The Living Consequences

On Friday, I’ll be in Newport, R.I. to participate in a panel discussion on “The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Rhode Island.”

I’ll be speaking about the Rhode Island slave trade and the example of the D’Wolf family of Bristol, R.I., who were the nation’s leading slave traders. My fellow panelists will be Jim Campbell of Brown University, who will discuss what Brown has uncovered about its own connections to slavery; and Keith Stokes, of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, who will talk about the lives of enslaved Rhode Islanders.

The panel will be held on Friday, June 6, at 4:00pm at the Colony House, Washington Square, Newport, R.I.

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Senator Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, based on a conservative Associated Press tally of delegates.

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The Early Show on CBS is scheduled to air an interview with Tom DeWolf and Katrina Browne in the near future.

The interview, which has been pre-recorded with news anchor Russ Mitchell, focuses on Tom’s book, Inheriting the Trade, and on the upcoming documentary film Traces of the Trade, for which Katrina served as director/producer/writer, and in which Tom and I appear.

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We’ve just learned the scheduled broadcast dates for Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North in the Boston area:

• Thursday, June 26, 3:00am (WGBH-44)
• Sunday, June 29, 9:00pm (WGBH-44)
• Monday, June 30, 10:00pm (WGBH-2)

As I’ve mentioned previously, P.O.V. is debuting its 2008-2009 season with Traces of the Trade, with a suggested air date of June 24 at 10:00pm. Local stations are free to broadcast the film whenever they wish, however, and many markets are deviating significantly from that suggestion. It is also possible that these scheduled air dates in Boston might change prior to broadcast.

Update: For those who receive digital broadcasts in the Boston area, the film will also be shown on WGBX World (Channel 44.2) on Wednesday, June 25 at 7:30pm, and will be rebroadcast three times over the course of the next day.

Few in the United States have taken the opportunity to acknowledge, much less to commemorate, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade in 1808.

For this reason, I was pleased to see that Senator John McCain gave a campaign speech on Wednesday in Michigan, in which he took the importance of the British and U.S. abolition of the trade as the jumping-off point for a focus on modern sex trafficking, child pornography, and other contemporary evils:

… the achievement of both countries in terminating the international slave trade and setting into motion the titanic and bloody struggle to close a shameful chapter in the history of our country [i.e., slavery itself] should be remembered as a turning point in mankind’s long and fitful progress toward a more just world.

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Tom and Katrina’s scheduled appearance on CBS’s The Early Show to promote Inheriting the Trade and Traces of the Trade has been postponed.

They will definitely be appearing on the show, as they’re taping their interview this morning, immediately following the live broadcast. This is merely a rescheduling to accommodate other programming, and the producers hope to air the interview next week. I’ll post the new date as soon as we know it.

Since last year, there has been a series of legislative developments, at the state and national levels, related to the legacy of slavery and the slave trade. I’ve blogged about each of these efforts separately in the past, but in this entry, I want to offer a quick overview of the various legislative proposals and their current status.

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The Early Show on CBS is scheduled to air a live interview with Tom DeWolf and Katrina Browne on Tuesday, April 29.

The interview, to be conducted by news anchor Russ Mitchell, will focus on Tom’s book, Inheriting the Trade, and on the upcoming documentary film Traces of the Trade, for which Katrina served as director/producer/writer, and in which Tom and I appear.

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For readers in the Boston area, Tom DeWolf will be appearing at the Harvard Coop tomorrow to promote his book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History.

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Several of us from Traces of the Trade attended the White Privilege Conference in Springfield, Mass. over the past few days, where we offered a screening and discussion of the documentary and solicited feedback.

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