Georgetown Holds Conversations on Legacies of Slavery

In April, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gayle Jessup White—a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and community engagement officer at Monticello—conversed on stage with Melisánde Short-Colomb (C’21), a descendant of Abraham Mahoney and Mary Ellen Queen, who were among the 272 enslaved men, women, and children sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838. Short-Colomb, 64, is in her second year at Georgetown and works in the Georgetown Slavery Archive in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections.

“I know that I am here in this place at this time because those people prayed for me,” Short-Colomb said. “They prayed me into existence. They prayed me into being, and 180 years ago, somebody had a dream, and it was me, and here I am.”

Rev. Brandon Harris, Protestant chaplain at the Law Center and Main Campus, and Heidi Tseu, director of local government affairs, organized the event, “We Choose to Remember: A Conversation on the Legacies of Slavery,” to reflect on racial justice 50 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This and other events commemorating King’s assassination fell within the university’s “Let Freedom Ring!” Initiative, named after King’s 1968 speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The initiative opened dialogues around urgent problems requiring social action and explored Georgetown’s capacity for social change.

“The 50th anniversary marks a watershed moment that has sparked an outcry across not only our country but the world, and particularly Washington, D.C., and Georgetown,” says Andria Wisler, executive director of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service, who co-chaired the overall initiative with Patricia Grant, senior associate dean for the undergraduate program in the McDonough School of Business.

The roster of commemorative events wove together activism and art through teach-ins, music, and worship services, unarmedcivilian protection trainings, a virtual-reality immersive experience on mass incarceration and solitary confinement, book talks, film screenings, spoken-word poetry performances, and expert-panel discussions spanning the historical to the contemporary.

“If you are afraid of history, can you please account for the harm you are doing today?” said Marcia Chatelain, provost’s distinguished associate professor in the history department, at the April event. “For those people who are descended from the slaves of Georgetown, this is not a perfect puzzle piece. The pieces are torn and tattered. But they can still fit together. Georgetown is providing us a place to confront the hard truths of history.”

Maker Hub Celebrates International Successes in Innovation

Refugees have immediate needs of water, food, medicine, and shelter. But they also need something else to start their lives anew: a credit score. To help migrants and refugees build credit, a cross-disciplinary team of students organized by the Georgetown University Library’s Maker Hub—in partnership with many university programs and with the generous support of Molly (G’11) and Steve (F’79) Cashin (Parents’10, ’13)—dreamed up a system called Credit/Ability.

In March, Credit/Ability took first place in the Migrants and Refugees category at VHacks, a 36-hour hackathon competition held at the Vatican that leverages technological innovation to advance social inclusion, interfaith dialogue, and the welfare of migrant peoples and refugees. The team has since moved its operations to the WeWork Venture Lab near the White House—a space made possible by a $1.5-million gift from Ted Leonsis (C’77) and his family—to make the idea a reality.

The Maker Hub, a fulcrum of innovation at Georgetown, is buzzing with success stories of students and alumni improving the world through new inventions. When the hub launched a course extension, one student, Kate Bonner (C’20), who was struggling with a formidably complex physics concept—probability density-wave functions traversing through time and space—came looking to develop a better way to comprehend the science. Through the extension, she developed a virtual-reality program to help students learn particle-level physics through immersion and is now looking at ways to fold animation and coding into her career path in physics.

Recent Law alumnus Dalton Dwyer (F’11, L’18) used to daydream as he looked out his law classroom window at industrial-sized cranes working nearby. He realized that the cranes were not operating at peak safety and developed an idea to make construction work safer. He has since sold six of his devices, has orders for two more, and built them all at the Maker Hub.

When other professionals in the field came knocking, hoping to exchange their expertise for time with the hub’s equipment, the hub created the Maker Neighbor program. Through a supervised volunteer program based on the skill-sharing economy, the growing community has added artisans in printmaking, electronics, and programming.

Most recently, the Maker Hub has branched out into television. A Georgetown team earned a place in the televised Make48: World’s Fastest Invention Competition in October 2018. Team members are sworn to secrecy regarding the results of the competition until it airs live on PBS.

Despite all these successes in turning wild ideas into physical objects, Maker Hub manager Don Undeen says the hub’s greatest lesson is teaching students how to fail better.

“The point is to set up a situation where students are expected to fail, and through that experience begin to see failure as an opportunity to reflect, iterate, and grow.”

Learn more about the Maker Hub at http://library.georgetown.edu/ makerhub