My Family’s Story in Georgetown’s Slave Past

New Orleans — One fall day in 1838, Jesuit priests from Georgetown University assembled enslaved people and walked them to a ship at a wharf south of Washington. The boat was not filled with silver or wood or cotton, but with 56 people, some of the 272 enslaved humans kept by the university.

The 56 people were unaware of the life of terror that awaited them when the boat docked in New Orleans. Georgetown was in debt and needed cash; so its priests forced the African-Americans they had enslaved onto the ship and sold them down the river.

My relatives — Hillary Ford, Henny Ford, their infant Basil and others –— were on that ship. Hillary and Henny were my maternal grandmother’s grandparents; their son Basil was my grandmother’s father. They didn’t live that long ago: I knew family members who had known them. They were real people with real names. They loved their child and would have done anything to escape the nightmare of their reality.

Hillary, Henny and Basil were sold together to the Ascension Plantation, later called Chatham Plantation, in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. Henry Johnson, the former governor of the state, owned it; he bought my ancestors.

This is family history that I just learned in May, when I got a call from a Georgetown alumnus, Richard Cellini, who was working to make sure the school reckoned with its past. The Catholic Church, central to my life and the life of my family, had been involved in the sale of my ancestors.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/opinion/my-familys-story-in-georgetowns-slave-past.html?