Thursday, February 29
The 2024 Russo Lecture | 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
McNally Amphitheater
Rachel Swarns is a journalist, scholar, and Black Catholic from Staten Island whose groundbreaking reporting and research illuminates the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in America, which relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and help fuel its expansion.
The article she first wrote for The New York Times in 2016—about the prominent Jesuit priests who sold 272 people to save Georgetown University from bankruptcy—would become the seed of her new book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. Her work has helped spark the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America—and in the Catholic Church. Click here to learn more and register.