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From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly.

I'm Metters.

And I'm Brian Bellow.

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.

Last month, students at Georgetown University accomplished something unprecedented.

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.

In 1838, Georgetown, the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit university, sold 272 enslaved people to pay off the school's debts.

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.

Our thought was, how do we make people care about this? So we decided that people care when they're asked to invest.

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.

She helped organize the student advocacy group that created the details for the referendum.

Every student come into Georgetown University will pay an additional $27.20 to their tuition.

We decided to make it $27.20, which symbolically represents the original 272 people who were chosen to be sold.

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.

So we can form partnerships to help the descendant community in ways beyond what the university has offered.

Short-Columb says that if every undergrad student pays $27.20 per semester that comes out to about $400,000 each year.

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.

If it's approved, it will be the first reparations policy at a major American institution.

The university's position is pretty much we're proud of you but we're not obligated or bound to do any of that.

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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