Slave Trade

Annapolis, one of the Chesapeake region's earliest slave ports, may become one of the first cities in a fledgling movement in which governments apologize for their role in the slave trade. Alderman Samuel Shropshire said he plans to introduce to the city council tomorrow a resolution calling for atonement for "centuries of brutal dehumanization and injustices." "It's not like we are trying to dig up the past; the past is always there, it's a fact and a reality," Shropshire said. "All I'm asking is that we look at it and deal with it and pray for reconciliation and move on."

T he heart-rending images of injured and frightened children after Haiti's devastating earthquake last month no doubt stirred the compassion of many Americans, including the Baptist evangelicals from Idaho now being held on suspicion of human trafficking in Port-au-Prince. We reserve judgment on the group's claim that they were motivated only by the best of intentions when they tried to spirit more than 30 youngsters across the border into the neighboring Dominican Republic without proper documents.

The recent controversy surrounding Louis Farrakhan has included discussion of the role of Jews in the slave trade. This article is excerpted, with permission, from the fall 1992 issue of Culturefront, a publication of the New York Council for the Humanities. David Brion Davis is professor of history at Yale. His books include "The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture" and "Slavery and Human Progress."To blame Jews for participating in the Atlantic slave trade is a bit like blaming Native Americans for contributing to the oil industry that now threatens the earth with atmospheric pollution and global warming.

Philip D. Curtin, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor and a historian of the African slave trade who was instrumental in changing the way schools teach the subject, died June 4 at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, Pa., of pneumonia. He was 87 and lived in Kennett Square, Pa. Dr. Curtin, winner of a 1983 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a leading figure in reviving the neglected field of African history after World War II. He applied more rigorous and scholarly methods to the study of the slave trade and brought the topic to the attention of a wider academic audience.

LIVERPOOL, England -- At Town Hall, the facade has sculpted heads of African peoples -- silent reminders of the victims of the slave trade that once helped make this city rich. Street names commemorate the places the slave merchants traded with -- Maryland Street, Virginia Street.For 75 years, Liverpool merchants and seamen dominated the infamous trans-Atlantic commerce in human beings -- until 1807, when Britain banned it. For the next half-century they traded in the cotton, tobacco and sugar that slave labor produced.

Adanggaman, Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M'Bala's controversial drama of Africans' role in providing human cargo for the European slave trade, is tonight's offering in the film series The African Diaspora II: More Black Cinema from Africa and Beyond. Set in the late 17th century, M'Bala's film is the story of Ossei, a young man who rebels against his father's wish that he marry into a wealthy family. Determined to follow his own path, Ossei runs away from home. He soon returns, only to find that his village has been raided by warriors under the rule of Adanggaman, whose forte is enslaving neighboring tribes and selling the people to European slave traders.

THOUSANDS of NAACP members descended on Baltimore for their convention this week, prompting visits to the major tourist attractions that line the Pratt Street corridor. What most of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Inner Harbor each year don't realize is that they are walking on sacred ground, where countless thousands of men, women, and children suffered during Baltimore's darkest hour. Between 1815 and 1860, traders in Baltimore made the port one of the leading disembarkation points for ships carrying slaves to New Orleans and other ports in the deep South.

NANTES, France -- Along the quays of the Loire, fine mansions speak of the time when Nantes was a great port that loomed large in France's colonial history.Behind the pilasters and wrought-iron balconies lived the shipbuilders and sea captains who, local lore has it, bravely crossed the Atlantic and returned with precious produce from French possessions in the Americas. But few people here knew -- or chose to remember -- why exactly Nantes became so rich.Breaking a taboo, the city has mounted an exhibition showing that its past wealth came largely from running slaves from Africa to the New World.

History Detectives are at work in the Poe Room of the Enoch Pratt Central Library. Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the detective story, seems bemused looking down from a portrait over the mantel at the TV crew scuttling around the room below. History Detectives is a new PBS show that has sent out teams of architects, antiquarians and historians to uncover "the history hidden on America's doorstep." It's a 10-episode series set to begin on July 14, with three historical mysteries to be "solved" per episode.

ON JULY 24, 1863, three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, Union officers freed the inmates of a slave trader's jail on Pratt Street near the Baltimore harbor. They found a grisly scene."In this place I found 26 men, 1 boy, 29 women and 3 infants," Col. William Birney of the U.S. Colored Troops wrote to his commanding officer. "Sixteen of the men were shackled and one had his legs chained together by ingeniously contrived locks connected by chains suspended to his waist."The slaves were confined in sweltering cells or in the bricked-in yard of "Cam- liu's slave-pen," where "no tree or shrub grows" and "the mid-day sun pours down its scorching rays," Birney wrote.

