“Ventus”,

Because we have no access to first hand stories, any resource that can provide a look into the past regarding the Middle Passage can be used, simply to just create perspective.

dding museums around commercial ports would not only reach tourists, but relate the local history of the port rather than sharing a tale about history that happened elsewhere.

Slave Voyages Site

Even though traumatic parts of history have been silenced and concealed, museums are intended to be permanent and can live far past a common legend and a story (Araujo 8)

5

New Yor

Because official history is disrupted by sub-history and sub-narratives,

and news

By anchoring history to a specific location, the official history composed of many intricate parts can be broken down to more relatable components that are more consequential to individual communities that share history.

We remember history by reenacting it in the present; however, as humans we can only concentrate on one thing at a time and we cannot recognize a whole scale of happenings and occurrences because our capacity to understand concepts at any given time is limited (Jeffrey-Clay 4).

ocean floor. The ocean floor

Museum Placement Proposal

However, memorializing slavery and other negative historical events is still a debated action, and evaluating how to memorialize these atrocities while educating the modern public and honoring past victims is a difficult process.

Rice

"Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic,

Issues with Memorializing the Slave Trade Send keybo

helped increase people’s ethical and religious concerns about slavery and prompted abolitionist movements

.”

A memorial was created in 2007 near the Black River in Jamaica to remember those lives lost

An infamous example of the brutality of slavery

An appropriate location for this African memorial would be in Accra, the coastal capital of Ghana.

“Inland warrior aristocracies”

Hartman

"Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,"

Battle

these lesser-known stories and facts and should encompass all parts of and include all locations of these lost historical events. In addition to the United States, this memorial should include sites in Africa and the Caribbean that share stories and information that are otherwise untold.

."

Rice

Memorials, museums, and other educational sites about slavery often leave out stories that are untold and unaccounted for and little-known details about the trans-Atlantic slave trade that aren’t discussed

The Middle Passage was not instantaneous

Nevertheless, even though each of these five individuals had unique and complicated human lives, the Boston Massacre does not conjure up the same negative emotions as the Middle Passage.

oston Massacre

Placing floating buoys with plaques that each tell the story of one person who was forced into slavery at intervals along the dedicated path of seafloor can accomplish this.

(Johnson 58).

I suggest placing floating buoys with plaques that each tell the story of one enslaved person at intervals along this path.

Mintz

I first propose to dedicate a portion of the seafloor that stretches from the coast of West Africa to the Caribbean as a historic landmark in order to commemorate the full extent of the journey that most slaves were forced to take.

The

When choosing where to place a monument to the Middle Passage, historians must consider both statistical evidence and firsthand accounts of the experiences of individual slaves.

mage Caption: A ship diagram demonstrating how slaves were packed together in extremely close quarters as they journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean via the Middle Passage. 

as excerpts

10.7 million individuals survived the journey,

Unsung Founders Memorial

Background

We must truly understand what others endured in order to promote empathy and progress. We must learn from the past to inform our future.

These shoes

. A memorial gains a strong foundation through numbers, but it is through empathy and human stories that it is made effective.

Although artistic monuments can be effective in representing the large quantities of people who perished, it is crucial that the stories of those who were enslaved be integrated. Numbers often become an abstraction of human life, such as the numbers prisoners were assigned in concentration camps. While it is important to realize the mass amounts of people who were enslaved, it is crucial that we understand who they were. In order to gain a holistic understanding of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, one must first comprehend the human lives that were stolen.

The Holocaust, or any tragedy, cannot afford to be commemorated in a limbo of uncertainty

a historical basis and a humanizing element.

such as these.

circuit

The

“Trans-Atlantic”).

ations (Prager).

What happened with the Zong ship serves as one of the pinnacle events to the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which the legal case reflected the institutional dehumanization of Africans and the priority of economic gain over salvaging human lives; the trial gained attention to the point that­ “a new ethical dimension” was discussed over the slave trade, in which it was previously only a commercial and political debate (Walvin).

).

Nichols

Get Out

An example

approach.

past.

