Georgetown University recently announced that it would fundraise $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of 247 slaves sold by the school’s Jesuit founders in 1833, after students voted to make a reparations fund in April. The money will go toward funding community projects like schools and health clinics for the over 4,000 living descendants.
The official decision, publicized last week, comes on the heels of similar announcements from Princeton Theological Seminary in October and Virginia Theological Seminary in September. Princeton Theological Seminary is offering $27 million toward scholarships and related projects, and Virginia Theological Seminary created a $1.7 million reparations fund.
In a growing reparations movement, universities are looking for ways to financially give back after discovering historic ties with slavery, provoking difficult conversations on campus about what restitution means and how much, if anything, is enough.
But for religious higher education institutions, reparations involve another layer of dialogue – struggling with not only their tangled financial pasts but their theological contributions to slavery.
“People have to wrestle with the fact that many of these institutions produced pro-slavery theologians,” said Dr. Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University’s divinity school. Pierce also founded the Center for Black Church Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.
“It isn’t that we’re just simply talking about people who physically held people in bondage, though there were plenty of them,” she added. noting that theologians, pastors and priests at many of these institutions would go on to write pro-slavery theology. “I think there is and there has to be a wrestling with that history.”
Pierce described that history as “complicated.” Some Christian denominations broke away to reject slavery. Some saw the mere existence of slavery in the Old Testament as justification for it, while others pointed to New Testament texts that idealized servitude, like “Servants be obedient to them that are your masters,” from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
