Patrick Francis Healy

Patrick Francis Healy (February 27, 1834 – January 10, 1910) was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its "second founder". The university's flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was widely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to earn a PhD, as well as the first to enter the Jesuit order and to become the president of a predominantly White university.

Healy was born in Georgia to a family that produced many Catholic leaders. His mother was one-eighth Black and his father was a White Irish emigrant. Under Georgia law, Healy's father technically owned his wife and children as slaves. Healy and his siblings were sent north by their father to be educated at the College of the Holy Cross, and Healy continued his higher education in Belgium at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1864. He returned to America and started as the chair of philosophy at Georgetown University.

Healy was elected president of Georgetown University in 1873 and appointed rector the following year. Seeking to transform the institution into a modern university, he oversaw a period of extensive growth. He increased the prominence of the sciences, raised the standards of the School of Medicine, and oversaw a rapid expansion of the Law School. He also constructed a grand building that became known as Healy Hall, which left the university in substantial debt. In 1882, he went to live with his brother, James, the Bishop of Portland, Maine, and the two traveled extensively throughout Europe. Afterwards, Healy returned to pastoral work in Rhode Island and New York City, before returning to Georgetown, where he died.

Early life

Healy was born on February 27, 1834, in a log cabin in Macon, Georgia. Patrick's father, Michael Morris Healy, had emigrated from Ireland to the United States, through Canada, in 1818. one of whom was Patrick's mother, Mary Eliza Smith.Efn|name=clark|Eliza was also documented as having the surname Clark, rather than Smith. One of her parents had fled Saint-Domingue for the United States in the 1790s, during the Haitian Revolution.

Patrick was the third of 10 siblings, eight of whom would survive into adulthood. Two of his brothers would become priests; one of them, James Augustine Healy, would become the Bishop of Portland, Maine, Patrick and all of his siblings were born as slaves, as by the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, they inherited the legal status of their mother. Michael Healy was prevented by Georgia law from manumitting his wife or children, which could be done only by an act of the Georgia General Assembly in exceptional circumstances. Wishing to remove them from their conditions of slavery in Georgia, Healy was at first unable to find a school in the North that would accept his children, which enrolled both Black and White students, including the three eldest Healy sons. He placed first in his class at the college, as his brother James had before him. Healy and his brothers had been taken under the tutelage of John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the Bishop of Boston. After graduating, Healy entered the Society of Jesus on September 17, 1850, and proceeded to the novitiate in Frederick, Maryland.

After two years of study, Healy professed his first vows, and was sent to teach at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia. In 1853, he was transferred back to the College of the Holy Cross. While teaching there, he found that some students who knew his brothers learned of his racial background and made disparaging comments about him in secret.

In 1858, Healy went to Georgetown University, where he studied philosophy and theology. He also became fluent in Latin, French, Italian, and German. On July 26, 1865, he received a PhD in philosophy, making him the first Black American ever to earn a PhD.

Racial identity for presiding over a period of unprecedented growth in the university's history. In 1975, Patrick F. Healy Middle School in East Orange, New Jersey opened.