"Let Us Go Free": Slavery and Jesuit Universities in America

A vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding and its historical relationship with Jesuit universities in the United States

The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is renowned for the quality of the order’s impact on higher education. Less well known, however, is the relationship between Jesuit higher education and slavery. For more than two hundred years, Jesuit colleges and seminaries in the United States supported themselves on the labor of the enslaved.

“Let Us Go...