(Photo by Brandon Kopp)

After a series of discussions, protests, and revelations about its slaveholding past came to the fore last year, Georgetown University released a working group’s recommendations today and outlined steps it will take to make amends.

President John DeGioia will formally outline the plan in a speech to students this afternoon, including offering an apology for the university’s past as it related to the slave trade.

“There is a moral, as well as a practical, imperative that defines this moment—that shapes the responsibility we all share: how do we address now, in this moment, the enduring and persistent legacy of slavery?” he wrote in a message to students that includes a list of recommendations from the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation that was convened last year.

The steps include engaging with the descendants of more than 200 slaves who the university sold to pay off debt in 1838, including giving them the same consideration in the admissions process as the children of Georgetown alumni. The university will also establish an Institute for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies, develop a public memorial, and rename several buildings.

The changes have been brewing since last fall.

In August, the university announced the reopening of the Mulledy Hall, a residential building that held the name of a Catholic priest and former Georgetown president, Thomas Mulledy, who sold 272 slaves to fund the university nearly two centuries ago. After expressing concern, a group of black student leaders were invited to speak to DeGioia’s chief of staff about the building’s name, a student told DCist last year.

The following month, the university created a steering committee to discuss the process to change the name. The group was also tasked with making recommendations on how best to acknowledge and recognize the university’s history with slavery and creating events and opportunities for open conversation.

But in November, a group of students felt that their demands weren’t being met, and they assembled a protest on campus. The following day, DeGioia announced that the Mulledy Hall would temporarily be called Freedom Hall, and another building, McSherry Hall, would be called Remembrance Hall. DeGioia said that his decision was based on recommendations that he received from the group.

Among today’s announcements, DeGioia says that Mulledy Hall will permanently be called Isaac Hall, in honor a slave whose name is the first mentioned in the documents of the 1838 sale. And McSherry Hall will be named Anne Marie Becraft Hall, in honor of Anne Marie Becraft, a free black woman who founded a school for black girls in Georgetown in 1827.

“This moment is an opening, a beginning, an invitation for us—and each of us is welcomed to engage, to offer perspectives, to reflect, and to understand anew the responsibilities that we have to one another,” DeGioia wrote.

Georgetown University Report by Christina Sturdivant on Scribd