History: Georgetown University’s Sale of Enslaved Africans, 1838

In the New York Times (April 16, 2016), Rachel L. Swarns reported the work at Georgetown University to identify the descendants of the 272 enslaved Africans who were sold to pay off the institutions debts.  In a follow-up article, she and Sona Patel interviewed some of those descendants about their reactions to this discovery of their families’ histories.