I will never forget the woman I met after giving a talk in New Orleans, one of the most brutal slave-trading cities in our country. Almost ninety years old, she came up and hugged me, wiping her eyes as she thanked me for helping birth a project that had allowed her to release the shame that comes with being told that the only thing Black people have contributed to this country is our brute labor. “I always knew the truth,” she told me. “But I didn’t have the facts of what happened.”
