WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.400 In April 2020, near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Louisiana 00:00:10.400 --> 00:00:13.320 emerged as an epicenter of the disease. 00:00:13.320 --> 00:00:17.920 Marty Grah had just occurred and caseload spiked in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 00:00:17.920 --> 00:00:22.760 But no place was more devastated than a veteran's retirement home in the town of Reserve. 00:00:22.760 --> 00:00:29.160 Well, exactly one month ago today, doctors diagnosed the first coronavirus patient at a 00:00:29.160 --> 00:00:31.760 veteran's home in St. John Paris. 00:00:31.760 --> 00:00:34.880 Since then, 43 residents there have died. 00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:35.880 43. 00:00:35.880 --> 00:00:38.640 Then the coronavirus hit Louisiana. 00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:43.000 It started like a sneak attack, but quickly turned into an all-out assault. 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:47.160 Residents at hundreds of nursing homes became sitting ducks, none more than the veterans 00:00:47.160 --> 00:00:50.160 home in Reserve. 00:00:50.160 --> 00:00:53.840 News reports detailed individual stories of the people who had died. 00:00:53.840 --> 00:00:58.720 But none mentioned George Washington Taylor, a 96-year-old World War II veteran who had 00:00:58.720 --> 00:01:01.120 died on April 22nd. 00:01:01.120 --> 00:01:03.880 Rochelle Prader is Mr. Taylor's cousin. 00:01:03.880 --> 00:01:08.560 She recalled something he had told her during one of the last times she spoke with him, 00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:10.280 a kind of last request. 00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:18.200 And so I would like for you to share with everybody that when I first went down to New Orleans 00:01:18.200 --> 00:01:24.560 to talk to him to see if he had information about our ancestors, he did share. 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:29.620 He said, well, what would you want from this cousin, George, and he said, you know, 00:01:29.620 --> 00:01:35.600 Ro, the only thing I want is for somebody to apologize to me personally for what he went 00:01:35.600 --> 00:01:39.160 through as a World War II veteran. 00:01:39.160 --> 00:01:41.160 And his story went like this. 00:01:41.160 --> 00:01:48.380 He told a story where he had gotten, came back, had been in the foxhole for days with 00:01:48.380 --> 00:01:52.280 their corpse, and came back and got on the bus. 00:01:52.280 --> 00:01:54.800 You know, when he got back, stayed side. 00:01:54.800 --> 00:01:58.880 And he said he would just destroy it, and he just sit down on the bus. 00:01:58.880 --> 00:02:05.440 And the bus driver got up and say, I don't care who you think you are with that uniform 00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:08.600 on that, but you know you ain't supposed to be here. 00:02:08.600 --> 00:02:14.200 And he said, and with tears in his eyes, this was in 2016. 00:02:14.200 --> 00:02:17.520 Tears in his eyes still that long. 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:20.480 He shared that he was so hurt. 00:02:20.480 --> 00:02:26.160 He wasn't, it wasn't so much angry as was pain that he got off the bus and he walked 00:02:26.160 --> 00:02:27.160 home. 00:02:27.160 --> 00:02:32.400 George Taylor died still waiting for that apology, but others in his family had found him 00:02:32.400 --> 00:02:35.160 and were fighting for something more than an apology. 00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:40.440 They were looking for justice, restitution, repair for a century's old wrong. 00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:44.120 Taylor was the oldest surviving male descendant of Isaac Hawkins. 00:02:44.120 --> 00:02:50.120 The first person named on a manifest cataloguing the sale of 272 enslaved people by the 00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:54.040 Jesuits who operated Georgetown University in 1838. 00:02:54.040 --> 00:02:58.320 Rochelle Prader can recite the connections tracing her cousin back through the generations 00:02:58.320 --> 00:02:59.320 by heart. 00:02:59.320 --> 00:03:06.200 Because I promised him that I would continue to try to do my best to honor what he felt 00:03:06.200 --> 00:03:07.800 that day. 00:03:07.800 --> 00:03:13.520 And so as an enslaved person, that's all he wanted from that was recognition that he 00:03:13.520 --> 00:03:14.520 was human. 00:03:14.520 --> 00:03:16.000 So he was mine. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:18.480 He was the grandson. 00:03:18.480 --> 00:03:22.880 His mother's name was Tarasena Dorita Hawkins. 00:03:22.880 --> 00:03:29.200 And Tarasena Dorita Hawkins was the child of Jackson Hawkins. 00:03:29.200 --> 00:03:33.520 Jackson Hawkins was the child of Patrick and Lady Hawkins. 00:03:33.520 --> 00:03:38.000 And Patrick Hawkins was the child of Isaac Hawkins. 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:44.320 The story of the 272 enslaved people sold by Georgetown University, known as the GU272. 