Today is the first day of 2013. This is an anniversary year that we’ve been talking about, and anticipating, for a long time here at the Tracing Center.

In 2013, we will celebrate the 50th anniversaries of major civil rights era milestones, including the March on Washington and Dr. King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

Over the coming year, the nation will also mark the 150th anniversaries of the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as well as the New York City Draft Riots (the violence of which was aimed mostly at the city’s free black population) and a host of other Civil War battles and dates.

The anniversaries of the Civil War and the civil rights movement are directly connected, as they represent two different, but closely related, stages in our society’s slow process of reckoning with its centuries-long embrace of slavery and racism. Exploring these anniversary dates, their connections, and their broader significance for racial healing and justice will constitute much of the Tracing Center’s work in the years 2013-2015.

Today, however, marks the 150th anniversary of perhaps the greatest of all of these events: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The Emancipation Proclamation marked a turning point in the history of enslavement in the United States, and generated momentum which, after much struggle, would lead to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and the abolition of slavery in this country. The Proclamation was also a political document: it was carefully designed to be limited in its effect, exempting those enslaved in Union states or in areas under Union military control, and aimed mostly at those held as property by the enemy. Even so, Lincoln was taking a calculated political risk in issuing the proclamation: his own advisers were opposed to the measure, many Union soldiers in the field were aghast to learn that they were now fighting for the freedom of southern slaves, and as the political maneuverings depicted in Steven Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln, would prove, a majority of the Union public was still firmly opposed to emancipation.

Thus this anniversary is not only an occasion for celebrating freedom, but also for somber reflection on how much the entire nation was supportive of slavery and how little would actually change as a result of the Civil War. The widespread public opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation, even in the northern and other “free” states of the Union, goes a long way towards explaining why emancipation was paired not with some rudimentary form of compensation, but instead with indifference, with other forms of forced labor, and with discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices throughout the nation for another 100 years.

In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation illustrates, as well as any other single event, why it is that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the civil rights moment are so intimately connected—why the civil rights movement is, in a broad sense, merely another chapter in a story that began with abolitionism and only reached a decisive middle with the coming of the Civil War.

Here is how King began his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in the summer of 1963:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

King saw that the reluctance of the white citizens of this country, north and south, east and west, to emancipate 4 million slaves at the time of the Civil War led to a racial stalemate afterwards, in which freedom from bondage was not matched by liberty in any meaningful sense. He understood that the Union decided it had taken a moral stand in abolishing slavery, and thus washed its hands of any further responsibility for its role in two centuries of slavery. He realized that freeing slaves with no support whatsoever, and then imposing the most onerous restrictions on education, employment, and housing through generations of segregation and discrimination, had led to an enduring racial prejudice and inequality so crippling that it scarcely amounted to freedom in any meaningful sense.

In 2013, we must ask of ourselves as a nation, what progress have we made over the course of another 50 years since the civil rights era? In what ways have we made progress towards realizing King’s dream of an end to racial prejudice and inequality, and in what ways does his dream remain unfulfilled?

In other words, what remains today of the unfinished business of Civil War and civil rights?

I’m one of the jaded ones now.

So it surprised me not to find Fernando Wood rearing his pro-slavery head again, this time as a Democratic Congressman from New York. Here he was on the big screen in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, showing up in 1865 as a vocal opponent in Congress to the passage of the 13th amendment. I knew of him from four years earlier, when in 1861, as mayor of New York City, on the heels of South Carolina’s secession, he proposed that the city should also secede from the Union. He was well aware that New York’s economy was inextricably tied to slavery.

Once you know about the North’s complicity in slavery and racism you see the through-line almost everywhere you look. The winter-spring of 1865 that is the subject of Lincoln thus becomes just one more chapter.

In the popular, white, non-southern imagination, we put Lincoln on a pedestal, but we subconsciously put ourselves on that pedestal too, because he is our symbol of northern determination to end slavery. That was us. The good guys.

But Spielberg, along with screenwriter Tony Kushner and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book the film is largely drawn from, confront us with a drama that is not North vs. South. Congress, after all, had no representatives from southern states at that time; the latter had their own Confederate States of America. Rather, we see unfolding with great intensity, the efforts of President Lincoln to secure enough Republican and Democratic votes from Union states to pass the 13th amendment, and it is far from clear that Northern white men care to end slavery as much as they care to end the war. We see that Thaddeus Stephens and the Radical Republicans are in the minority in their belief that blacks and whites are fundamentally equal—that all are created equal. Even the narrower concept that black Americans should be seen as “equal before the law” is well outside the mainstream and Lincoln knows it. So he heroically exerts all his political and moral will, skill and capital to generate passage, and succeeds only within a hair’s breadth.

