Loyola University Maryland reckons in new report with its ties to slavery

Loyola University Maryland presented a 27-page report Wednesday detailing how the Catholic Jesuit school in Baltimore benefited from slave trade.

A task force of undergraduate students, faculty and staff, as well as descendants of slaves sold by the Jesuits, has been researching the private liberal arts college’s ties to slavery since 2021. Terrence Sawyer, Loyola’s president, made the task force a priority during his first month on the job in January 2022.

Loyola, founded in 1852, is also part of an international consortium that is exposing and reckoning with connections to slavery and the slave economy. The report will be followed by a 300-page book based on their research and essays from descendants of the slaves called “Untold Truths: Exposing Slavery and Its Legacies at Loyola.” It’s scheduled to be published April 15.

“A lot of different colleges and universities are really trying to understand these histories and then figure out what it means for institutions like ours today,” said David Carey Jr., Loyola’s Doehler Chair in History and a task force member. “Part of what was happening there is that [Georgetown] owned six plantations, or forced labor camps, in Maryland and a decision was made partly along with [selling the 272 slaves] to sell those plantations to sort of get out of agricultural production and shift and really focus on education.”

Georgetown University, another Jesuit school, sold 272 enslaved people and children in 1838 for seed money to further invest in educational institutions, including Loyola. It’s considered one of the largest slave sales in the United States. Loyola was created 14 years later in 1852, about a decade before the Civil War. Tens of thousands of people have been identified as descendants of the people who were sold in 1838, Carey said.

“The task force found evidence of a direct financial connection between Loyola’s founding and the proceeds of the GU272 sale,” the report says. “From July 1855 through December 1860, Loyola Jesuits also rented ‘servants’ who were likely enslaved, and Loyola likely benefited from the labor of an unidentified woman listed in an 1860 census as enslaved by the Order of the Jesuits in Baltimore.”

According to the report, an 1859 letter from Maryland to Mr. John Ryers Thompson, who purchased many of the enslaved people from the original buyers and thus incurred outstanding debts, links Loyola’s founding with the 1838 sale. Thompson asked the Jesuits to extend their loan on the sale in 1859 but was rejected.

“I am sorry to inform you that it is quite out of our power to accede to your first proposition viz: to lend you $30,000. As we yet owe a very large amount for a college built in Baltimore a few years ago,” Maryland responded.

The report also says Jesuits at Loyola frequently rented slaves to maintain campus and residences from slaveholders in Baltimore.

“In short, funds from the 1838 sale provided the cornerstones for what is now Loyola University Maryland,” the report says.

The task force included Carey, psychology professor Diana Betz, former dean Stephen Fowl, school of education dean Afra Hersi, theology professor John Kiess, archivist Jenny Kinniff, equity and inclusion officer Rodney Parker, and African and African American studies professor Karsonya Wise. Class of 2024 student Alexis Faison, 2023 graduate Grace Murry, and descendants of people sold in the Georgetown sale Lynn Nehemiah and Mélisande Short-Colomb were also on the task force.

New York Times reporter Rachel Swann in 2016 first uncovered the Jesuit priests’ slave sale that was made to keep a struggling Georgetown in business. Loyola became focused on its history with slavery after national journalists provided evidence that it was connected to Georgetown’s sale.

The report also explores how the legacy of slavery continued at Loyola after the Civil War. Members of the president’s task force offered 10 recommendations for university leadership on how to reconcile with this history, including restitution.

“How can we make Loyola a place that is more just in terms of racial justice, in terms of opportunities for all kinds of different students but particularly descendants and Black students, particularly in Baltimore and Maryland?” Carey said.

At least 22 students, faculty, or staff joined the Confederacy, while 10 joined the Union forces, according to the report, and in the late 19th century, Loyola Jesuits hosted lost cause literary figures including the Rev. Abram J. Ryan, who donated funds to establish a prize for poetry that was awarded until at least the late 1960s. The task force also found that the 1921 land deed for Loyola’s campus limited education on campus to “white persons” before black students Charles Dorsey and Paul Smith helped desegregate the school.

The report found a group of African Americans whose contributions to Loyola’s founding and development was not previously known.

Louisa Mahoney Mason eluded transfer to Louisiana when the GU272 sale was completed, and after emancipation, worked for Maryland Jesuits for another half century, according to the report, and free black laborers at Loyola Dominick Butler and Madison Fenwick worked for the university.

Loyola will consider the report’s recommendations as part of the university’s next strategic plan, scheduled to be adopted and implemented in the spring.

“We offer this report as part of advancing this mission. We do so knowing that we are at the beginning of this process, not at the end. Examining this history and responding to it is not something that can be completed by any single task force, course, or initiative,” the report says. “We hold steadfastly to a mistaken view of history, casting progress towards racial equity as linear, uninterrupted, and inevitable.”