In a most unusual way, PBS is about to remind us of an anniversary this nation should never have experienced – and should not be allowed to forget.

On June 24, it will air “Traces of the Trade,” a documentary on New England filmmaker Katrina Browne’s discovery of her family’s past as the biggest slave trader in American history. Coming 200 years after the American slave trade – though not slavery – was ended, this program will make viewers aware of the largely unacknowledged truth of the role Northerners played in this human tragedy.

The documentary is a soft-spoken but intensely worded trek through the history of the DeWolf family of Bristol, R.I., a town that would rather be known for the oldest continuous Independence Day parade it holds than for once widely benefiting from the African slave trade.

“Everybody in town lived off of slavery,” Kevin Jordan, a retired professor from Bristol’s Roger Williams University, says in the documentary. “The boat makers, the iron makers who made the shackles, the coopers who made the barrels to hold the rum, the distillers who took the molasses and sugar and made it into rum. So literally the whole town was dependent on the slave trade.”

The patriarch of Bristol’s slave trading family was Mark Anthony DeWolf – the first of three generations of DeWolfs who traded rum in Africa for people, who in turn were taken to Cuba where they were forced to work on plantations or held hostage until sold into slavery in other parts of the American hemisphere. DeWolf began the family business in 1769.

For many Americans, slavery is thought to be a Southern outrage. But as Browne discovers, it was largely the product of Northern businesses treating the people they hauled away from Africa with no more regard than the barrels of rum they traded for these slaves, or the coffee and sugar they got in payment for them in Cuba.

Without the willingness of Northerners to traffic in humans, the South would have had few Africans to enslave.

The great irony here is that the role of people like the DeWolfs has largely been ignored or underreported by historians. That’s a mistake that needs to be corrected – not to demonize them but to show the nation that people far beyond the South benefited from slavery.

That was certainly true in Bristol, where DeWolf sold shares in his slave trading business to townspeople.

While Congress ended the slave trade in 1808, slavery lasted another 57 years until states ratified the Constitution’s 13th Amendment. The DeWolfs managed to surreptitiously continue their business until 1820.

In the documentary, Browne and nine other members of the DeWolf family tree do a lot of soul-searching over the role their ancestors played in the slave trade – and what, if anything, they should do to assuage their guilt and repair the damage. They visited Bristol; they went to the West African nation of Ghana, where the DeWolfs got most of their slaves; and they traveled to Cuba to see the plantation their relatives built with profits from the slave trade.

Most poignant were their efforts to connect with the Africans and African-Americans they met in Ghana – and to extract a measure of understanding (if not forgiveness) from the documentary’s black co-producer, who briefly became a part of Browne’s story.

Coming in the midst of a campaign in which Barack Obama is on the verge of becoming the first black to win the presidential nomination of a major political party, “Traces of the Trade” is a stark reminder of how far this nation has come – and the distance it must yet go to live up to its great promise.

DeWayne Wickham is a columnist for Gannett News Service. His e-mail address is