The new measures include naming a building for one of the men who was sold and giving preferential admissions treatment to descendants of those who were enslaved. At the very least, it should have conferred with them on the contents of the report, which was released Thursday. Beyond that, the Georgetown Memory Project, a nonprofit group that has been tracking descendants, maintains that Isaac understood his surname to be Hawkins. The university’s decision to treat the descendants essentially as legacy applicants for admissions purposes is a welcome move. But it falls short of what’s clearly needed: a scholarship fund specifically for descendants who are poor and generationally disadvantaged by the legacy of slavery from which Georgetown profited.

Source: New York Times September 02, 2016 00:30 UTC