‘Not nameless’: Bringing the lives of those enslaved to light

As with many of us, Robin Proudie’s daily routine includes checking her mailbox and sifting through the usual assortment of bills, advertising circulars, and requests from charitable organizations to find that rare missive that might be of special interest. She found one on a July morning in 2019. Ms. Proudie, who has since retired from a federal government position, was unfamiliar with the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation Project, but she was familiar with the city from which the letter came – St. Louis – her childhood hometown. 

Once inside her Maryland home, she opened the envelope and read: 

I write today with information about people we believe to be your ancestors. Through the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation [SHMR] Project, we are trying to learn more about the lives of the people who were held in slavery by the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, including your ancestors, in order to tell their stories and connect with their descendants in a meaningful way. ...

Ms. Proudie was stunned by the news from the SHMR Project, initiated by the Jesuits’ USA Central and Southern Province and Saint Louis University. 

“From my own research, I already knew that I was a direct descendant of an enslaved woman, Henrietta Mills; she was my great-grandmother three times removed,” says Ms. Proudie, who has long been interested in her family’s genealogy. “What I didn’t know was who had enslaved her: the Society of Jesus.”

Ms. Proudie cried. 

“I knew the significance of this letter,” she remembers. “I knew what it would mean to our family.”

The Rev. Gregory Holley, also a descendant of Mills, experienced what he describes as shock and awe when he received his letter from SHMR. “You mean a Catholic school is saying that some of our ancestors were enslaved by them?” he recalls asking his wife. “I had to process that. ... You mean they got our history?”

Piecing together family ties

Within months, Mr. Holley, pastor of Grace Fellowship Church Center, and several other descendants of Mills were seated at a table at Saint Louis University with people from SHMR. Since 2016, the group’s researchers had been digging through Saint Louis University’s archives and other historical record sites. 

“One of the first records they found was some type of Communion certificate for [Mills],” says Ms. Proudie, who stayed abreast of what the researchers were sharing. “[Mills’] marriage record stated that she was owned by Saint Louis University, and her husband, Charles F. Chauvin, was the slave of a St. Louis woman. They got married in the upper colored chapel of St. Francis Xavier College Church on June 28, 1860.” 

Countless documents that few Black Americans get to see offered a glimpse into the lives of Ms. Proudie’s and Mr. Holley’s ancestors. They learned about Proteus Queen and Anny Hawkins Queen (Mills’ grandparents). Between 1823 and 1829, this couple and several others, along with some of their children, were forced to leave relatives and friends at the Jesuits’ White Marsh Plantation in Maryland. Betsy Queen, Mills’ mother, was 10 years old when she made the trek to St. Louis. 

The families lived together, while cooking, laundering, building structures, and cultivating the land for their enslavers. “They labored as slaves during the day and rented themselves out at night to earn money,” says Ms. Proudie. “My dad would have loved to have known all this. ... He was a history buff. ... When you know your history, it allows you to feel a sense of belonging. ... African Americans know our ancestors were slaves, but it’s difficult to know too much beyond that because you hit the 1870 brick wall.”

That brick wall is the fact that federal census records before 1870 didn’t identify enslaved persons individually. They were aggregated in the total number of enslaved people owned by an individual. That number was used for taxation purposes and the allotment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In some cases, slave owners listed enslaved persons by gender and age range. The Jesuits, however, kept detailed records of the people they enslaved. 

Finding cousins across the country

In 2021, Ms. Proudie connected with descendants of people who were enslaved by Jesuits in Maryland, where her ancestors had once lived. “You could say we’re cousins because we really are,” she says. 

Through the Maryland descendants, the St. Louis descendants were able to trace their lineage to Mary “Poppaw” Queen, their first ancestor to arrive on American shores in 1715. A woman of African and Ecuadorian heritage, Queen was an indentured servant when she came to Maryland from Ecuador. 

