| Traces of the Trade & Inheriting the Trade |
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| Written by Webmaster | |||||||
| Thursday, 08 May 2008 | |||||||
The Film: The Traces of the TradeIn this feature documentary, filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine cousins retrace the Triangle Trade and gain a powerful new perspective on the black/white divide.
The Book: Inheriting the Trade
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Inheriting the Trade is Tom DeWolf's powerful and disarmingly honest memoir of the journey in which ten family members retrace the steps of their ancestors and uncover the hidden history of New England and the other northern states.
Their journey through the notorious Triangle Trade—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—proved life-altering, forcing Tom to face the horrors of slavery directly for the first time. It also inspired him to contend with the complicated legacy that continues to impact black and white Americans, Africans, and Cubans today.
Inheriting the Trade reveals that the Northern involvement in slavery was as common as it was in the South. Not only were black people enslaved in the North for over two hundred years but the vast majority of all slave trading in the United States was done by Northerners. Remarkably, half of all North American voyages involved in the slave trade originated from Rhode Island, and all the Northern states benefited.
With searing candor, DeWolf tackles both the internal and external challenges of his journey—writing frankly about feelings of shame, white male privilege, the complicity of churches, America’s historic amnesia regarding slavery—and our nation’s desperate need for healing. An urgent call for meaningful and honest dialogue, Inheriting the Trade illuminates a path toward a more hopeful future, and provides a persuasive argument that the legacy of slavery isn’t merely a Southern issue but an enduring American one.
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“Tom DeWolf’s deeply personal story, of his own journey as well as his family’s, is required reading for anyone interested in reconciliation. Healing from our historic wounds, that continue to separate us, requires us to walk this road together.”
— Myrlie Evers-Williams, civil rights leader, chairman emeritus of the NAACP (1995-98), and author of The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, Watch Me Fly, and For Us The Living.
“Inheriting the Trade is a candid, powerful and insightful book about how one family dealt with the infamous slave trade. This book is jarring in its candor, and revealing in its honest assessment of slavery and the Dewolf family. We must read important books like this one, if we dare to appreciate every aspect of our history, and as the Dewolf family does, dare to change our judgments about the wretched history of slavery.”
— Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Executive Director, The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School
“[Inheriting the Trade is] like a slow-motion mash-up, a first-person view from within one of the country's founding families as it splinters, then puts itself back together again.”
— Edward Ball,author of the National Book Award winner, Slaves in the Family
“Thomas DeWolf’s personal journey into his family’s long hidden slave trading past is a compelling invitation to explore how our country and many institutions, including churches, benefited from this dark chapter. Such exploration is essential if we are to move forward to a place of repair and racial reconciliation.”
— Frank T. Griswold, 25thPresiding Bishop, Episcopal Church of the U.S.A.
“Exploring the links between a grand Rhode Island mansion and dungeons in Ghana, Tom DeWolf traces the infernal trade that gave his family, and this country, great wealth and power. His journey into the past forces painful questions to the surface, and illuminates our present.”
— Henry Wiencek, Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award & author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
“In ongoing efforts to promote racial reconciliation, this contemporary white family’s journey stands out. It represents the kind of honesty and courage that is so urgently needed to forge new ways of talking and thinking about the legacy of slavery in American life.”
— Sherrilyn Ifill, author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century
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