Websites like Emory University’s Slave Voyages

Zong

While it’s important to analyze the data and realize the scale of the oppression among the entire African population, evoking the moral obligations of society to our past mistakes and properly remembering those who were affected requires more than being given simplified information.

cultural diaspora and colonization.

African lifestyle

Citations

THE CITATION TO YOUR CLIPBOARD

Walvin, J. (2011). Remembering The Zong. Retrieved from http://writingindhs19.web.unc.edu/files/2019/04/The_Zong_A_Massacre_the_Law_and_the_End_of_Slavery_-_Remembering_the_Zong.pdf

By looking at the two parts of data

These events as well as others demand to be known through the use of monuments and other public memorials.

monument be built in commemoration to their contributions to the western society

s

them

.”

That scene, at the auction block, was quick and to the point

es

they

there was an attempt to show the desperation felt by captured Africans

The

during the two centuries of slavery black bodies were seen as disposable and worth nothing

This is

This g

”.

document

The

Steven Spielberg directed, film

The

The argument usually

he holocaust is an example of an event often brought up when discussing the lack of conversation around slavery

Other less noteworthy ships and events in history have monuments yet when it comes to slavery and the Middle Passage the conversation is sparse.

The Zong is an example of a ship that caused such a great controversy yet is largely unacknowledged in the form of monuments

The Zong is an example of a ship that caused such a great controversy yet is largely unacknowledged in the form of monuments

largest cause of missing information in these large databases. The creators are afraid to shed light on the dark parts of American history in fear of damaging the American freedom narrative.

Renee Ater says,

Archives like this properly take a visible stance on

ta

ohnson article

Those enslaved through the slave trade have endured unbelievable adversities that have become hidden and forgotten about when presenting the numerical data of how many lives were lost through the Middle Passage.

”.

t.”

Using numerical and personal data can be a way to expose the true hardships of American slavery and begin the process to healing the internal damages caused by it.

whole

partially due to the internal struggle of expressing the American story of freedom while also acknowledging the enslavement of others for personal gains

What the importance Send keyboard focus to media

“The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined. As islands and dark continents are. It is a place which exists or existed. The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World. It was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable...this door is the place of the fall (Brand 3).”

here

discoveringamistad.org)

daughtership slave ship a new idea. A daughtership

Showing

(Zeuske).

sing a single image would leave little impression, nor would a simple plaque

To Walk on a Slave Ship

The question of how to best memorialize the Middle Passage holds no easy answers, but following the footsteps of the abolition movement indicates that bringing the setting of slavery to the public can have great effect. Museums to the American Civil Rights Movement give weight to this concept: they seek to replicate sites integral to the movement, and visitors overwhelmingly respond to it. These living history exhibits “reach people in a manner that the children in Albany came back to repeatedly: I felt like I was there.” (Hamburger 67)

e trade, and were key in turning public opinion against the slavers (Walvin 211

e Transatlantic trade, and inspired the famed Turner painting, The Slave Ship (Walvin 206)

 (Johnson, 64). 

 Think about it

t's just numbered on top of numbers on top of fancy, academic wording to make the writer sound better

This gives each port a unique spin as no other port would have the same artifacts unless there was a direct connection between the ports via the voyages. 

entire book.

When people think of the Trail of Tears memorial or Sherman's March to the Sea, they see multiple sites in which the event took place. The continuity from start to finish helps people put together a story while also seeing the full picture of what this event in history was. Each place was affected differently and that is seen within the town or area in which the memorial is placed. 

This limitation can cause clumping of every artifact together as “the middle the passage” without a true examination of each area.

outside of the textbook

Because this event spanned across so many different locations over the span of two centuries, there are multiple factors such as the literacy rate among slaves was close to none, or they are represented through letters between masters that limit historian’s ability to have actual accounts; limiting how historians are able to memorialize the middle passage.

