How do you ensure that the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade will somehow remain in the minds and muscles of young people?  How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory such a momentous event as its own participation in the transatlantic slave trade?  These were the questions that rang in my head as we departed Bristol for London.

I had spent over three weeks in two cities, Liverpool and Bristol with Britain’s largest continuous Black population.  Two cities where in the years between 1730 and 1807 over three quarters of all English ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade were fitted out for travel to the west African coast and the Americas.  Two cities that after 1780 were not only the undisputed slaving capitals of England but, most importantly by far the largest port in the Atlantic world.  Two cities that two hundreds years later had witnessed a urban rebellions that was rooted in the lasting legacies of the transatlantic slave trade.   Two cities that just opened an International Slavery Museum and the exhibit “Breaking the Chains” with libations and a long view towards what is likely ahead for institutions that dares to speak about a topic that in some places remain taboo.  Leaving Bristol I am firmly convinced that a communal agreement that initiates collective remembering could help overcome public forgetting about the transatlantic slave trade.

Over the course of our time in Liverpool and Bristol, I witnessed the six students who joined the second leg of the Atlantic Freedom Tour walking the streets interrogating the people and places that shaped the history of the city. They had encountered the past and present in ways few students will ever have a chance to do. They had learned from local residents like Eric Lynch and Michael Simon, Sr. that the challenges facing Black communities like Liverpool were no different than those of similarly situated Black people in Washington, D.C., Bridgeport, CT, or Newark, NJ.  They had learned in Bristol that discussions about the transatlantic slave trade reflect a need for a much deeper discussions about how power and authority have been deployed to define what a nation is or ought to be as well as, how citizens should relate to one another.  The students departed Bristol having learned that it was possible to convey to the public the horrific nature of the transatlantic slave trade. They had learned that people of African descent had in fact maintained their human dignity in the face of the brutality that made the institution of slavery possible. 

As the Freedom Schooner Amistad departed the Bristol for perhaps Her final time, my sense was that the students were taking with them a lasting lesson: Black and White people are not connected by some biological or romantic notion of race, but rather by a shared history that had created an Atlantic world.  A shared history that long ago had started in the port cities of Liverpool and Bristol had now somehow seeped into the minds and muscles of young people.   

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