So christian green is a newspaper journalist, the author of the Devils Half Acre the untold story of how one woman liberated the south, the most notorious slave jail, and the New York Times bestseller of some things must something must be done about Prince Edward county, which receives a library of virginia literary award for nonfiction and the peoples choice award and for two decades, greene has worked for several newspapers, including the boston globe, the san diego uniontribune, the Richmond Times dispatch. And greene also holds a masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy school. She currently resides in richmond, virginia, with her two daughters and ben raines is an Award Winning environmental journalist, filmmaker and charter captain who lives in fairhope, alabama. Range is the author of the last slave ship the true story of how the clotilde was found, her descendants and extraordinaire ari reckoning and raines wrote and directed the underwater forest. An Award Winning film explores a 70,000 year old Cypress Forest found off the gulf coast and wrote and produced the pbs documentary americas amazon the mobile tents for delta and raines earlier work saving americas amazon the threat to our nations most biodiverse river system speaks to the environmental diversity about them as aquatic systems. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much, danielle, for being here. Well get started. So both of your works sit at the intersection of yourself and domestic slave trade. How did you develop these projects . What drew you to following mary lincolns life and legacy and to begin searching for the goodwill that. Thank you so much, all of you, for being here. And thanks to cspan for being here. And i just want to say thank you so much to the other organizers of this amazing festival. Its just been a wonderful weekend and such a great introduction to authors and new books and music. And im just very appreciative to be hosted here in nashville and to be able to attend such a neat event to. I was working as a reporter in richmond, virginia. Im from virginia and i had just moved back after being gone for. After college, i became a reporter and was a reporter around the country. And i had just moved back after having two kids and going to grad school in boston. I wanted to be closer to my family and i was also working on my first book, which was about my hometown. Something must be done about or accounting, but i thought i should take a reporting job at that time so that i could get to know richmond better. Probably because my kids were so young, it was like easier to be at work as a reporter than home to toddlers. So one day the richmond reporter was out covering Something Else and my editor asked me to cover the story of this african Burial Ground that activists were asking to be preserved. They were claiming that this part of the city, this plot, was a Burial Ground and it was actually covered in a parking lot that the State University of Virginia Commonwealth University was using as a parking lot. And so i really didnt know anything about like that Burial Ground or the area where the Burial Ground was located, which was a slave trading district in richmond. I knew that richmond was, you know, a slave trading town, but i knew very little about the history. And so i was just doing a little background reading before i went to this assignment. And i came across an article on the Smithsonian Magazine from 2008 about an archeology article dig there had been done and had located the remains or the, i guess, the foundation of what was called lumpkin jail also known as the Devils Half Acre and it was a slave jail that had been run by the slave trader named Robert Lumpkin. And i didnt know what slave jails were and i didnt know really about slave traders. And so i was really interested in this story of this jail that was considered one of the most brutal slave jails in america. But there was a couple of sentences in the story that really stuck with me. And the story described mary lumpkin as the mother of robert lincolns children and as an enslaved woman who had been, quote, chosen as his wife or im sorry, not chosen as i quote, acted as his wife. And although i didnt know that much about the slave trade, i knew that enslaved people, black people, couldnt marry whites at that time in virginia. And so i thought, what does that mean . Acting as someones wife . And there are a couple of other sentences that said that she had educated the children and that they had been freed and that she had turned this jail into a school for free. Black men after the civil war. And it had eventually become or had been the foundation of Virginia Union university, one of the first historically black colleges and universities in america. So that story stayed with me while i worked on and i sold the penn state county book, and i wrote it and when i turned that book in my thoughts returned to mary lumpkin again. And so she had she really just stayed with me during that time. I tried to send her away because she didnt provide any documents she had very you know, i was like, you kind of have to you know, he wanted me to write this book so bad, but she really stayed with me. And i thought because of the way that i was taught the history of enslavement in virginia, i thought her story was just different than any story of an enslaved person i had known, especially an enslaved woman. And i thought that her story well, because it was intentionally a race, deserved to be there, to be told, you know, deserved to be widely known. So thats kind of what drew me to the story. So my involvement with the clotilda, which was the last ship to bring enslaved people to the United States, started with a phone call from a former colleague at the newspaper i was working at who had since moved on and was managing the Hunting Department at Bass Pro Shops and he called me up and said, i think you should look for the clotilda. And i said, is it missing. I didnt know the story. I knew, you know, in mobile you drive around and theres a mural of the clotilda and you know, its the last ship that brought enslaved people into the country. But i didnt understand the nuance that it came in in 1860 and it had been illegal to bring enslaved people in to the country since 1808. But this illegal trade kept going. And so the clotilda was the last ship to come in before the civil war. So my friend, the Bass Pro Shop scott tells me this story and that when the ship arrived, they hid it, they burned it to disappear it because the federal agents were already looking for it, because the guy who paid for the whole trip had been blabbing, the whole time the ship sailed to africa. So . So they burned the ship the night it came