Seminarian traces family’s unspoken role in slavery

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Katrina Browne was in seminary when she got the letter. Written by her grandmother, it revealed an ugly secret: Her family’s wealth, Ivy League diplomas and social affluence all stemmed from the slave trade. Her ancestors _ the DeWolf family of Rhode Island _ had created what was perhaps […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Katrina Browne was in seminary when she got the letter. Written by her grandmother, it revealed an ugly secret: Her family’s wealth, Ivy League diplomas and social affluence all stemmed from the slave trade.

Her ancestors _ the DeWolf family of Rhode Island _ had created what was perhaps America’s most powerful slave-trading dynasty, and profits from their ships financed entire towns, industries and churches.


Churches. This thought struck a chord with Browne. Her family’s name had been synonymous with the Episcopal Church for generations. It adorns the stained glass windows of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in seaside Bristol, R.I., a building she now knows had been heavily financed by slavery.

But all this was omitted from the family record passed from generation to generation.

“They created an identity as heroic abolitionists,” Browne said. “Growing up, I fell in love with that story.”

She faced her newly discovered past determined to make amends. She left the seminary to make her first documentary film, “Traces of the Trade: A story from the Deep North,” about her family’s struggle with the sins of their ancestors and the ripple effects of those sins in the black community generations later.

“The slave trade was our Holocaust,” one black woman declared in the film, which is scheduled to be shown on PBS stations on June 24 as part of the P.O.V. documentary series.

The film follows members of the DeWolf family as they retrace the slave route, from Africa to Cuba and finally back to Rhode Island, but also takes a gripping and unflinching look at the core issue of race in America.

Although Browne left the ministry, many DeWolfs had made similar journeys through the church and become ordained as ministers. In the film, she discusses this anomaly of descendants of a family of slave traders entering the church.

“An awful lot of us need to be of service and to give back. We were wondering if there might be something in the genes,” she said in an interview. “My father was a priest. Our grandfather was a bishop. His father was a priest. There’s got to be a message here.”


Browne, 40, is tall and thin with a small, neat face. At first, she seems almost meek, but when she begins to speak, the artist in her rises to the surface. Her hands wave excitedly as they try to keep up with the pace of her words.

She’s screened her documentary at middle schools, college classes, the Sundance Film Festival and, increasingly, churches. Although she calls herself more “spiritual” than overtly religious, she feels inspired by the prophet Isaiah, who labored to “repair the breach.”

“Faith communities have a lot of values and beliefs around forgiveness, atonement and repairing relationships,” she said.

During filming of the movie, she and her family pushed the Episcopal Church, at its national convention in 2006, to acknowledge its role in the slave trade. Other groups had asked for the acknowledgment three years earlier without success. After a passionate plea by black Episcopalians and members of the DeWolf family, however, a resolution was overwhelmingly passed.

It compelled the Episcopal Church to “acknowledge its history of participation in this sin and the deep and lasting injury which the institution of slavery and its aftermath have inflicted on society and on the Church.”

It also recommended the church actively research its own involvement in slavery, including any “economic benefits” it derived. That has led, in part, to Philadelphia’s historic Christ Church introducing new live-action dramas of the slaves who worshipped alongside George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.


Browne also has been working with Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who introduced a bill that would create a commission to study reparations for African-Americans and discuss whether or how the United States should deal with its slave-trading past.

During a recent screening for a group of Episcopal ministers at Washington National Cathedral, there were weighty exhales, sighs and more than a few sniffles from the crowd.

The group of black and white ministers discussed the difficulties of talking about race, the fiery sermons of Barack Obama’s former pastor and the “black anger” that white Americans can’t seem to understand.

“It feels that we’re at a point, even if we’re resistant, that we have to deal with this,” one minister said. “We are the DeWolf family, as a country.”

KRE DS END RUBIN

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