Georgetown University in Washington apologized for its slave-owning past and formally apologized and said it would help descendants of those slaves by making it easier for them to attend the university Georgetown University once owned slaves and sold 272 of them in 1838 for $115,00 ($3.3 million today) in order to pay off its debts. 
Georgetown President John DiGioia however did not agree with a recommendation from a university panel that the university provide free tuition to those descendants who will be admitted. 
Georgetown is one of the few US universities who were once slave owners in pre-Civil War America--such as Harvard, Brown, and Princeton--to deal with the matter. Nevertheless Georgetown has been criticized for not going far enough by offering scholarships to the descendants. 
As DiGioia was announcing details of the university's offer on Friday in a building built by slaves, some of their descendants, saying they weren't included, disrupted the event to rush to the stage. 
They read a statement on behalf of more than 300 descendants: "Our attitude is that all of this evolved from the pain and suffering of the 272 people we talked about. If reconciliation is gonna take place as it has to, it needs to start at home and you don't start reconciling by alienating."  As part of the reconciliation, the Roman Catholic university will start an institute to study the enslavement of Africans in the United States and will create a new Georgetown department of African American studies. 
Two buildings on campus will also changed their names from slave-owning university presidents to some of the slaves they sold. One will be named Issac, a slave mentioned in the document of the slave sale. 
According to the university study of the sale, the slaves were shipped from the school's Jesuit plantations in Maryland to the state of Louisiana, "where they labored under dreadful conditions," and families were broken up. 
How America deals with slavery, which was abolished in 1865, is still a controversial matter more than 150 years later, with some African American groups calling for economic reparations to be paid, an idea the government has so far resisted. 
Those who want reparations argue that many wealthy American individuals, landowners, companies and universities became rich by inheriting their slave-owning ancestor's wealth and should restore some of it as unpaid wages to the descendants of slaves.