The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

Swarns, Rachel L

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A New Yorker Best Book of the Year • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal

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, journalist, author and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family, the Mahoney's, through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to reveal the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.

The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. Swarns follows the family, whose descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’ reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.

The 272 unravels a never-before-told story about universities with ties to slavery, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.