Film describes Northern Family’s Role in Promoting and Profiting From Slavery

Northerners like to think they bear less guilt than Southerners for our nation’s history with slavery and the slave trade. They are dead wrong, according to Katrina Browne, a committed Episcopalian from Boston.
Browne learned that the hard way. Now she’s spreading the word to compatriots, North and South, in a manner she hopes will help to heal what she describes as our country’s greatest wound.

Brown, 37, has created a documentary film to tell the story of her ancestors from New England, to spell out the legacy white Americans have inherited from the history of slavery.

The DeWolf family of Rhode Island was the largest slave-trading family in early America. More than 10,000 Africans – kidnapped, chained, beaten – made the hellish middle passage across the Atlantic in the holds of DeWolf-owned ships. Over the course of three generations, from 1769 to 1820, 47 of these ships made runs, building trade and the family’s fortune.

Katrina Browne is refusing to side-step that unsavory history. Instead she is facing it head on in a very public way … with her 80-minute feature film, five years in the making. She hopes Traces of the Trade eventually will be seen on PBS television. more...

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