I’m jaded now, because this is where my attention has been for more than a decade—northern anti-heroism. But in seeing this powerful film, I couldn’t help think of how disillusioning some of these revelations would be for many Americans, especially white, non-southern Americans. I found my mind pulling me back to some of the moments in the education of this white woman that were most shattering and indelible. Those moments remind me of how deeply I was raised in one storyline and what a big deal it was to be confronted with good reason to rethink it at its core.

Here is one indelible moment. The occasion was during a research fellowship for filmmakers and artists at the American Antiquarian Society in 2000. I was digging into archival documents during the early development stage of Traces of the Trade. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that there had been slavery and slave trading in the North.

It seemed a bit of a digression, but someone suggested I look at AAS’s collection of minstrel show sheet music. So here they were now in my white-gloved hands in a quiet reading room. I was aghast. The racist stereotypes—whether of the happy slave, the buffoon, the step-and-fetch-it—that were their stock and trade (pun intended), were not just produced and consumed as entertainment in the South, but were coming to a large degree out of cities like New York. I learned that writers, performers, publishers of minstrel shows were thriving in the North and relied on northern audiences as much as southern. And this was during the 1840s, 50s, 60s and beyond.

So in 2000 this was the latest shock to my innocent notions. Here’s how the revelation went: “Oh my god! Even after slavery and the slave trade were illegal in the North, there was pervasive racism!” It seems so obvious and predictable to me now. Black Americans would have reason to scoff at my naiveté, but I remember the disbelief, the heartbreak, the feeling that I’d been fooled again. Weren’t we the good guys? If we had seen reason to abolish slavery in northern states, wasn’t it because we believed in freedom and equality for black Americans?

Not so—at least not as far as the majority went.

So here we are in the spring of 1865 with the through-line. Northern lawmakers were not clamoring to bring a full-scale end to slavery. Even those who backed the amendment didn’t necessarily believe in equality of the races. President Lincoln should not have had to fight so hard for what we now see so easily was the right thing to do. Black abolitionists (who are sadly off-screen in this film) should not have had to fight so hard.

The Anti-Racism Committee, chaired by the Rev. John Kitagawa, was responding to Resolution A-143 from the 2009 General Convention, which calls on dioceses to learn about the historic complicity of the Church in slavery and racial discrimination. Resolution A-143, in turn, followed similar resolutions at the 2006 General Convention which were adopted following screenings of a rough cut of Traces of the Trade and pleas from DeWolf family members appearing in the film. Scenes from the debate and adoption of these resolutions appear towards the end of the film.

For information about obtaining the film, arranging for facilitated conversations, or inquiring about our other programs on slavery, race, and privilege, please see the Tracing Center’s programs and screenings page.

Katrina is executive director of the Tracing Center, and James blogs at The Living Consequences.

Traces of the Trade was directed by Katrina Browne, with co-directors Alla Kovgan and Jude Ray.

Professor Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr. has an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times in which he takes on the issue of reparations for slavery.

Gates will, no doubt, attract enough controversy for his general approach to the issue. He is convinced that our society must address the issue of reparations, and that we must reach a “just and lasting agreement,” which he believes will have to be “a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime.”

Remarks like these will land any public intellectual in the U.S. in hot water these days. Just consider the case of Goodwin Liu, whose mild remarks related to reparations at one of our events in 2008 became a central issue in his nomination by President Obama for a seat on the Ninth Circuit.

However, this essay is most notable for telling difficult truths about the central role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and thus about the shared culpability of people of different races in the resulting history of slavery.

What is unusual about this essay is not the historical facts which Gates relates about Africa’s role in the slave trade, or even the interpretation which he gives them. These are commonplace observations in the study of the slave trade, and are necessary to the most basic understanding of that historical phenomenon and its legacy today.

This essay is noteworthy because someone of Gates’ stature is telling these hard truths, and insisting that they are necessary to assessing responsibility for the past and for healing these historical wounds today.

