Title:New center to study slavery and its legacies

Georgetown has launched a Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies (GCSSL) to deepen its research, teaching, public programming, and interdisciplinary collaboration on the history of enslavement and its imprint.

The center connects faculty and student researchers across the university and sponsors new partnerships and scholarship on slavery and its legacies at Georgetown, throughout the District of Columbia, and in Catholic communities throughout the United States.

“Georgetown continues to be engaged in a long-term effort to understand and respond to our institution’s historical relationship to slavery,” says Georgetown President John J. DeGioia. “The center will support rigorous faculty and student research, innovative teaching, creative projects, and collaborative programs that sustain Georgetown’s commitment to facing our history.”

The center was first envisioned by the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, a group of Georgetown faculty, staff, students, and alumni formed in 2015 to engage the university community in a process of reflection about Georgetown’s involvement in slavery and to make recommendations for future action.

The internationally recognized Georgetown Slavery Archive (GSA) serves as the foundation for the center, with more than 450 items related to the history of slavery at Georgetown, slaveholding by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, and the lives of enslaved people held by Georgetown and the Jesuits.

“It’s not just about the past—although we do want to incubate rigorous scholarship on history,” GCSSL Founding Director Adam Rothman, a professor in the Department of History and curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive, says of the center. “We also want to think about the echoes and reverberations of the history of slavery in the present, whether that’s in political institutions, economic life, or culture.”

The center is guided by a distinguished group of Georgetown faculty colleagues who bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

For its first event last spring, the center hosted a two-part event on the Music of New Orleans with a screening of the film City of a Million Dreams, directed by Jason Berry (C’71), and a performance by the Dr. Michael White Quartet, featuring clarinetist Dr. Michael White, one of New Orleans’ most acclaimed musicians and the Rosa and Charles Keller Endowed Chair in the Humanities of New Orleans Music and Culture at Xavier University of Louisiana. Rothman spoke about the history of jazz and its connections to slavery in New Orleans.

In September, the center held a special launch event in Gaston Hall that featured a live performance of Carlos Simon’s Grammy-nominated “Requiem for the Enslaved” and a discussion with the artists.