Georgetown University Grants Legacy Status

[Gregory Matthews]

NOTE:  Legacy Status is when a University grants extra points on the evaluation needed to qualify for admission.  In most cases, these are ten (10) extra points which granted to students whose parents graduated from the University.  Typically about 10% of the students admitted in a year are legacy students.

Now to Georgetown:

It was 1838 and Georgetown University was in financial trouble.  To meet  its debts, Georgetown priests sold some 272 slaves to pay off the Universities debt!

Now, Georgetown is attempting to come to terms with this incident in its past.  It has decided to grant legacy status to those who descended from those 272 slaves.  But, a problem exists.  How does one identify and inform people who may be due legacy status?  African Americans were not listed in census records until 1870.  It is likely that most of the people who descended from those 272 slaves have no idea of that background.  

So, Georgetown established The Georgetown Memory Project, and hired a genealogist, Judy Riffel, to search for people who might be eligible.

So far, two (2) persons have been identified as eligible, applied and granted admission to Georgetown.   One is a 20 year-old freshman student.  The second is 63 year-old Melisande Short-Colomb, also a freshman student.

NOTE:  The source for my post above is an article published in the October 1, 2017 Sacramento Bee.  The source for that article was an article previously published in the Washington Post, and written by Terrence McCoy.  I find the article that I read to be very interesting as it goes into the previously known family history of Short-Colomb and he reaction to becoming a freshman student at Georgetown.