Slavery was not about race

When I address audiences on the history and legacy of slavery, I will often say that slavery and the slave trade were never about race. Having offered that hopefully surprising statement, I will explain that while the concept of race gradually became important in justifying and perpetuating slavery in the United States, race played essentially no part in establishing the transatlantic slave trade or in bringing millions of Africans to the Americas.

This argument has two parts: first, that Europeans (and Americans) did not engage in the slave trade out of any sense that it was particularly appropriate to enslave black people, and second, that Africans were full partners in the slave trade, without any sense on their part, either, that race was relevant to what they were doing.

Gates addresses the second part of this argument, summing up by saying that “white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, [were] complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.”

The historical truth about Africa and the slave trade

When we visited slave forts along the African coast in modern-day Ghana to film Traces of the Trade, we were walking in the footsteps of my ancestor, James DeWolf, and the other members of the DeWolf family who purchased more than 12,000 Africans in such slave forts.

As Gates asks, “How did slaves make it to these coastal forts?”

The reality is that nearly all who were sent across the Atlantic in chains were enslaved by Africans.

Gates cites two leading historians of the slave trade, John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University, for the proposition that roughly 90% of the slaves sent across the Middle Passage were enslaved by African traders and then sold to Europeans along the coast. Other leading scholars believe that the percentage is actually much higher, that only at the margins were any Africans enslaved directly by Europeans.

The leading role of Africans in the slave trade was a necessary one. The slave trade took place before Europeans colonized the continent of Africa, and white traders exercised little influence beyond their coastal trading posts. Only African societies could extract slaves from the interior of the continent, primarily by taking captives in wars or kidnapping in raids.

The vital role of Africans in the slave trade made for a highly profitable business for many African societies, lining the pockets of local rulers and of the many ordinary people who became involved in the trade. As Professor Gates notes, slaves were the primary export of many kingdoms in western and central Africa, including the Asante in Ghana, Dahomey in Benin, Ndongo in Angola, and Kongo in the modern Congo.

These facts dispel the myths that Africans were only tangentially involved in the slave trade, or that African societies were coerced into participation, or that the slave trade left a legacy of demographic or economic harm to those societies which participated in it.

Another myth which I often hear is that Africans participating in the slave trade had no idea what slavery meant in the Americas. The implication is that they were less culpable because they assumed slavery would be far more benign for the victims than it actually was. Gates outlines the historical evidence against this myth, too, noting that many African elites, including ambassadors and the children of African royalty, actually visited the Americas, and even did so on slave ships. Meanwhile, enslaved Africans would occasionally be freed and return to their homes in Africa, while later on, thousands of freed slaves returned to settle in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

As Gates puts it, “under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.”

Why this truth is so hard to talk about

I said above that what is noteworthy about this essay isn’t the history that Gates recounts, but that someone of his stature is telling this truth, and putting it front-and-center in the discussion about reparations for slavery.

Those of us who are descended from the DeWolf slave traders, and who speak out in Traces of the Trade about the dominant role of the northern United States in slavery and the slave trade, are generally quite well-received by those who want to push forward the dialogue about reparations, or the legacy of slavery generally. In other words, those who care about this issue tend to embrace the message that the complicity of (white) Americans in slavery and the slave trade was broader and deeper than has been generally acknowledged, that this complicity extended to the northern states and to most ordinary citizens.

Most people who are in conversation about the legacy of slavery in the United States are, however, deeply reluctant to acknowledge the role of Africans in the slave trade. As Gates describes it,

Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

Why is this? One problem for many African Americans, in particular, is that it is always difficult to acknowledge that one’s own people were complicit in wrongdoing. We see this again and again in our work, as people freely acknowledge the horrors of the DeWolf slave trade, but are reluctant to embrace the truth that their own northern ancestors were probably involved in the slave trade, as well. Or people will embrace this truth, but reject that their own ancestors were complicit in slavery, as well, whether because they had settled in the midwest or the west during slavery, or came to this country as immigrants following the end of slavery in 1865.

Another reason why many black activists, and their white and non-white allies, are often reluctant to acknowledge the African role in the slave trade is that this reality explodes the myth that the enslavement of Africans occurred because of racism. While history amply demonstrates that this belief is false, the myth lives on because it is a convenient way of understanding the past and of explaining the truth that the burden of these historical events and their legacy has fallen to black people to bear.

Likewise, it is convenient to believe that the blame for slavery can be allotted on the basis of race. This mythology not only allows for the demonization of white people historically, but it provides ammunition for claims of reparations for slavery.

