
The 272
The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
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Narrated by:
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Karen Murray
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By:
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Rachel L. Swarns
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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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Story
By a prize-winning young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race, Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
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Love
- By Brie on 02-11-25
By: KB Brookins
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The Devil's Half Acre
- The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail
- By: Kristen Green
- Narrated by: Deanna Anthony
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
New York Times best-selling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre”. When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre”, a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams.
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Preachy
- By Elizabeth Combs on 09-13-22
By: Kristen Green
Details!
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This story is well worth your time. The details and writing make the families come alive. The Jesuits should be ashamed. The families are classy and great people
Excellent book
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very interesting
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Hard, but absolutely worthwhile.
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Not surprising…
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The scholarship and attention to detail.
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I am blown away....
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Love, love, the extensive history accounts. It's a stack of receipts so high there is NO WAY one can remain "sleep". The case for #WOKE
Thanks for the Journey "Back to the Future"
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This is an engaging, informative read from the perspective of the enslaved families that were destroyed and sold off to save a Jesuit school.
The narration by Karen Murray is lovely; I could listen to her all day.
Well Done
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Jesuit accountability
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