December 2011 newsletter
Posted December 27th, 2011 by James DeWolf PerryCategory: News and Announcements
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The Tracing Center is pleased to announce that our founding executive director, Katrina Browne, has taken on a new role as our director of ideas and external affairs. This shift will allow her to dedicate her time to public activities, content development, and other work on behalf of the organization.
The board of directors has hired James Perry to be our new executive director. James was the founding board chair and president of the Tracing Center and has been centrally involved, since 1999, with Traces of the Trade, for which he shared an Emmy nomination.
We have an op-ed today at CNN.com on how to understand the relationship of the North to slavery and race on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.
The essay, written by Executive Director Katrina Browne and Managing Director James DeWolf Perry, builds on our ongoing work around the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the enduring historical myths which blind us to the legacy of slavery and race today.
Here is how the op-ed begins:
This week marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a war that redefined national and regional identities and became an enduring tale of noble resistance in the South and, for the rest of the country, a mighty moral struggle to erase the stain of slavery.
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. By April 14, the fort had fallen and the war had begun in earnest.
By the time Fort Sumter was again in Union hands, following the evacuation of Charleston in the closing days of the war in 1865, the war had become the bloodiest in the nation’s history — and has not been surpassed. Yet the relationship of the North to the South, and to slavery before and during the war is not at all what we remember today. The reality is that both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation’s “peculiar institution.”
To read the full article, go to “Civil War’s dirty secret about slavery” at CNN.com.
On Katrina Browne’s recent visit to Grand Rapids sponsored by the West Michigan AmeriCorps Collaborative, she was interviewed by Fox 17 News. Segments One and Two are both available on Fox 17’s web site.
Here is our first newsletter:
In April, our executive director, Katrina Browne, was invited to Bermuda to screen Traces of the Trade and to facilitate dialogues on the history and legacy of slavery and the slave trade.
The following video, “Discussing the Trade,” was created by local filmmaker Alex Dill at one of these dialogues. In October, this video aired on local television in Bermuda, along with daily broadcasts of Traces of the Trade, as part of follow-up programming organized by the Tracing Center and Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda (CURB).
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North has won an award, for “Best in Festival,” at the Nov. 1-5, 2010 International Film Festival South Africa in Kwa Zulu Natal.
Traces of the Trade was directed by our executive director, Katrina Browne, with co-directors Alla Kovgan and Jude Ray.