Georgetown University, Learning From Its Sins

David J. Collins, associate professor of history and chairman of the working group on slavery, memory and reconciliation at Georgetown University, writes:  The Jesuit cemetery in St. Inigoes, Md., used to be surrounded by tobacco fields. Over the course of roughly 150 years, those fields were worked by hundreds of slaves owned by the Jesuits. In June, I sat in that cemetery, as a priest and a history professor at Georgetown University, with 16 Jesuit seminarians. We discussed what had happened there in 1838, when several hundred men, women and children were rounded up by the churchmen and their hired agents and transported first by wagon, then by ship to plantations in Louisiana.  I tell this history to seminarians every year. Both as historian and as priest, I am convinced that the past matters in the present.