The Living Consequences

If you’ve watched our documentary, Traces of the Trade, then you’ve seen that one of the DeWolf slave-trade descendants in the film is Dain Perry.

Of the ten of us who took the journey shown in the film, Dain and I were usually closely in sync on issues involving race, much more so than either of us was with anyone else. This is particularly surprising because, although Dain is my uncle, as he explains in the film, he grew up surrounded by intense racism in the Jim Crow South, while I was raised in a progressive, racially mixed environment many years later.

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Tomorrow, the Boston Globe offers a review of Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, entitled “Facing up to a family’s past as slave traders.”

The review is occasioned by the screening of the film tomorrow night at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. The film will be screened at 8:00pm, and afterward, Katrina Browne and I will participate in a question-and-answer period, along with editor Alla Kovgan and co-producer Elizabeth Delude-Dix.

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The bicentennial of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated at a service of liberation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City on Sunday, January 13.

Traces of the Trade, which is being released in conjunction with the bicentennial, will be represented at the service through resource materials prepared by the Diocese of New York, and Tom DeWolf, the author of Inheriting the Trade, will attend the service.

The service is being sponsored by the Episcopal dioceses of New York, Newark, Long Island, and New Jersey, as well as various Episcopal church offices and organizations.