Faith Communities and Hard Histories
Slavery is a Founding Link Between Loyola Maryland and Georgetown Universities
Join us on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, at 12 noon eastern time for our next webinar "Hard Histories: Slavery and the Rise of Catholic Universities,” with Professor Rachel Swarns, author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, and Professor David Carey, contributor to Untold Truths: Exposing Slavery and Its Legacies at Loyola University Maryland. Registration is free and easy, here.
When in 2016 for The New York Times, journalist and professor Rachel Swarns shared the story of the 272 enslaved people sold to ensure the future of today's Georgetown University, she could not have known how the work of Georgetown researchers, of the community descended from "the 272,” and her own reporting would influence the work to come through projects like Hard Histories at Hopkins. Through the Georgetown example, we learned that it was possible to blend rigorous research with ethical and even moral reflection, that our revelations about slavery and the university were of interest far beyond the university campus, and that the work of reckoning and reconciliation demands long term commitments rather than quick fixes.
Some at Loyola University Maryland watched the story unfolding at Georgetown with interest. After all, both schools owed their founding to the Jesuit order, also known as the Society of Jesus: Georgetown in 1789, in what was then the Maryland colony, and Loyola in 1852 on Holliday Street in what is today downtown Baltimore. Among those watching was history professor David Carey, Jr., a who in 2021 joined a university task force charged with studying Loyola's ties to slavery. Professor Carey, his colleagues, and their remarkable students at Loyola are a model for us, demonstrating the possibilities and the power of placing research and reconciliation in the hands of students. You can watch Professor Carey and the Loyola students discuss their research here during a Hard Histories webinar.
As we've talked about some here on the Hard Histories Substack, asking questions about the role of faith communities, and people of faith, in slavery and the slave trade is one that we have been called to reflect on. Our followers have wanted to better understand how members of the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, including members of the Hopkins family, engaged in slave holding. You can read from us here at “Anti-Slavery and Anti-Abolitionist?: An 1842 Critique of Baltimore's Quakers Points to the City's Trouble Middle Ground.” And we continue to recommend Ryan P. Jordan's 2007 book Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865, to those looking to understand how it was that in Maryland, Quakers did not align often with the abolitionist movement.
We look forward to exploring with Professor Swarns and Professor Carey both their work and their experience with unearthing histories that have exposed new and difficult truths about their shared faith community. These discoveries have not engendered denial or disaffection. Instead, as Professor Swarns has written: “When people ask me whether my research has shaken my faith, I shake my head. I am inspired by the families who pressed the church to be true to its teachings. Their history is one of struggle and resistance, family and faith. Unearthing their stories has deepened my connection to Catholicism and transformed my understanding of my own church.”1
Please join us on March 13 for an important discussion between these two researchers, educators, and people of faith in an illuminating conversation.
— MSJ
Rachel L. Swarns, "My Church Was Part of the Slave Trace. This Has Not Shaken My Faith,” New York Times, June 17, 2023.
Looking forward to this event! Your readers might be interested to know that in the 1770s and 1780s - a half a century before the infamous 1838 Jesuit sale - Quakers and Methodists alike manumitted hundreds of enslaved Marylanders through private land deeds. My team has uncovered the names of 618 enslaved people on the Western Shore who were impacted by more than 80 freedom deeds filed in county courts during this period. The ancestors of Johns Hopkins were responsible for close to 100 of these manumissions, and perhaps even more that may have been recorded in counties where land records no longer exist. For more about our findings, see https://www.thehouseofhopkins.com/manumissions.