4.7 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2019
⏱️ 73 minutes
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0:00.0 | Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. |
0:12.0 | From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory. |
0:21.0 | Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly. |
0:26.0 | I'm Metters. |
0:27.0 | And I'm Brian Bellow. |
0:29.0 | If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians. And each week, along with our colleague, Joanne Freeman, we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news. |
0:37.0 | Last month, students at Georgetown University accomplished something unprecedented. |
0:43.0 | Breaking overnight, undergrad students at Georgetown University have voted to add a small fee to pay the descendants of slaves sold by the university in the 19th century. |
0:54.0 | In 1838, Georgetown, the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit university, sold 272 enslaved people to pay off the school's debts. |
1:04.0 | This group is known on campus today as the GU272. And now, more than 175 years after the sale, students at the school have approved a fund to benefit GU272 descendants. |
1:18.0 | Our thought was, how do we make people care about this? So we decided that people care when they're asked to invest. |
1:31.0 | Millison Short-Columb just finished her sophomore year at Georgetown. She's a descendant of two families from the GU272 and is attending the university as a non-traditional student in her 60s. |
1:43.0 | She helped organize the student advocacy group that created the details for the referendum. |
1:49.0 | Every student come into Georgetown University will pay an additional $27.20 to their tuition. |
2:03.0 | We decided to make it $27.20, which symbolically represents the original 272 people who were chosen to be sold. |
2:17.0 | And that money will go into a fund that will be collected by the university but dispersed by a board of directors made up of the descendants and students. |
2:34.0 | So we can form partnerships to help the descendant community in ways beyond what the university has offered. |
2:46.0 | Short-Columb says that if every undergrad student pays $27.20 per semester that comes out to about $400,000 each year. |
2:56.0 | But just because the students pass the referendum doesn't guarantee that reparations will happen. Now the measure goes to the university's board of directors. |
3:05.0 | If it's approved, it will be the first reparations policy at a major American institution. |
3:10.0 | The university's position is pretty much we're proud of you but we're not obligated or bound to do any of that. |
3:18.0 | So we'll see what happens. Of course we're sure that there will be conversation about it but the board is not obligated to act on the referendum immediately either. |
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