Tuesday lecture with Rachel L. Swarns

Summer Lecture Series

July 16, 2024

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author, and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and race relations for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University’s ties to slavery touched off a national conversation about American institutions and their ties to this painful period of history. This reporting expanded into 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold (2023), a larger story exploring the connection between slavery and the growth of the American Catholic Church. 

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project–what is now Georgetown University. In this powerful account, Swarns follows one family, the Mahoneys, through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement. 272 shines a light on the people whose forced labor helped build, sustain, and expand the Catholic Church into the largest religious denomination in the nation.

The Mount’s general COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines can be found here.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.

Thanks to our sponsors:

Robert A. Ouimette

  • Sales for all lectures will open for Mount Members on Friday, May 10, and to the general public on Wednesday, May 15. Prices are $25 (Mount Members) and $30 (General Admission). All lectures and panel discussions are free for graduate and undergraduate students, and children under 18. Check back to book online!
  • All lectures will take place in an outdoor, open-sided tent. We look forward to seeing you rain or shine.
  • Books are available for purchase through The Mount's Bookstore before and during the event.

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author, and associate professor of journalism in New York who writes about race and race relations for The New York Times, where she served as a reporter and correspondent for 22 years. Her articles about Georgetown University’s roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. Swarns is the author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (2023); American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (2012), and a co-author of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives (2017). The 272 was selected as one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Biographers International Organization, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the MacDowell Artist Residency Program, and others. In 2023, Swarns was elected to the Society of American Historians.

Reviews
“Through her prodigious research, expert storytelling, and deep empathy for the victims of slavery, Rachel L. Swarns has produced an absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church.”
– Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth

 

“The 272, Rachel L. Swarns’s deeply researched and revelatory new book…journeys to slavery’s heart of darkness: to the separation of families, the terror of being sold into the vast unknown and of bodies transformed into profits and investments. But it is also the moving human story of some of the people who endured and survived this ordeal, and who have long awaited rediscovery…. No single work of history can remedy the vexing issue of repair for slavery in America, but The 272 advances the conversation and challenges the collective conscience; without knowing this history in its complexity we are left with only raw, uncharted memory.”
— David Blight, The New York Times Book Review 

“Powerful and moving…Swarns centers the experiences of enslaved people owned by the Jesuits for nearly two centuries who remained largely unnamed and unknown until now…and weaves together extensive research, data, letters and oral histories to bring forth an intimate family story.”
— Ana Lucia Araujo, The Washington Post Book Review 

“…a vivid and compelling narrative…that illuminates the pragmatic motives of the Jesuits and recovers from near-oblivion the lives of the enslaved people at the center of the story….Ms. Swarns has brilliantly mined archives and oral histories to tease out buried connections and biographical details.”
— Fergus M. Bordewich, The Wall Street Journal 

“…a vivid, pointillistically detailed narrative that foregrounds the people who were enslaved even as it tells the story of the school buildings erected with their labor and the institutions sustained and funded by their sale.”
— The New Yorker