Descendant Imani Pope, a college student in St. Louis, has always taken pride in her family’s history. Her family passed down to her the achievements of several of her ancestors, including two of Henrietta and Charles Chauvin’s 10 children. Louis Chauvin was a pianist who, along with Scott Joplin, composed the ragtime song “Heliotrope Bouquet,” and Sylvester Chauvin was a team captain for the St. Louis Black Stockings, a Negro League baseball team. “It makes a difference every day because knowing about them makes me want to be honorable to my ancestors and what they fought for,” says Ms. Pope, Mills’ granddaughter five times removed. 

Yet, learning about family members from an earlier era also makes her angry, Ms. Pope reveals. “I can’t believe they treated my ancestors like that,” she says. “Yeah, I know it happened a long time ago, but it’s still around today.” 

One of the things still around that could be remedied is the racial wealth gap. “History, more than current choices, best explains the racial wealth gap today,” writes Ray Boshara, senior adviser at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. 

White Americans, he explains, were included in “major wealth-building policies such as the [1862] Homestead Act (which granted 160 acres of land, mostly west of the Mississippi River, to families willing to work it); the GI Bill of 1944 (which helped returning soldiers go to college, start a business, or buy a home); and robust 20th-century policies to promote homeownership. Black Americans, though, were largely excluded from those policies,” he writes.

Giving descendants their due

For Mr. Holley, financial compensation has a place in reparative justice conversations. Slavery, as he sees it, was a for-profit business that economically empowered some people at the expense of others. “Now people just want to talk about scholarships for kids and stipends for our elderly,” he says, “but back then, a lot of people were making a lot of money. Some people didn’t get any. I’d like to see us get some of that fruit.”

Nonfinancial recognition matters, too. 

In March of this year, Ms. Proudie and other descendants of the people enslaved at Saint Louis University finalized the formation of the nonprofit organization Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved. Their purpose is to honor and preserve the history of their ancestors and help repair the historical harms caused by their enslavement.

“We want our ancestors to be acknowledged for their contributions to the founding of Saint Louis University and the expansion of the Jesuits’ presence in the Midwest,” says Ms. Proudie, the founder and executive director of DSLUE. 

“They labored without compensation to build the university,” she continues. “We’re not saying we want to take any names off any buildings, but we are saying that we’d like to see the names of some of our ancestors go up. They are part of the university’s history. ... We are living testaments ... [that] they were here and are not nameless.”

Ms. Proudie says acknowledgment should include “a memorial on the campus that honors our ancestors; and for their descendants – educational, business, and financial literacy opportunities; and health care services and facilities for our elderly descendants.” 

In 2021, Ms. Proudie learned of a residential facility being built on the university’s campus for Jesuit faculty. “What caught my attention in the news story was when it said that there’s been ‘a Jesuit community at St. Louis University since 1829. And so this is just an opportunity for us, both the university and for the Society of Jesus to assert that the Jesuit community is part of the fabric of the university,’” says Ms. Proudie. 

“That’s fine,” she continues, “but our ancestors were in this community just as long as the Jesuits have been, and they were the ones doing the heavy lifting. The Jesuits didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they pulled themselves up by our ancestors’ bootstraps.” 

An unanswered appeal

Among the many revelatory documents that have been shared with the St. Louis descendants is a letter kept at the Georgetown Slavery Archive. It was written in 1833 by Thomas Brown, a member of one of the first families, along with Ms. Proudie’s ancestors, to move to St. Louis from Maryland between 1823 and 1829. An enslaved man, he labored for Jesuits in Maryland and at Saint Louis University for nearly 38 years. His letter to the Jesuits in Maryland told of his mistreatment and that of his wife, Molly. 

Advanced in age, the couple were living in a “rotten logg house” and would soon find themselves moving into “the loft of one of the outhouses.” Concerned about their health and safety, Mr. Brown offered to buy their way out of slavery. He enclosed $50 (approximately $1,800 in today’s dollars) in the letter and promised to pay another $50 when he could. 

To date, no response to that letter has been found. One can only hope that, 190 years ago, someone opened that letter, realized its significance, wept, and then rectified a long-standing injustice.

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.