The Living Consequences

According to the Boston Globe, Senator Sam Brownback intends to offer a resolution in the Senate this week calling for Congress to apologize for slavery.

Brownback, a social conservative running for president, says that he has a Democratic partner for his proposal, which fits with earlier efforts on his part to address historic injustices committed against American Indians and others.

This resolution would join H.Res. 194, Rep. Cohen’s earlier resolution currently before the House.

As part of the burgeoning movement to explore ways of healing the wounds of slavery and discrimination, there are now nationwide displays of performance art aimed at provoking thought about the moral and practical implications of reparations or other forms of restitution.

These displays tie in with Traces of the Trade in a variety of ways, not least by raising difficult questions about the past, its implications for today, and just how individual members of society, of various races and backgrounds, might address the unhealed wounds.

H.R. 3432, which establishes a commission to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade, passed the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon.

The bill has already been received in the Senate, where it will be referred to the judiciary committee.

This is good news for those of us who believe that the nation should be paying more attention to this milestone in our history.

Brilliance Audio, which is publishing the audio edition of my cousin Tom’s book, Inheriting the Trade, has decided to have Tom narrate the audio edition himself!

I think this is a wonderful idea. Not only does Tom have a strong and compelling speaking voice, but the book is essentially a memoir, and a particularly personal and powerful one. Having Tom provide the voice himself is just perfect.

We interviewed Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School for Traces of the Trade, in which he provides a sobering assessment of race in our society today, as well as one of the film’s most popular and light-hearted lines. Professor Ogletree, who is a leading figure in the reparations movement and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, has offered the following thoughts about Inheriting the Trade:

“Inheriting the Trade is a candid, powerful and insightful book about how one family dealt with the infamous slave trade. This book is jarring in its candor, and revealing in its honest assessment of slavery and the Dewolf family. We must read important books like this one, if we dare to appreciate every aspect of our history, and as the Dewolf family does, dare to change our judgments about the wretched history of slavery.”

As I’ve mentioned before, my cousin Tom DeWolf has written a book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, which is being published in January 2008.

The book will now also be published in an audio edition by Brilliance Audio. The audio book will be released around the same time as the hardcover edition (scheduled for January).

My cousin, Tom DeWolf, has written a memoir about the journey which ten of us undertook in 2001 to retrace the steps of our slave-trading ancestors and to explore the legacy of the slave trade today.

That book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, about the legacy of Senator James D’Wolf and his family, will be published by Beacon Press in January.

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Many people are familiar with H.R. 40, the perennial House bill proposing a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and possible remedies. Rep. John Conyers (D), currently chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced this bill in every Congress since 1989. (The bill number is chosen to reflect the phrase “forty acres and a mule,” which came to symbolize the brief and unrealized promise of compensation to slaves freed after the Civil War.)

There are two other major items pending in the U.S. House which also bear on slavery and the slave trade:

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I congratulate you, fellow citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may … constitutionally … withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights … which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe.

— President Thomas Jefferson, in his annual message to Congress, Dec. 2, 1806

With these words, President Thomas Jefferson proposed abolishing the U.S. slave trade, effective on January 1, 1808, when the constitutional prohibition on outlawing the trade expired. Within four months, both the U.S. and Britain had passed historic legislation outlawing their trade in human cargo.

On January 1, 2008, the U.S. will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade. At least, it may do so. Despite legislation pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, it isn’t clear whether the U.S. will officially acknowledge, much less pause to observe, this early milestone on the road to abolition and racial equality.

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As some of you know, there is a documentary film coming out about several of my ancestors and their role in the slave trade.

Traces of the Trade tells the story of the D’Wolf family of Bristol, R.I. and follows ten of our family today, as we retrace the route of the triangle trade and discuss the implications of this family legacy for U.S. race relations today.

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