I am honored by the Committee's request that I testify at this very important hearing on the Legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Chairman Conyer's efforts to raise awareness of this issue, and to promote the study of this issue through H.R. 40, are rightly celebrated. Thanks in large part to his efforts, state legislatures in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Alabama, have engaged in an investigation of, and apology for their sponsorship of the Slave Trade. These important developments have stimulated a national discussion of the role of slavery in American history and pose the difficult question of how to acknowledge and account for it in America's present. That discussion is one that H.R. 40 seeks to sponsor, and one that this legislature should support.

Despite being almost a century-and-a-half removed from slavery, and fifty years from de jure segregation, we are not very good at talking about race in America. In part, that is because we, as a public, are not very knowledgeable about that history. Even relatively recent incidents from the Jim Crow era have been deliberately hidden or forgotten.1 Yet there are still living the survivors of the race riots that swept the South and Midwest designed to rid or coerce them into submission whole communities of African Americans.2 Their voices are still discounted or outright silenced. One reason our civic discussion of race and racism is so stunted is that finding the means to talk about the history and legacy of slavery and segregation for America has hardly begun. It cannot properly start until we have some shared understanding of the still-hidden aspects of slavery and segregation upon which our community is based. Public institutions are at the forefront of recent initiatives to promote an informed and inclusive discussion of race and history in America. State legislatures, like those in Rosewood, Florida, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Greenwood, North Carolina, have convened commissions to investigate and report upon community-sponsored killings of African Americans.3 These innovative inquiries, explicitly modeled on the Civil Liberties Act of 19884 and H.R. 40,5 have sought to publicize and provide redress or closure for the citizens or descendants of state-sponsored racial violence. Various universities have sponsored studies to determine their own involvement with slavery and educate a state and national audience about their shared responsibilities.6 That research has led some of these institutions, including the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina, and the Episcopal Church have actually apologized for their ties to slavery.