This Saturday, July 19, beginning at approximately 4:45pm (eastern daylight time; this program plays live everywhere–at 1:45pm pacific time, for instance) Book TV (C-Span 2) will broadcast a panel discussion live from the Harlem Book Fair: From the Door of No Return: The Bicentennial of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the U.S.
The panel discussion takes place at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, NY.
As author of Inheriting The Trade, I am one of four authors on the panel. I will join Rosanne Marion Adderley (New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-century Caribbean), Sylviane A. Diouf (Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Last Africans Brought to America), and David Eltis (Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database). The panel will be moderated by Howard Dodson, director of The Schomburg Center, and author of Ideology, Identity, and Assumptions.
From the HBF website: Although it went unnoticed, the year 2008 marks the bicentennial of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. This American amnesia stands in stark contrast to the yearlong commemorations – costing $40 million-that took place in Great Britain in 2007 to commemorate the bicentennial of the British abolition. This missed opportunity perpetuates the general ignorance about a central aspect of American history. This panel will provide the audience with the latest scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition, including numbers and ethnicities. It will explore the little-known illegal slave trade to the United States that continued for half a century after 1808; the re-Africanization of the Caribbean with the arrival of Africans liberated from the slave ships; and the northern involvement in the trade. This will be an extraordinary opportunity to bring to the public the latest information on and analysis of this fundamental part of U.S. history that still has immense resonance today.
Based on my past experience with Book TV, the timing can be flexible. So if you plan to record this broadcast, I’d recommend adding 15 minutes to both the start and finish times.