In 2017, top clergy and officials from the Society of Jesus and Georgetown University apologized for taking part in and profiting from the American slave trade.

The Jesuits and Georgetown held a public ceremony to apologize for selling 272 enslaved Black people to three Louisiana plantations in 1838. The money received was $115,000, and it kept then-struggling Georgetown from closing. 

A man whose ancestors were enslaved by the Jesuits is now calling for reparations. 

Sixty-four-year-old Minneapolis-based Elton Wright-Trusclair grew up in Louisiana during 1960s-era Jim Crow segregation. While he wasn’t sure, he sensed his family had endured even more difficult times. 

“My grandparents raised me, but they didn’t talk about that part,” he told MPR News. “They didn’t talk about that. Some things a lot of old people didn’t talk about because that’s how they were raised. That’s how they did us, manipulated us down there. And a lot of old people didn’t talk about stuff like that.”

“We express our solemn contrition for our participation in slavery and the benefit our institution received,” said Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia at the apology ceremony in 2017, CNN reported. “We cannot hide from this truth, bury this truth, ignore this truth. Slavery remains the original evil in our republic, an evil that our university was complicit in.”

“It is our very enslavement of another, culminating in the tragic sale of 272 women, men, and children that remains with us to this day, trapping us in a historic truth for which we implore mercy and justice, hope and healing,” Father Timothy Kesicki, then the leader of the Society of Jesus for Canada and the U.S., told descendants at the ceremony.

Wright-Trusclair wants more than an apology. 

The Jesuits enslaved more than one thousand people over more than a century and a half–more than the 272 people they spoke of in the apology. By 1700, Jesuit priests had purchased enslaved people and established tobacco plantations on more than 12,000 acres along the Potomac River in southern Maryland, according to the Georgetown Slavery Archive.

The school’s wealth was built tough the free labor of slaves–and the school benefited for generations, long after the end of slavery.

The Jesuits enslaved four generations of Wright-Trusclair’s family, and their labor is now worth billions of dollars. Wright-Trusclair and others want direct cash payouts.

“I would like to see some kind of reparations,” Wright-Trusclair said, “It is unfair.”

Other descendants have requested $1 billion in reparations.

The Jesuits did enter negotiations with a small group of descendants, and in March 2021 there was a deal that did not include direct cash payments. The Jesuit Conference of Canada and the U.S. formed a new organization with those descendants, called The Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation and the Jesuits pledged $100 million toward a $1 billion goal. The funds that will be used in part to support initiatives such as educational scholarships for descendants, anti-racist programs, and charitable organizations.

But Wright-Trusclair is among the descendants who don’t agree with the scholarship fund proposal. He wants direct financial reparations.

Photo: Georgetown University, https://www.georgetowndc.com/neighborhood/georgetown-university/