SLIDESHOW: Slavery Museum

SLIDESHOW: Liverpool

LIVERPOOL, England The story of slavery is the story of America. Everyone's America.

It is the story of ports on both sides of the Atlantic that became rich from the profits of slave ships. It is the story of plantations where slave labor produced immense wealth. It is the story of Northern factories that prospered by weaving cloth from slave-produced cotton. It is the story of Africans debased and degraded for generations on end.

"Everyone in the country still profits from slavery. Everyone in the country still suffers from the injustice and racism that go with it," said Gregg Kimball, director of publications and educational services at the Library of Virginia.

In the former slave-trading capital of Liverpool, England, such issues are explored in the highly visited International Slavery Museum, which opened last summer on the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in Great Britain.

In Virginia, the story of slavery is still looking for a home.

The National Slavery Museum proposed by former Virginia governor and current Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder has yet to put up a building on its chosen site near Fredericksburg, though a memorial garden opened last summer.

Some people question whether the museum will move to Richmond or if the necessary funding will ever be available. Competition for some of the same dollars comes from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is to be built on the National Mall in Washington.

Historians continue to see the topic of slavery as critical to an understanding of America's story.

"It was central to the American experience in every possible way," said Joseph C. Miller, history professor at the University of Virginia. "It's not about them. It's about us.

"These people were Americans. They spoke English. They were increasingly devout Christians. The history that they were having was parallel to the history that everybody else was having in the United States, but inhibited, interrupted, disrupted, distracted by the institution of slavery."

"Every fortune made in Colonial Virginia was made in large extent by exploiting slaves," said Brent Tarter, senior editor at the Library of Virginia. Slaves worked on plantations to raise cash crops of tobacco and cotton, but slaves also were used for some jobs by businesses in the cities. Slave labor built canals and roads.

"It would be almost impossible to prove that any building before the Civil War was not built by slaves," Tarter said.

Liverpool's relationship to slavery was more distant because only the profits, not the enslaved people, were highly visible. Even so, slavery was a touchy subject when a slave-trade gallery opened in 1994 in the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

"The people in Liverpool deserve a lot of credit," said Marcus Rediker, chairman of the history department at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the recent book, "The Slave Ship: A Human History."

Rediker, a graduate of Midlothian High School and Virginia Commonwealth University, traces his interest in the subject to growing up in the South during the civil-rights era. Through his studies, he came to know Anthony Tibbles, the scholar behind Liverpool's slave-trade gallery.

When the exhibit was proposed, a common reaction was "Why do you want to bring that up? It's just going to cause trouble," Rediker recalled. "It turns out the slave-trade gallery was the most popular thing the museum had ever done."

Liverpool's International Slavery Museum became a separate entity last summer and expanded to take over the top floor of the maritime museum.

Three fairly equal sections examine Life in West Africa, Enslavement and the Middle Passage, and the Legacies of Slavery.

Step off the elevator and you are in a noisy hallway where video monitors show people discussing their ideas of freedom and enslavement. Turn the corner and you may see children trying out the chairs in a full-size reproduction of an Igbo family compound from Nigeria.

Enslavement narratives include a timeline of slave rebellions, coffles and shackles used to keep slaves from escaping, and a brief film that shows the horrors of the Middle Passage voyage from Africa to America.

Legacies include Liverpool street signs carrying names of slave traders such as James Penny (of the Beatles' Penny Lane), a quilt from Alabama in a traditional African style and ads that used caricatures of black people.

Finally, a wall is dedicated to black achievers ranging from civil-rights campaigners and politicians to rock stars and poets.

Gerald Henderson, who is active in the Liverpool branch of the Richmond-based Hope in the Cities program, remembers Liverpool before the museum opened.

"This city was in total denial about what happened here," Henderson said. "There was absolutely no mention of the slave trade at all in any of the history, the brochures.

"That gallery opened a door. Now people are just beginning to realize . . . that there is still a legacy [of slavery] within the city in racism. . . . It is very deep."

Some of that legacy is written on the buildings pointed out by Eric Lynch, a Liverpool-born black man who leads slave-trail tours of the city. At the former Martins Bank, for example, the stone around a doorway is carved with images of Neptune resting his hands on the heads of two slave boys holding bags of money.

In Rumford Place, historical plaques document Liverpool's support of the Confederacy during America's Civil War. Alabama House recognizes the CSS Alabama, which was built at a Liverpool shipyard under the code name Enrica. Semmes House recognizes the captain of the Alabama, Raphael Semmes, the same man honored on Richmond's Semmes Avenue.

A slavery museum in Virginia would have resources just as rich.

"I think the main thing we lack is the will to do it," Rediker said. "People put a lot of energy into denying it, pretending it doesn't matter.

"It's a natural thing for Virginia to do," he said. "Virginia is rightfully known as a truly historic place, birthplace of the nation, pantheon of distinguished people, but Virginia is also the place where the American slave system first took root, a region in which slavery and its aftermath have been significant.

"Moreover, I would say Virginia can do what Liverpool has done - play a leading role in demonstrating what's possible."
Contact Katherine Calos at (804) 649-6433 or kcalos@timesdispatch.com.