Lots of organizations start their conferences on a Thursday. And CROSS, the acronym of Catholic Religious Organizations Studying Slavery, was no different with its own conference, which started Nov. 13, 2025 at Georgetown University.
But the Nov. 13 date was suffused with meaning. For it was on Nov. 17, 1838, 187 years ago, that 130 enslaved people owned by Jesuit priests at their plantations in Maryland were loaded onto a boat, the Katherine Jackson, which was docked in Alexandria, Virginia, and transported to Louisiana after they had been sold to new owners. The Jesuits’ infamous 1838 sale of 272 enslaved men, women and children helped ensure the financial survival of Georgetown College, which is now Georgetown University.
“In 1838, when hard times hit, the priests decided to do what many people did at the time, to sell off their assets. In this case, the Jesuits’ most valuable assets happened to be human property,” said Rachel L. Swarns, who wrote the book “The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,” capping a 30-year career at The New York Times.
“The strategy worked,” said Swarns in her Nov. 13 keynote address at the CROSS conference. In her talk, which was titled, “Meeting the Moment: Reckoning with Catholic Slaveholding,” she noted, “The priests were successful. They completed the sale and the cash rolled in. Georgetown survived and became, as we all know, one of our nation’s elite universities. But all of this came at a terrible, terrible cost. Scores of families were torn apart. And they would be mostly forgotten for more than a century.”
And they could have stayed mostly forgotten.
But “a colleague of mine at The New York Times had received an email from” Richard Cellini, a Georgetown alum, who was dangling an “exclusive … about this slave sale, this 1838 slave sale that had benefited Georgetown,” Swarns said. “My colleague was interested, but uncertain. Remember: This is before ‘The 1619 Project,’ Ta-Nehisi Coates had done his ‘Case for Reparations’ (essay). It is my great fortune that she did not just delete that email. She didn’t because she remembered that there was someone.”
Someone – Swarns – whose biography of then-First Lady Michelle Obama, “American Tapestry,” chronicled her genealogy, and how her family had gone in five generations “from slavery to the White House.”
Swarns said that when she thanked Cellini for giving this scoop to the Times,” he replied, “What makes you think The New York Times was Plan A?” It turns out two other “major media outlets” had passed on the story, she added.
Before offering his exclusive, Cellini had “turned to Google. Search terms: ‘Jesuit slaves Louisiana plantations 1838.’ And then he pressed the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. And he was lucky that day. Up popped a link to Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, who had discovered her family’s ties to the sale and had written about it,” Swarns said.
Bayonne-Johnson was gifted at the CROSS conference with a chart outlining her own family heritage and honored as the “queen mother” of genealogical research into ancestors who had been enslaved. The honor came from Descendants United, the new name for the GU 272 Descendants Association, which has grown to encompass additional lineages linked to slaveholding.
Swarns noted that at that time she began working on the article, “Historians knew about it. Many archivists here in this room knew about it. But ordinary Catholics, not so much. I happen to be Black and Catholic, and I had never heard about any of this.”
When Swarns’ first article on the Jesuits’ slave sale appeared in the newspaper in 2016, she said, “more than a million people read the story online. Thousands shared it on social media. It was one of the most widely read stories in The New York Times that year.”
The impact went well beyond a quick read. “Scores of people read and reached out. Descendants learned about their ties to this wrenching history and started to organize,” she said.
And Swarns set about writing her book “The 272.” What was intended to be a two-year effort took seven. The book’s success ultimately pulled her away from The New York Times and into academia, as Swarns now teaches as a journalism professor at New York University.
And it’s far from the only upshot from Swarns’ series of articles and her book.
“There are now more than 90 universities that are studying or have studied their ties to slavery. Other religious denominations, too, are doing this work. Episcopal churches, Methodist churches, Presbyterian churches. When folks ask me how I can stay a practicing Catholic, I like to say, ‘Where would I go?’ Even the Quakers enslaved people – before they didn’t,” Swarns said.
“And it’s not only universities and religious institutions. We’re talking about the financial sector, banks, insurance companies, and cities and states, from Boston to New York to California. And all of you are a part of that,” the author said.
“Archivists around the country are going through their records and painstakingly documenting the enslaved people who were baptized and married in their communities,” she continued. “Educators are working on this in their classrooms and have developed a curriculum that will be available to Jesuit high schools around the country. Descendants are conducting research, partnering with, and prodding institutions, to continue grappling with this history.”
It’s a “hard history,” Swarns acknowledged. “This hard history, and the decision to reckon with it has brought so many of us together, all of us, here today. … This is history that we have to engage with, wrestle with together, as a community, all of us here in this space today, and all of us here in this country.”
She said, “When you’re researching and writing about slavery, there are always people who say: ‘Hold up. Don’t bring your 21st century morals and ideas to this situation. Slavery was legal at the time.’ Which it was. But some Catholic priests were wrestling with these moral questions in real time.”
Swarns included in that category Irish Father Patrick Smyth, who visited Maryland and in 1788 condemned the Jesuits for “enslaving and whipping Black people,” and Cincinnati Archbishop John Baptist Purcell, who later called for the emancipation of the enslaved and condemned what he described as “the sin of . . . holding millions of human beings in physical and spiritual bondage.”
The conversations on this topic aren’t always easy. Sometimes, they aren’t even conversations.
Swarns said one newspaper interviewer asked her, “What does your parish priest think about your work?”
“And I had to tell him: ‘He doesn’t know.’ And the reporter said, ‘He doesn’t know?’ It speaks to my experiences within my own church as a Black Catholic, that I didn’t feel comfortable telling my own priest about my work,” she confessed.
“When I finally did rally the courage to send an email about a talk I was doing on the subject, I got no response. So I know how hard this can be,” Swarns added.
But she also told of a white deacon from Kansas City, Kansas, writing in his archdiocese’s newspaper, who wrote that “as Christians we are called to listen to the stories of our brothers and sisters,” and “for those of you who feel uneasy or uncomfortable grappling with this history, know this: The discomfort that you feel might just be the Lord knocking on the door of your heart.”
