But she would like to see a scholarship program that would bring the slaves’ descendants to Georgetown as students.

“It’s hard to know what could possibly reconcile a history like this,” he said. “What can you do to make amends?”

She was the city’s first black woman television anchor.

She listened, stunned, as he told her about her great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Hawkins, who had labored on a plantation just a few miles from where she grew up.

Father Van de Velde begged Jesuit leaders to send money for the construction of a church that would “provide for the salvation of those poor people, who are now utterly neglected.”

Father Mulledy took most of the down payment he received from the sale — about $500,000 in today’s dollars — and used it to help pay off the debts that Georgetown had incurred under his leadership.

So in June 1838, he negotiated a deal with Henry Johnson, a member of the House of Representatives, and Jesse Batey, a landowner in Louisiana, to sell Cornelius and the others.

“It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves,”

They worried that new owners might not allow the slaves to practice their Catholic faith. They also knew that life on plantations in the Deep South was notoriously brutal, and feared that families might end up being separated and resold.

The Jesuits had sold off individual slaves before. As early as the 1780s, Dr. Rothman found, they openly discussed the need to cull their stock of human beings.

At the time, the Catholic Church did not view slaveholding as immoral

But few were lucky enough to escape.

It showed that the cargo included dozens of children, among them infants as young as 2 months old. Credit Ancestry

and that of other scholars, is a glimpse of an insular world dominated by priests who required their slaves to attend Mass for the sake of their salvation, but also whipped and sold some of them.

Within two weeks, Mr. Cellini had set up a nonprofit, the Georgetown Memory Project, hired eight genealogists and raised more than $10,000 from fellow alumni to finance their research.

But he said he could not stop thinking about the slaves, whose names had been in Georgetown’s archives for decades.

neither the Jesuits nor university officials had tried to trace the lives of the enslaved African-Americans or compensate their progeny.

to remove the names of the Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy and the Rev. William McSherry, the college presidents involved in the sale, from two campus buildings.

“The university itself owes its existence to this history,” said Adam Rothman,

But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?

And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University.