In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, The Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation is carrying out its mission by providing post-secondary scholarships to descendants of people enslaved by the Jesuits, allowing them to pursue education at the institutions of their choice.
According to Monique Trusclair Maddox, the foundation’s president and CEO, the organization is standing in the gap for universities unsure of how to help Black students as the Trump administration seeks to punish institutions of higher education for any hint of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
As she told The Guardian, “We’re looking to fill the gap where these institutions are somewhat hesitant or unsure how they’re going to be able to support those communities. Teaching this history through Jesuit institutions, allowing dialogue to come in places that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded is something that hasn’t been done in the past. We believe that that whole approach to changing how people look at racism and how people look at marginalized communities is something that will last for a long time.”
In recent years, the Jesuits and their relationship to the practice of chattel slavery, both in the United States and elsewhere, has been receiving more attention, notably through the admission from Georgetown University that its founders engaged in human trafficking and sold more than 272 enslaved people to plantations from Maryland to Louisiana to help pay down the school’s debts. The sale of those people generated $3.3 million in today’s currency and made Georgetown University the institution that it is today.
This admission, however long overdue, likely would not have been made were it not for one of the descendants of the enslaved doing genealogy research in 2004. Over more than a decade after their discovery, a larger discussion about an appropriate response from both the Jesuits and Georgetown occurred, and the conversations between descendants of the enslaved and the Jesuits had a profound effect on Father Timothy Kesicki, a Jesuit priest and the chair of the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation.
As he told the outlet, “I almost had a 180-degree turn on it, because suddenly it wasn’t a past story. It was a living memory, and it begged for a response. The whole thing was painful for everybody. This is a historic trauma. It was very hard for Jesuits. It’s very easy to be trapped by shame and fear and a prevailing sentiment out there that says: ‘Why are you digging up the past?’ We were understanding the truth differently than our preconceived notions, there was a power and a beauty to it also.”
Eventually, the Jesuits’ shame turned into action, and they agreed to fund the first $100 million of the project, of which, they have delivered $45 million so far, some of which came from the sale of what used to be plantation land.
Georgetown also committed to fund $10 million, and aside from funding scholarships for descendants of the people enslaved by the Jesuits, the reconciliation project is dedicated to home modifications for elderly descendants and projects that are dedicated to racial healing.
One of those projects, an art display that went up on Juneteenth in New Orleans, will head to the Essence Festival, also held in New Orleans, before heading to Cleveland, Ohio for another display.
According to Maddox Trusclair, the work of the foundation is not just helping the Jesuits of the United States, but it’s having an impact across the pond, on England’s College of Bishops in Oxford, who are looking into ways they can respond to their own role in the enslavement of Africans and looking to the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation for a guide on how to accomplish this feat.
“We’re transforming their church,” Trusclair Maddox told The Guardian, “not just what we’re doing here in the US. The heirs of enslavers and the descendants of those who were enslaved have come together, not from a litigious perspective, but from a moral perspective, and joined hands and hearts together to walk this path. As painful as it may be together, we believe that shows some hope. There is a possibility for a greater America. There’s a possibility for people to not live in fear.”
RELATED CONTENT: $27M Reparations To Be Paid To Descendants Of Enslaved People Sold To Fund Georgetown University
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