[Editor's Note: This post was originally published last year.]

Thanksgiving dinners and football may be proud American traditions, but nowadays, they don’t figure very heavily into life at Georgetown. That wasn’t always the case. Students used to celebrate Thanksgiving Day all together on campus (forget skipping your Wednesday classes) and Georgetown University used to annually host the Washington Thanksgiving Game—the most popular football game in town.

Beginning in the 1850s, Georgetown began to throw a yearly Thanksgiving Day feast for its students, which Georgetown’s Southern students referred to disparagingly as “Yankee Christmas.” The turkey dinner, Robert Curran writes in The Bicentennial History of Georgetown University, took place after a High Mass and came “with all the trimmings, including pumpkin pie.”

By the 1880s, a concert that included performances by the Georgetown Banjo Club, Mandolin Club, and Glee Club rounded out the night.

Georgetown began to host the annual football game by the turn of the century, and at the time, it was the place to be in Washington on Thanksgiving Day. Attendance was regularly in the thousands. It was a time when college football was a brutal affair and it wasn’t uncommon for players to incur injuries that resulted in death.

That was the case for a Georgetown halfback, George Bahen, in 1894, when he was paralyzed in a game against the local Columbia Athletic Club.

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Matt Sheptuck (COL ’10) is an American Studies major writing his senior thesis, which explores how Georgetown University has perceived Jesuit Father Patrick Healy’s racial identity over the years. In his research Sheptuck found that Healy, whom many of us know as the first African-American President of Georgetown and one of the first black presidents of any major American university, was understood as white for much of the University’s history, until beginning in the 1960s, when Georgetown began to “market” Healy as black.

Sheptuck says he isn’t “overtly condemnatory” of the University’s history, knowing that how they framed Healy was a product of the times. But he proposes that going forward, Georgetown doesn’t need to relegate Healy’s racial identity to the “one-dimensional” white or black designation, and should present him as the complex man he was. He also thinks Georgetown needs to look closely at its relationship with race in America in the past. Intrigued by his research, Vox caught up with Sheptuck on Tuesday to learn more.

Vox Populi: So tell me a little about your thesis.

Matt Sheptuck: I’m looking at how the University’s changing racial conceptualization of Patrick Healy’s identity fit in relation to how the University thought about race in general. And what I’ve found in my research about Healy, who was president from 1874 – 1882, is two main periods from the 1880s, when Healy resigned as president, up to the present, in which the University talked about his racial identity differently.

From the 1880s to the 1950s … the University failed to try to mention Patrick Healy’s African-American identity or birth to a slave mother at all in that period.

VP: Let’s back up a little. What is known about Healy’s heritage?

MS: Certainly. Patrick Healy was born to a slave mother of part African and part European ancestry. She probably had very little African ancestry, but according to the ‘one drop rule’ of the times, Patrick was black. His father was an Irish immigrant …. But since being a slave was [based on one's] mother, according to the confines of American society at the time, Healy was [legally] classified as a black and a slave.

Patrick Healy never lived the life of a slave. None of [Michael Healy's] children did. They were all raised as free. Healy entered the Jesuits in 1850, and this became sort of symbolic of his passing as a white.

(Michael Healy purchased Patrick’s mother as a slave before marrying her. Read more on Patrick Healy’s parents)

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The 210th 192nd Georgetown College Commencement ceremony

Newly minted College grads were probably congratulated a few dozen times on being the 210th graduating class. It’s a nice sentiment, but, unfortunately, it’s not factually accurate. The problem is that the University’s been miscounting the number of graduating classes for at least 77 years.

Georgetown history buff Matt Stoller (COL ’08) caught onto the fact that Commencements used to be dated from 1817, the year Georgetown first awarded degrees under the power granted to it by Congress in 1815. At some point, though, the dating of Commencement was set back to 1799, the year the first college course was established, making this year the 210th Commencement.

Stoller asked about the inconsistency and his inquiry made it all the way up to John Glavin, Director of the Gervase Programs, and John Q. Pierce, the University Registrar. Glavin verified Stoller’s guess that this year was the 192nd—not the 210th—Commencement.

Check out Glavin’s response and an estimate of when the error was made, after the jump!

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