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The 272

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

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The 272

By: Rachel L. Swarns
Narrated by: Karen Murray
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About this listen

“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

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews

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 groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

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. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s 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.

Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.

©2023 Rachel Swarns (P)2023 Random House Audio
Black & African American United States
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Critic reviews

“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.”The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant blend of history and journalism, this book unearths the story of the enslaved people whose labor benefited the Catholic Church—and what happened when their descendants sought answers.”—People

“Swarns is a gifted writer and storyteller. But The 272 succeeds not only in its telling of a tragic story. [She] centers the experiences of enslaved people owned by the Jesuits for nearly two centuries who remained largely unnamed and unknown until now.”The Washington Post

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So glad that this story has been told

There is a lot to learn from history, my heart just goes out to the people and descendants of slavery, which was abominable, there is no excuse the church can make in partaking and encouraging it, they should continue to make reparations.

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