The wealth generated from U.S. chattel slavery is still in the system. The ancestors of those who benefited from U.S. slavery still have that wealth today.
A Northern Family Confronts Its Slaveholding Past
Filmmaker Katrina Browne discusses her family’s role in American slavery
Katy June-Friesen
June 18, 2008
Katrina Browne and a Ghanaian child on the ramparts of Cape Coast Castle slave fort.
When Katrina Browne discovered that her New England ancestors, the DeWolfs, were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history, she invited DeWolf descendents to retrace the Triangle Trade route and confront this legacy.
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, which airs June 24 on the PBS film series P.O.V., follows their journey and documents the North's intimate relationship with slavery. Browne's cousin Thomas DeWolf has also written a book about the trip,
Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. This year is the bicentennial of the federal abolition of the slave trade.
How did you first find out about your family's history and why did you want to make a film about it?
I was in seminary in my late 20s—I was 28-years-old—and I got a booklet that my grandmother sent to all her grandchildren. She was 88 and coming to the end of her life and wondering if her grandkids actually knew anything about their family history—whether they cared. She was conscientious enough to put in a couple sentences about the fact that our ancestors were slave traders. It hit me incredibly hard when I read those sentences. I probably would have just treated the whole thing as my problem to reckon with on my own with my family, privately, if I hadn't come across a book by historian Joanne Pope Melish called
Disowning Slavery. She traced the process whereby the northern states conveniently forgot that slavery was a huge part of the economy.
Slavery itself existed in New England for over 200 years. History books leave most of us with the impression that because it was abolished in the North before the South, it was as if it never happened in the North, that we were the good guys and abolitionists and that slavery was really a Southern sin. That book made me realize what I had done with my own amnesia, and my family's amnesia was really parallel to this much larger regional dynamic.
That's what inspired me to make this film—that showing me and my family grappling with it would give other white Americans an opportunity to think and talk about their own intimate feelings, wherever their family history may lie, and that it would also set Americans straight about the history.
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A Northern Family Confronts Its Slaveholding Past