________________________________________
NATURALIZATION ACT OF 1790
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof…”
So out of curiosity I wanted to see what Eric Michael Dyson thought about reparations. He is a black sociology professor at Georgetown. Dyson believes there should be IRAs — Individual Reparations Accounts.
No reparations – I say give the Isaac Hawkins Legacy group the whole damn institution.
Hmmm. I am of several minds on this.
Mind#1: Allow for voluntary Reparation Payments by Georgetown employees, including Professors, and students into a fund. If an employee, you can have it deducted from your paycheck every payday. If a student, you just pledge an amount, whether it’s $20 or $50 whatever, monthly. (Because I would just love to see how much the SJWs would pony up out of their drinking and partying money. Plus, how much the liberal professors would kick in out of their paychecks.)
Mind#2: Tell the mooching Negroes to pound sand. They were better off in Louisiana than they would have been in Africa.
Mind#3: Let Georgetown pay reparations to Louisiana, who has to pay welfare benefits to the descendants, and pay to incarcerate them, and pay for all the crime they commit.
Mind#4: Off each “victim” $100,000 as asocial experiment, but they have to account in detail for how they spend it. I bet most of them would still be dead broke in a year or so.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Enough incoherence and hysteria. Repeal the 19th amendment.
There are no words to describe the tragedy, heartbreak, and great evil that was not only part of this massive sell off, but the entire institution of slavery. Intellectually, I understand that people were raised in this system and could not see it was wrong. In my heart, I cannot understand why they could not see it was wrong. How could any human being lack such empathy as to separate husband from wife, mother from child, grandmother from her family?
However, I disagree with reparations, as they will have no end. Georgetown would have to pay billions of dollars, and it would close. No one at Georgetown was in any way involved in what happened in 1838, mere decades before the slaves were all freed. And if the slaves were not sold by Georgetown, they would have still be enslaved people until either the Emancipation Proclamation or the end of the Civil War.
How many slaves experienced being sold? The difference with Georgetown is that there was a total liquidation all at once. But being sold was part of slavery, as was degradation, poor nutrition, beatings, rape, having family torn away from you…I read once that this is why getting married and sticking loyally by your family was so intensely cherished by African Americans for generations after they were freed. They were never allowed to have a marriage ceremony and a family of their own to keep forever. So they kept that family forever, until that custom was torn from them by the Progressives.
In addition, the great pain caused by this massive selloff garnered enough attention that the Pope finally banned the clergy from participating in slavery. A bit late there, eh? I guess better late than never.
If Georgetown has opened the door to litigation in which it has to pay reparations and close the school, then every single white owned business and individual can be forced to pay reparations to every single African American who can trace his American ancestry prior to the 1860s. And won’t that be a genealogical nightmare. What if an African American today has half a family tree that suffered slavery, and the other half descended from the very tribes who sold those people to European slavers? What about Africans who emigrated here after the 1860s, who owned slaves themselves in Africa? After all, slavery still persists and is quite common in numerous African countries. What about blacks who owned slaves where in the US?
Here are some other reparations owed:
1. Native Americans who wiped out every man, woman, and child in territory disputes
2. Native Americans who kept sex slaves, who were subsequently ruined in society when they were rescued
3. Native Americans who owned African American slaves
4. Everyone in the US because women did not have suffrage. They could be committed to a mental institution when their husband tired of them and wanted a mistress. When they were granted a divorce, the husband could take their children away from them.
5. Mental institutions engaged in electric shock therapy (one of their victims was Vivienne Leigh) and lobotomies. They purposely caused brain damage by ramming an ice pick up someone’s nose, usually a woman, until they are reduced to an obedient childlike shell. Practitioners traveled across the country shoving ice picks into people’s brains.
6. Every Obstetrician owes reparations to every women upon which they performed the Twilight Sleep. Women were given narcotics and then strapped down so that they would not hurt themselves during the subsequent hallucinations and bad trip. They felt their pain and were high out of their minds, but the drugs were an amnesiac. They woke up with a baby they often had trouble bonding with, and a sore throat. How many children had lifelong bad relationships or abuse from mothers who were abused during childbirth in such a manner?
7. Women servants, especially indentured servants, were often sexually abused.
The list of injustice over antiquity just goes on and on. No one’s acts of the past would hold water today. Even Abraham Lincoln, who sent the entire country into war and thousands of people to their deaths or maiming in order to free the slaves, held opinions that would be considered racist today. Yet, he was one of the best people alive during his time. Harriet Tubman, who saved so many slaves without losing a single passenger on the Underground Railroad, at great risk to herself, held opinions about men, women, and marriage that would not coincide with today’s mores.
African Americans should stop demanding more and more and more money. The US has spent billions of dollars on programs designed specifically to help them. Universities across the nation have tried to help them. At some point, they need to want to be treated just like everyone else, instead of persisting in a protected class in perpetuity. Come join the rest of us and be one, not apart. Take responsibilities for your actions, and seize every opportunity. This persistent belief that African Americans will fail because of slavery may be holding them back, and may explain why recent African immigrants, who come from far worse poverty and privation, fare so much better than those born here. Also, the surest way to protect yourself from poverty is to get married before you have kids, and to stay married. Period. It’s just math, and the studies are indisputable. There are individual cases where that is not possible or the most healthy, but that needs to be the overall trend.
Also, it may appear that I pick on Native Americans occasionally in my posts. That is not my intention. My intention is to show that Native Americans were no better or worse than the rest of humanity, as human nature is part of all of us. I actually quite like a lot about Native American customs and lore.