Patrick Francis Healy - Biography

Biography

Patrick, as he was known, was born into slavery in Macon, Georgia, to the Irish-American plantation owner Michael Healy and his bi-racial slave Mary Eliza. Because of the law of slavery that children took the status of the mother, by the principle of partus sequitur ventrum, Patrick and his siblings were legally considered slaves, although they were three-quarters or more European in ancestry.

Patrick was the third son of Mary Eliza and Michael Morris Healy, who had joined in a common-law marriage in 1829. After Patrick's father Michael bought his mother Mary Eliza, he fell in love with her and made her his common-law wife. The law prohibited their marriage, but they lived together all their lives. Discriminatory laws in Georgia prohibited the education of slaves and required legislative approval for their manumission, so Michael Healy arranged for all his children to leave Georgia and move to the North to obtain their educations and have opportunities in their lives. They were raised as Irish Catholics. Patrick's brothers and sisters were nearly all educated in Catholic schools and colleges, and they also achieved notable firsts for Americans of mixed-race ancestry during the second half of the 19th century, making the Healy family of Georgia a notable one.

Healy sent his older sons first to a Quaker school in Flushing, New York. Despite the Quakers' emphasis on equality, Patrick met some discrimination during his grade school years, chiefly because his father owned slaves, which the Quakers considered unforgivable. As an Irish Catholic, he also met some resistance in the school. When Michael Healy heard of a new Jesuit college, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, he sent his four oldest sons, including Patrick, to study there in 1844. (It had high school-level classes as well.) They were joined at Holy Cross by their younger brother Michael in 1849.

Following Patrick's graduation in 1850, he entered the Jesuit order and continued his studies. The order sent him to Europe to study in 1858, as his mixed-race ancestry had become an issue in the United States, where tensions were rising over slavery. He attended the University of Leuven in Belgium, earning his doctorate, becoming the first American of openly acknowledged part-African descent to do so. During this period he was also ordained to the priesthood on September 3, 1864.

In 1866 Healy returned to the United States and taught philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Eight years later in 1874, he was selected as its twenty-ninth president.