The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

NYU journalism professor Swarns (American Tapestry) expands on her 2016 New York Times article in this immersive and doggedly reported account, which reveals how the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved men, women, and children saved the debt-ridden Jesuit college now known as Georgetown University. In devastating detail, Swarns traces the sale’s impact on the families of Anna and Louisa Mahoney, sisters who labored on a Jesuit-owned plantation in St. Mary’s County, Md., until Anna and her children were sold to a plantation in Louisiana. Thanks to DNA testing and Swarns’s reporting, their descendants reunited nearly two centuries later. Intertwined with the Mahoney family story is Swarns’s searing investigation into the Catholic Church’s deep involvement in American slavery, which has fueled debates at Georgetown and other colleges and universities about what the Church owes to the descendants of those whose labor and sale value bolstered its financial, political, and spiritual power in America. Swarns makes excellent use of archival sources to recreate the lives of the enslaved families and the circumstances of the sale, which was fiercely opposed by some Jesuit priests at the time. It’s a powerful reminder of how firmly the roots of slavery are planted in America’s soil. (June)