Georgetown University. Look at that building — Healy Hall. Three hundred and twelve feet long. A clock tower two hundred feet tall. Named after the man who built it and nearly killed himself doing it.
Patrick Francis Healy became president of Georgetown in eighteen seventy-three. He was the son of an Irish immigrant planter in Georgia and an enslaved woman named Eliza Clark. Under Georgia law, his father couldn't marry his mother. Couldn't free his children. Technically, Michael Healy owned his own wife and kids.
So he sent them north.
Patrick went to a Quaker school in New York, then to Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He entered at age ten. He never went back to Georgia. He never saw his mother again. He was light-skinned enough that he was — in the language of the time — "widely accepted as white." He earned a doctorate at Louvain in Belgium — the first Black American to earn a doctoral degree — and was ordained as a Jesuit priest.
Then he came back to Georgetown and transformed it.
Before Healy, only seniors could take science classes. He rewrote the curriculum. Rebuilt the medical school. Dissolved the governing board, replaced the faculty, required entrance exams for the first time. He doubled the campus. And he commissioned this building. The budget was a hundred thousand dollars. The final cost was over four hundred thousand. It broke his health. He left the university
