Patrick F. Healy
Patrick F. Healy, born on February 27, 1834, in Georgia, was a notable figure in the history of American higher education and the first African American Jesuit priest. Healy's early life was marked by the complexities of his heritage; he was the son of an Irish immigrant father and an African American mother, whose union was not legally recognized due to the racial laws of the time. This background led Healy to be sent to Northern boarding schools, where he excelled academically and embraced his Roman Catholic faith.
After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross, Healy joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1864, becoming a trailblazer in the Jesuit community. Healy served as a professor and later became the first African American president of Georgetown University from 1873 to 1882. His presidency was significant for expanding the university's infrastructure, curriculum, and demographic diversity, as he actively sought to attract students from various backgrounds.
Healy's contributions to higher education were recognized posthumously, particularly in light of revelations about his racial identity, which challenged contemporary understandings of race and identity. He died on January 10, 1910, leaving a legacy as a pioneering leader in the Jesuit tradition and a catalyst for change in American education.
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Subject Terms
Patrick F. Healy
Religious leader and university president
- Born: February 27, 1834
- Birthplace: near Macon, Jones County, Georgia
- Died: January 10, 1910
- Place of death: Washington, D. C.
The first African American to be ordained as a Jesuit priest, earn a Ph.D., and become president of a predominantly white university, Healy initiated Georgetown University’s expansion from a regional to a national institution by modernizing its administration, curriculum, and campus facilities. He was subsequently known as Georgetown’s “second founder.”
Early Life
Born on February 27, 1834, near Macon, Georgia, Patrick Francis Healy (HEE-lee) was the third of ten children born to Irish immigrant Michael Morris Healy and African American Eliza (Clark) Healy, his common-law wife and slave. Because interracial marriage was illegal in the state of Georgia, Michael officially remained a bachelor while treating Eliza as his wife and their children as his legitimate heirs. To secure their future, he sent his sons, including Patrick, to Northern boarding schools—first to a Quaker elementary school in New York and afterward to the newly founded College of the Holy Cross, administered by the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuit order). After entering Holy Cross in 1844 at the age of ten, Healy never returned to Georgia or saw his mother again.
Far from their home and parents, the Healy brothers embraced the collegiate community’s Roman Catholic religion, itself the target of prejudice at the time. Academically successful and popular among their white peers, Healy’s brothers James and Alexander Sherwood went on to enter the Catholic diocesan priesthood, in which James rose to the rank of bishop.
Upon graduating from Holy Cross in 1850, Healy likewise decided on a religious vocation, in his case in the Jesuit priesthood. With the support of his mentor, Father George Fenwick, Healy entered the novitiate in Frederick, Maryland, where he took his initial vows in 1852. After a year of study in Philadelphia, in 1853 he returned to Holy Cross College as a teacher. In 1858, the Society of Jesus sent him to the University of Louvain in Belgium for graduate work. Healy was ordained in 1864, thereby becoming the Jesuits’ first African American priest; in 1866, he earned his doctorate in theology, likewise becoming the first African American to hold a Ph.D.
Life’s Work
Light-skinned and European in appearance, Healy—unlike some of his siblings—could “pass” for white but nevertheless confronted obstacles because of what he delicately termed the “irregularities” of his racial and familial background. Catholic canon law technically forbade the priestly ordination of illegitimate sons, for example. However, the Jesuit priests presented a case for his admission and accepted him into their community. In return, Healy’s personal letters expressed intense gratitude and commitment to the Catholic institutions that had overlooked his family’s situation.
After one year of parish work, Healy began teaching at Georgetown University in 1866 and was promoted to prefect of studies in 1869. Upon the death of Georgetown’s president on May 23, 1873, its board of trustees appointed Healy to the vacant post, first temporarily and later permanently. At age thirty-nine, Healy had become the first African American president of a predominantly white university.
As Georgetown’s president from 1873 to 1882, Healy initiated the university’s expansion from a regional institution to a major national university. Finding the university’s physical facilities inadequate to his vision, Healy launched a reconstruction of the Georgetown campus that began in 1877 and, although largely completed by 1881, continued until 1889. To fund this massive project, in 1878-1879 he conducted the university’s first major fund-raising campaign, traveling across the United States to personally solicit alumni donations. As a result of his efforts, Georgetown gained an endowment of sixty thousand dollars—an amount that helped the school immensely but disappointed Healy, who thought it was too modest.
During his presidency, Healy also restructured Georgetown’s law and medical schools, strengthening their relationship to the university as a whole, elevating standards of admission and student performance, and expanding their curricula. To modernize the undergraduate program, he introduced new science courses and, in 1875, a bachelor of science degree. Significantly, Healy also used financial aid incentives to attract middle-class Northern students to Georgetown, thereby introducing greater geographic and economic diversity into its previously Southern and upper-class student body.
In 1882, ill health led Healy to resign as Georgetown’s president, after which he traveled with his brothers James and Michael. After a brief residence at St. Ignatius College Preparatory (part of what is now the University of San Francisco), he served at a parish in Providence, Rhode Island, and later at churches in New York City and Philadelphia. Healy spent his final years quietly attending to the sacramental needs of his parishioners. He died on January 10, 1910, and was buried at Georgetown University.
Significance
Celebrated as Georgetown’s “second founder,” Healy planned and implemented changes to the university’s administration, curriculum, finances, and campus that made possible its transition from a regional school to a nationally respected institution. During the 1950’s, historian Albert Foley uncovered evidence confirming that Healy was the child of an African American slave, a fact then unknown even to the Healy family’s descendants. Newly recognized as the first African American Jesuit priest, Ph.D., and president of a majority-white institution of higher education, Healy directed scholarly attention to the practice of “passing” and the fluidity of racial categories.
Bibliography
Curran, Robert Emmett. From Academy to University, 1789-1889. Vol. 1 in The Bicentennial History of Georgetown University. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1993. Curran’s institutional history of Georgetown places Healy’s presidency in the broader context of Catholic educational expansion and analyzes his role in the university’s development.
Foley, Albert S. Dream of an Outcaste: Patrick F. Healy—The Story of the Slaveborn Georgian Who Became the Second Founder of America’s Great Catholic University, Georgetown. Reprint. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Portals Press, 1989. This standard biography of Healy was among the first to document his African American background, giving a new dimension to his academic and administrative achievements.
O’Toole, James M. Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Examining the lives of Michael and Eliza Healy’s nine surviving children, this scholarly work argues that racial categories are fluid and subjective.