The argument for reparations is generally framed as a claim that black people continue to bear considerable disadvantages as a result of slavery, and that white people are responsible for correcting that situation. The first part of the argument is hard to refute, but the second part is much more problematic. Why should those who played no part in the history of slavery be held accountable for it? The easy answer, but one which is historically false, is to claim that it was white people perpetrated slavery and must now be held accountable for it.

(There are other ways to make the case for reparations, which is how Gates can emphasize this history and still suggest that reparations is an issue that cannot simply be dismissed. One approach, for instance, is to point out that white people today still disproportionately enjoy the benefits of the history of slavery. Another response would be that society as a whole, and not white people per se, are responsible for correcting an historic injustice perpetrated by this society.)

How conservatives misuse this history to silence the conversation

A final reason why many people are profoundly reluctant to talk about the African role in slavery is that this history is commonly abused by those who would shut off all discussion of the history and legacy of slavery in our society. I will refer to these people here as conservatives for simplicity, although I’m talking specifically about those who, regardless of their politics in other respects, argue that the history of slavery no longer has any effect on our society and that we should simply stop talking about it.

Their reasoning is simple: if African societies participated in the slave trade, then there is no reason to hold our society accountable for its own role. If black people participated in the slave trade, then there is no reason for white people to pay attention to this history today.

This is, of course, a misuse of history. The fact that various societies, and people of various races, participated in the slave trade says nothing about who must grapple with this history, and its legacy, today. Indeed, most people would reject out of hand the notion that one person, group, or nation may avoid dealing with an historical legacy because others have inherited that legacy, as well, or have not yet owned up to their own inheritance. In fact, however, many African leaders and nations have been addressing their historical responsibility for the slave trade in recent years, acknowledging responsibility and asking for forgiveness.

The importance of telling this history

Why must we openly acknowledge and engage this history, despite the risk that doing so will be difficult and that others may seize on these facts for their own purposes?

On one level, this is a strategic issue. As long as we do not include the complicity of Africans in how we tell the story of slavery and the slave trade, those who would silence this conversation can continue to play “gotcha” by unveiling that aspect of the story, as if it were a dramatic surprise and an unexpected argument which undermines the entire discussion.

More broadly, I believe firmly that the starting point for addressing an historical legacy must be to tell the truth, and the entire truth, at that.

In the case of slavery in particular, we have long suffered in the U.S. from a collective national amnesia about certain key aspects of this history. The path to a comprehensive national dialogue, to healing in whatever form, and to moving forward together must lie in encouraging the telling of the whole truth. Deliberately obscuring inconvenient aspects of this truth will only hinder this effort and aid those who would keep other other important facts buried forever.

We also need to learn important truths about human nature from the long, terrible history of Atlantic slavery. In particular, why have we chosen to enslave others so often in our history? How is it that we are able to do so, and to justify what we do to ourselves? We can’t explore these questions if we aren’t open and honest about who participated in slavery, as well as how and why they did so.

I’ve also suggested that we have dramatically overstated the role of race in the history of slavery, as well as in our response to this history today. In the end, race did play a vital role in this history: circumstances conspired to bring about a situation in which the free citizens of our society were primarily of one race, while those who were enslaved were primarily of another race. This fact, in turn, led to profound racial inequalities in contemporary society, and to the development of ideas about race which retain a tight grip on our thinking even today. It is this last aspect, however, which explains why we have in some ways overstated the role of race in slavery and in our response to it today.

I am convinced that in order to move forward together, we need to both acknowledge the role which race has played, and continues to play, in our society, and also to confront the limitations of race as a way to think about ourselves and our society.

The Tracing Center has been formed by people who have long been involved in Traces of the Trade and in the use of the film for national and international outreach efforts involving the history and legacy of slavery. Their intention is to broaden and deepen those efforts and to develop related programming. This development will also allow Ebb Pod Productions to focus on its core mission as a film production company.

For more on the Tracing Center, please see its new web site at www.tracingcenter.org.

The story, “US family finds traces of slave-trade past in Cuba,” covers a just-completed trip to Cuba by Producer/Director Katrina Browne and historical consultant James DeWolf Perry, both of whom also appear in the film, along with Tulaine Marshall, who works with them at the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery.

