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Book of the week

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"The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) are renowned for the quality of their universities and colleges. Less well known is the relationship between Jesuit higher education and slavery. For more than two hundred years Jesuit colleges and seminaries supported themselves on the labor of the enslaved--in Maryland (Georgetown), Missouri (St Louis University), Kentucky (St Joseph College), Louisiana (Grand Coteau seminary), and Alabama (Spring Hill College). Even the founding of Xavier University in the free state of Ohio depended upon income from the labor of the enslaved in Kentucky. Walker Gollar shows that, in spite of their Catholic faith, Jesuits were in most respects very typical slaveholders. They sometimes worried about the spiritual and physical wellbeing of the enslaved, but they mostly were concerned with the finances of their plantations and farms. This book, deeply based on research in the Jesuit archives, provides a vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding for the general reader and the student. To the extent possible, it portrays the experiences of the enslaved, including the destruction of family ties and punishment but also resistance and emancipation. Gollar also traces the legacies of the Jesuits' participation in the...

Last updated 07/03/2025 by S. Wilson

University Archives & Digital Special Collections

Colored American - September 1, 1838
William Thomas Catto
James C. White
Colored American - August 22, 1840
William Howard Day
Charles Lenox Remond
Colored American - August 21, 1841
Weekly Anglo-African - February 11, 1860
Elevator - June 30, 1865
Pacific Appeal - March 5, 1864
Weekly Anglo-African - March 31, 1860
Frederick Douglass' Paper - December 16, 1853
Voice of the Fugitive - June 1, 1851
Voice of the Fugitive - June 1, 1851
Mirror of the Times - August 22, 1857
Voice of the Fugitive - October 22, 1851
Colored American - June 23, 1838
Austin Steward
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