Walvin, 206

Pictured to the right is the current Zong memorial, located at a local port in Black River, Jamaica. Currently, the memorial lacks all aspects of an effective memorial, with no imagery, hands on activities or experiences and a very brief summary. In order to promote the creation of an effective memorial, black historians and experts and local politicians/ academics should have the majority of input. Too often historical data used in the creation of memorials, especially in regards to African American history, is often obscured with little interest in incorporating viewpoints of those who have been afflicted. According to Johnson,

repeatedly: I felt like I was there. That is how we begin to derive strength from our history, with that essential empathetic link to the struggles of our forebears" (Hamburg, 76)

the Transatlantic slave trade, is often skewed or misrepresented

should implement a humanistic approach, taking into account first hand accounts such as Equiano, and incorporating hands on activities and imagery.

brushed under the rug

humanities

Granted, a memorial already exists yet it does not convey the brutality and importance of the Zong in a palpable way. 

River

Zong's arrival

In fact

ry.

In its importance, the Zong would be an ideal canidate to base a memorial to the transatlantic slave trade as it eventually led to its destruction.

Black Past

e.

influence arguably was on countries in the Caribbean

Zongs

(Walvin, 206). 

"What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder… The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard”

Walvin, 61

Black Past)

first mass killings

no wind

On the 29th of November, 1781, the Zong

anonymity,

This

The Forgotten Slave Trade

The history of the Middle Passage cannot be viewed in a vacuum.

This micro-scale approach to a macro-level historical injustice would reframe the enslaved as humans rather than capital-producing commodities.

lacing museums in these slave ports would counter this historical amnesia and focalize “subaltern pasts” (Chakrabarty 18)

These port cities cannot divorce themselves from their history; the lack of attention drawn to this local history exemplifies “nonhistory” and fosters the impression that their connection can be erased by the collective memory (Glissant 62).

This omission distances those involved with the Middle Passage from the blood indirectly or directly on their hands

The

Image: Douglas, Aaron. Into Bondage. 1936. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822003019823. 

each site would also include an individualized exhibit on the local area’s Middle Passage history and the stories of the slaves aboard the ships to these ports.

In contrast, story-driven memorializations of the Middle Passage offer retroactive empowerment by granting the slaves the agency they were systematically denied.

This

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

the digitalized form perpetuates the dehumanizing legacy of the data

hese inclusive intentions are obfuscated by the narrowed focus on data

The Middle Passage was a bridge between the familiar and the unknown, the past and an uncertain future, and, most deplorably, humanity and commodification.

Furthermore, it is time to acknowledge that past Black experiences are often tragically similar to those of the present.

Memorializing black experience in monuments has too long been done BY white people FOR white people as a means of easing guilt, and resistance to memorials that might reopen the wounds of this nation’s past is strong. 

mostly white populations at PWI–and why.

it is

the “second order violence” that comes from archive work? 

analyses

We cannot use data to re-commodify past enslaved populations by categorically imputing data points such as the likely geolocation of human remains.

Where Black Men are Missing" graph, helping to support the earlier claim that Black men

When memorializing the middle passage, it is pertinent that we do so as humans, not economists or data scientists.

These experiences

Mustakeem puts emphasis not on the abstraction of numbers but rather on enslaved persons and their experiences

Fuentes

s. This incorporation of experience in order to bring context to data can be thought of as humanistic analysis.

Using the tie between slavery in the past and race in the present, slavery can be understood as a type of language in modern discussions.

he perpetual impact of slavery on our nation is exemplified when Ira Berlin discusses how black actors taking on the role of enslaved peoples in a play affected their personal lives after shows.

These statistics beg the questions: Are Black people really even free in today’s society? If not, how do we combat the ways they are enslaved by modern institutions?

identify pervasive tendencies and structures that lend themselves to propagating narratives of the past within society, as opposed to using data to categorically define peoples based on characteristics

This map shows modern manifestations of Afro-Pessimism's existence in society.

The rest of this Story Map will address the mentioned superposition structures put in place by the slave trade onto the United State's post-slavery society.

While this word means different things to different people

nherent link between modern race relations and the country’s history of slavery,

make up a disproportionate amount of the institutions or organizations that fund such memorials.

The way in which academic institutions and formal organizations go about memorializing experience must change.

by nor for the people negatively impacted by the middle passage.

abstraction between experience and data

trade

PWI

digitization

This example goes to show that data without an accompanying humanistic analysis—an exploration of the world of the enslaved from their own perspective–is incapable of creating a full representation of experience

experience

Jessica Marie

data