5 Blackwater guards indicted in Iraq killings WASHINGTON: Five Blackwater Worldwide security guards have been indicted and a sixth was negotiating a plea with prosecutors for a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead and became an anti-U.S. rallying point for insurgents, people close to the case said yesterday. Prosecutors obtained the indictment late Thursday and had it put under seal until it is made public, perhaps by Monday. All who discussed the case did so on condition of anonymity because it remains sealed.

A replica of La Amistad docked at the Inner Harbor yesterday as part of an 18-month voyage that retraced the history of the original ship and the slave trade on the Atlantic Ocean. Several speakers, including Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, extolled the historical importance of the original ship, while a large crowd of middle- and high-school students looked on from the dock. In 1839, the 53 slaves on the ship, which was transporting them between ports in Cuba, revolted and took control, and eventually guided the ship to New York, where it was captured by the U.S. Navy.

The Slave Ship A Human History By Marcus Rediker Viking / 434 pages / $27.95 By 1807-1808, when Great Britain and the United States outlawed the slave trade, 9 million people had been transported from Africa to the New World. Three million more would follow. Crammed onto slave ships, more than a million of them died en route, their bodies cast overboard to feed a flotilla of sharks. The rest - the lucky ones - descended into a living hell. A "floating dungeon," the slave ship was their first "home" in captivity.

Britain's deputy prime minister told a Baltimore audience yesterday that his country regretted its part in the African slave trade. He called on other nations to redouble efforts to combat modern forms of slavery. Deputy Prime Minister John Leslie Prescott made his remarks at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, where a major exhibition about slavery in Maryland is on view. "We recognize the active role Britain played in the slave trade," Prescott said, noting that millions of African slaves were forcibly transported to British colonies in North America and the Caribbean during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.

A Senate panel approved a half-dozen ground rent proposals yesterday, including bills to create a registry of ground rents and to overhaul the process for ejectments. Another bill would prevent ground rent holders from selling leases without first giving homeowners a chance to purchase, and it calls for a state study of the need for a program to help low-income people obtain loans to buy out their ground rents. The bills were approved handily by the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee and head next to the Senate floor.

Annapolis, one of the Chesapeake region's earliest slave ports, may become one of the first cities in a fledgling movement in which governments apologize for their role in the slave trade. Alderman Samuel Shropshire said he plans to introduce to the city council tomorrow a resolution calling for atonement for "centuries of brutal dehumanization and injustices." "It's not like we are trying to dig up the past; the past is always there, it's a fact and a reality," Shropshire said. "All I'm asking is that we look at it and deal with it and pray for reconciliation and move on."

Philip D. Curtin, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor and a historian of the African slave trade who was instrumental in changing the way schools teach the subject, died June 4 at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, Pa., of pneumonia. He was 87 and lived in Kennett Square, Pa. Dr. Curtin, winner of a 1983 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a leading figure in reviving the neglected field of African history after World War II. He applied more rigorous and scholarly methods to the study of the slave trade and brought the topic to the attention of a wider academic audience.

A replica of La Amistad docked at the Inner Harbor yesterday as part of an 18-month voyage that retraced the history of the original ship and the slave trade on the Atlantic Ocean. Several speakers, including Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, extolled the historical importance of the original ship, while a large crowd of middle- and high-school students looked on from the dock. In 1839, the 53 slaves on the ship, which was transporting them between ports in Cuba, revolted and took control, and eventually guided the ship to New York, where it was captured by the U.S. Navy.

Michael Apted sits in a posh, sunlit Washington hotel room discussing his film Amazing Grace, which opened this weekend, anticipating what questions may arise out of his approach to the 19th-century abolitionist tale. Surely, he believes, some detractors are bound to ask: Why make a film about Britain's slave trade in Africa with virtually no slavery scenes and only one black main character? "I'll have to eat that," says Apted, who says he's also braced for those who will scoff at his nearly all-English cast, with few box-office notables.

WASHINGTON -- Having just celebrated Thanksgiving, Americans might add to the list of things for which they are grateful: Christian evangelicals. No, I'm not kidding. It has become fashionable and amusing these days to ridicule conservative Christians who believe in the Bible, even if they fail to live by the Word every waking moment. One fallen preacher comes along, and the secular world rejoices in the triumph of hypocrisy. Yet, anyone familiar with the history of social justice knows that evangelicals, as well as others of different faiths, have led many of the causes that progressives today claim as their turf.