The 272 with Rachel Swarns

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, journalist, author, and professor Rachel Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. The family’s descendants would remain apart until Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.

This event is presented as part of the Expansive Histories of the Early Americas, in partnership with the John Carter Brown Library.