Inheriting The Trade

Two days after the historic nomination of Barak Obama for President of the USA, and the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, on the day of Stephanie Tubbs Jones's funeral, I happened to be watching BookTV on C-Span.

Thomas DeWolf was presenting his book to an audience in Bristol, RI. In response to a question he said "This project," (tracing the story of his slave-owner ancestor's slaves) "was a lens through which not only to deal with slavery, but all kinds of oppression".

This Squidoo lens is my response to that statement, my little bit to contribute to the project.

In 2001, at age forty-seven, Thomas Norman DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in United States history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. Senator James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, curried favor with President Thomas Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed. When James DeWolf died in 1837 he was reportedly the second-richest man in America.

When Katrina Browne, Tom DeWolf's distant cousin, learned about their family's history, she resolved to confront it head-on, producing and directing a documentary feature film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.

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.