Loyola University of Maryland Publishes Report on Its Ties to Slavery

More than two decades ago, Brown University embarked on a deep investigation into its historical relationship to racial slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. After three years of study, Brown released its groundbreaking Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2006, confronting and publicly documenting the university’s complex history with the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies of anti-Black racism, racial domination and injustice. Since that that time, many of the nation’s highest-ranked university’s – Harvard University, Wake Forest University, Baylor University, Yale University, and Georgetown University to name a few – have issued similar studies. Now Loyola University of Maryland has published its findings. Loyola College was founded in 1852. Funds from the sale of 272 enslaved persons by Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., another Jesuit institution, helped finance the establishment of the new college in Baltimore. Loyola Jesuits depended on slave labor. Like their counterparts at Georgetown, they preferred to rent rather than to own the enslaved people who maintained the campus, residence, and college. From July 1855 through December 1860, Loyola Jesuits (including its first president Father John Early) rented “servants” from Mrs. Henry S. Manning, whose family were slaveholders. The 1860...