00:03:44.320 --> 00:03:50.560 It became international news in 2016 when current students at the University voted to create 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:55.600 a reparations fund to benefit the descendants of the people who had been sold. 00:03:55.600 --> 00:04:01.000 At the time, it was one of the first concrete steps towards local reparations for slavery 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:05.040 that had been enacted anywhere in the country. 00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:06.240 Welcome to Overdo. 00:04:06.240 --> 00:04:10.840 A podcast that this season will examine how archives are activated in the movement for 00:04:10.840 --> 00:04:12.360 reparations. 00:04:12.360 --> 00:04:18.120 The podcast is hosted by me, Lena Moe, and my colleague at Columbia University, Ty Jones, 00:04:18.120 --> 00:04:22.360 curator for American History at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 00:04:22.360 --> 00:04:27.760 Sometimes archives wait decades for the moment in which they get reanimated and reactivated. 00:04:27.760 --> 00:04:30.920 The Georgetown Slavery Archive is one such story. 00:04:30.920 --> 00:04:35.200 When in the past decade, these manuscripts were taken out of the library and into the public 00:04:35.200 --> 00:04:36.200 sphere. 00:04:36.200 --> 00:04:41.120 They were quoted in the Hoya, replicated, and posted on the walls of student buildings. 00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:46.840 The names of enslaved persons drawn from the archive were chalked in Georgetown's Red Square. 00:04:46.840 --> 00:04:53.440 And in 2019, students voted by a nearly two-to-one margin to enact reparations. 00:04:53.440 --> 00:05:01.120 The $27.20 activity fee referenced the sale of the 272 enslaved persons documented in the 00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:05.120 Maryland Jesuit archives. 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:13.800 Georgetown students voted 66 to 34 percent in favor of a new fee of $27.20 per semester, 00:05:13.800 --> 00:05:18.400 money that would benefit descendants of those 272 slaves. 00:05:18.400 --> 00:05:21.440 We've all benefited from the sales of these slaves previously, and I think we have a 00:05:21.440 --> 00:05:25.680 duty now to show our responsibility and the fact that we did benefit from them. 00:05:25.680 --> 00:05:31.120 In the lead up to the referendum vote, posters with QR codes appeared around campus. 00:05:31.120 --> 00:05:35.120 Students who scanned the posters would find themselves linked to documents from the Georgetown 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:36.440 archives. 00:05:36.440 --> 00:05:41.280 The implicit challenge students leveled was, if you want to know more about this history, 00:05:41.280 --> 00:05:44.520 it's here, an hour library. 00:05:44.520 --> 00:05:46.160 Jesuits are good record keepers. 00:05:46.160 --> 00:05:51.080 The original census from the 1838 sale is still preserved among the Maryland Jesuits 00:05:51.080 --> 00:05:53.720 and the Georgetown University archives. 00:05:53.720 --> 00:05:57.520 But that is only the tip of the iceberg of documents showing the depth and importance 00:05:57.520 --> 00:05:59.760 of slavery to the university. 00:05:59.760 --> 00:06:05.040 Their financial records showing how crucial the sale was to the university's balance sheet. 00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:10.760 There are baptismal and sacramental records of enslaved people who were practicing Catholics. 00:06:10.760 --> 00:06:15.080 These collections were not a secret, since at least the late 19th century historians of 00:06:15.080 --> 00:06:19.920 Georgetown had reflected on the entangled history of the university and slavery. 00:06:19.920 --> 00:06:25.000 In the 1990s, some documents were put online and used in American studies classes, but 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:29.320 around 2015 the amount of exposure changed. 00:06:29.320 --> 00:06:32.360 Archival documents were quoted in the student newspaper. 00:06:32.360 --> 00:06:38.160 The archive became the kind of thing debated in and out of class in the cafeteria and at parties. 00:06:38.160 --> 00:06:43.440 The university chartered a slavery memory and reconciliation commission and students across 00:06:43.440 --> 00:06:49.600 campus debated the possibility of taking direct, reparative action themselves. 00:06:49.600 --> 00:06:55.960 And the descendant community, GU272, emerged as a powerful interlocutor for the university, 00:06:55.960 --> 00:06:59.240 demanding that it confront its past. 00:06:59.240 --> 00:07:04.800 Follows are a series of conversations that pull at one thread in this remarkable story. 00:07:04.800 --> 00:07:09.480 What was the role of archives in the movement at Georgetown to confront the history of enslavement 00:07:09.480 --> 00:07:11.240 at the university? 00:07:11.240 --> 00:07:12.240 Why now? 00:07:12.240 --> 00:07:16.440 Why were these documents rediscovered and put to explosive use now? 00:07:16.440 --> 00:07:20.680 It's hard to think of a more high profile collection of archival boxes. 00:07:20.680 --> 00:07:25.640 In this season of Overdo, we speak with students and professors from Georgetown and members 00:07:25.640 --> 00:07:30.800 of the descendant community and alumni about the Georgetown Archives, the deep divisions 00:07:30.800 --> 00:07:36.160 and emerging consensus about reparations on campus, and what comes next.