On the trip, the trio visited the site of Mount Hope, a Cuban slave plantation owned by Perry’s fifth-great grandfather, James D’Wolf, the leading slave trader in U.S. history. They also held the Cuban premiere of Traces of the Trade, spoke at a number of public events, participated in activities surrounding the voyage of the Schooner Amistad to Matanzas and Havana, and reunited with Cubans who were in the film, advised the project, or were part of the Cuban crew during filming.

For more on the A.P. story and the visit to Cuba, see Perry’s blog, The Living Consequences.

En español

Katrina Browne, Producer/Director, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Executive Director, The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery
kbrowne@tracesofthetrade.org o: 617-349-0019 c: 617-290-5275
Ms. Browne will be in Cuba from March 22-30, so may not be reachable then.

Marga Varea, Events and Development Director, The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery mvarea@tracesofthetrade.org o: 617-349-0019 c: 617-710-5436

The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery is pleased to announce that three representatives of the 2009 Emmy®-nominated documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North will be traveling to Cuba with the Freedom Schooner Amistad next week. We are honored to be able to hold the Cuba premiere of the film during the Amistad’s visit. The ship is visiting Cuba from March 22-31 as part of the United Nations commemoration of March 25 as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For the press release from Amistad America please see: http://www.amistadamerica.org/content/view/1994/257/.

Traces of the Trade (Sundance 2008; POV/PBS 2008) chronicles Katrina Browne’s discovery that her ancestors from Rhode Island were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. As Browne and nine cousins retrace the Triangle Trade from Rhode Island, to Ghana, to Cuba, they uncover the hidden history of Northern complicity in slavery and grapple with the persistence of the black/white divide today. Havana was a regular stop on the D’Wolf “slaving” route—for selling Africans at auction—especially during the illegal period. Rhode Island and Cuba were central players during the period after the U.S. ban of 1808 and British ban of 1807. James and George D’Wolf eventually developed five sugar and coffee plantations on the island in order to control all sides of their “vertically integrated” triangle of commerce.

The Traces of the Trade premiere will be on Saturday, March 27 at Casa de Africa in Havana, hosted by Miguel Barnet, a preeminent Cuban cultural leader and ethnographer. This will be the first visit of family members since filming for the documentary took place in 2001 (which involved working with a Cuban crew and Cuban scholars). During next week’s visit, the team will also seek to locate two more D’Wolf plantations and perhaps meet Afro-Cuban descendants of people who had been enslaved there. Joining Producer/Director Katrina Browne in Cuba will be James DeWolf Perry, VI, a cousin in the film, an expert in the transatlantic slave trade, and a direct descendant of James D’Wolf (patriarch of the slave-trading dynasty, and a U.S. Senator); and Tulaine Marshall, a leader in Boston and in the community and youth development sectors nationally. Ms. Marshall serves as partnership coordinator between the film and Amistad America and facilitates use of the film for inter-racial dialogue.

Katrina Browne: “We are deeply moved to be part of this historic visit of the replica ship Amistad to Cuba. The successful revolt of Sengbe Pieh and the other captured Africans, in the waters off of Cuba in 1839, took place against a backdrop that our family now knows about all too well. It’s important to understand the details of that de-humanizing global economy that built so many nations. Its reverberations are still with us. We hope this visit will be a chance to deepen the dialogue.”

Relevant Film Credits:

Katrina Browne: Producer/Director/Writer
Alla Kovgan: Co-Director/Editor/Writer
Jude Ray: Co-Director/Executive Producer
Elizabeth Delude-Dix: Co-Producer/Executive Producer
Juanita Brown: Co-Producer
Director of Photography: Liz Dory
Production Sound Mixer: Jeffrey Livesey
Original Score: Roger C. Miller
Animation: Handcranked Productions

Cuban Crew:

Line Producer: Boris Iván Crespo
Unit Production Manager: Santiago Llapur
Second Unit Camera: Ariam R. Grass
Second Unit Sound: Ricardo Pérez Ramos
Gaffer: Luís Manuel Escuela
Electrician: Ovidio Gastón
Translator: María Teresa Ortega
Travel Guide: Raul Izquierdo

Cuban experts interviewed for the film:

Maria del Carmen Barcia
Natalia Bolivar
Carlos de Lara
Zoila Lapique (appears in final film)

The visit of the Traces of the Trade team to Cuba and the partnership with the Amistad for the Caribbean Heritage Tour has been generously supported through grants from the Wynecote Foundation and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.