The Living Consequences

The Denver Post has an excellent article this morning on Traces of the Trade and Inheriting the Trade, featuring my distant cousins Keila and Holly, and our friend and colleague Harold Fields.

The article deftly moves between a variety of topics related to our family’s heritage in the slave trade and the legacy of slavery in our society today. The reporter touches on the traditional silence about the prominent role of the North in the slave trade, on the lack of awareness of many Americans about the connections between slavery and today’s racial divide, and on the importance of commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade this year.

There are extensive quotations from Keila, Holly, and Harold in the article. Holly discusses, among other issues, the necessity of acknowledging an awful past and how she feels pain, but not personal responsibility, for the actions of her ancestors. Harold highlights the critical role of dialogue for our nation’s race relations, and how the film and the book encourage a broader dialogue on these issues. And my cousin Tom DeWolf, who wrote Inheriting the Trade, is also quoted on how much more widely recognized the bicentennial of the abolition of the trade was in the U.K.

Keila and Harold live in the Denver area, and Holly, Keila’s sister, lived in that area at the time we filmed the documentary. 

The book was published last week, and the film will be having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next week. So we anticipate much more publicity of this kind in the future.