in. And people have been looking for it for the next hundred and 60 years. So my friend tells me to look for it. And i said, thats ridiculous. Its like looking for buried pirate treasure. Theres no way im going to find it. But he knew i had made a documentary and written a book about the big swamp, where the ship was burned, which i named americas amazon. Its actually the mobile tents on delta and so we get off the phone and i sit down at the computer and typed in clotilda and i read all the history thats available on the internet. Before i got up, i had ordered all the relevant history books that involve the clotilda, and i started my research right then. And you know, if you read the book, youll discover i found the wrong ship first, which was something of an international embarrassment. But i went on and persisted and managed to find the right ship. But thats when i really began to understand the clotilda, because the people who came on it started a community in alabama called africa town thats still there today. They actually bought land from their former enslavers. They built a school for the kids because White Alabama wouldnt build them one. They built a church and this community persisted. And so, you know what i came to realize about the clotilda was this is sort of the origin story for the african diaspora, and thats what makes it so important. I mention that they came in at 1860. Well, by that time, on the eve of the civil war, almost no enslaved people in the United States had been born in africa. They had not experienced the Middle Passage. They didnt know what life in africa was like. They hadnt experienced all those aspects. And so the stories of all the people prior to them, you know, from the 1600s up to 1808 had been lost because no one was recording them. So the story of these people on this ship, because they came so late, was very well documented. Beginning at the end of the civil war. You know, there were newspaper articles about the clotilda starting in 1860 when it came in and this went on. The man who brought the ship in was was treated as a swashbuckling hero for having done this. He was interviewed dozens of times until he died in 1892 by things like the New York Times and harpers bazaar. But every time they would come interview him, they would go interview the africans. And so the africans became very famous. The last one who started africa town, cudjoe lewis, who was the subject of Zora Neale Hurston, spoke. He lived until 1935, so he was interviewed dozens of times. As were about ten of his fellow shipmates for a book that came out in 1940, which is what attracted Zora Neale Hurston. So from the mouths of the people on the ship, we have what their lives were like before they were captured. We have what african slave raids were like. We have what the Middle Passage was like. We have what their time as enslaved people was like and then their time living in, you know, reconstruction south in the jim crow era. Theres no record like it in the global history of enslavement. And so their story becomes a proxy for everyone whose ancestors arrived here in a hold of a ship who cant know, you know, their histories begin at the plantation. There are people were enslaved on and so this tells them you know, it speaks to the longing and the heartache the enslaved people who were brought here had their fears for what had happened to their families left behind or sent other places. It encapsulates the whole story in a way nothing else can, you know and so we have these hundred and ten voices from the past speaking for 12 Million People. And that brings us to our next question, really well. So, ben, your work speaks to joel know hurstons bear when it came out 2018 sylvia do dream of africa of alabama in 2009 Natalie Robertson is the last slave ship clotilda in the making of africa down to 2008. How does your work further deepen the conversations with these scholars have started well. So you know, when when Natalie Robertson started her work as a ph. D. Student, the clotilda story was just a footnote in history. And then sylvia and juice book, both excellent books. She actually managed to trace through things that the africans said in all these interviews and things that american born blacks witnessed and described in other interviews, she managed to trace the people on the clotilda back to individual villages in africa and figure out different regions and tribes and customs and so, you know, i came in and found the ship which is the other leg of this story. You know, we have the histories preserved by those women, and now we have the ship, you know, the vessel that brought these people here. And so that that was a big connection and step. And what i tried to do was kind of synthesize these earlier works. And i went to africa as part of the book and research there and found something that really surprised me. We have this new movie, the woman king, out right now with viola davis. Its based on the people who captured the people on the clotilda. And i have not seen the movie yet. I need to see it. But these were wicked. This was perhaps one of the most brutal regimes in world history. And you can see that there today in benin. So the diamond empires who captured the people on the clotilda and today the diamonds are the modern day fawn tribe in benin are the dominant ethnic group. But all the tribes they captured were also in modern day benin. And so you can tell in in benin, looking at people on the street by facial scarification that things what tribe they were in whether they were the capturing tribe, the diamonds or one of the dozens of tribes, the diamonds enslaved. And its leading to a rift in the country thats been building for hundreds of years. Theyre very worried about a genocide like rwanda, which was just a tribal resentment gone awry. And so the government there is actually doing something similar. What were working on here with reconciliation, you know, that part of that is reparations and all that thats going on there where the government is trying to confront this history and pull it all together. So, you know, one of the things the clotilda story shows is these hurts are generational, the legacy of this ship is haunting three groups of people still to this day, you know, the mayor family, the villains of the story who paid for the clotilda to go to africa. They still wont speak publicly about their involvement in any way because theyre embarrassed of what their ancestors did and theyre hiding from, you know, owning up to that. I interviewed people in africa down who had spent generations denying they were connected to the clotilda africans because that was, you know, they had been sort of brainwashed through tarzan movies and society to believe it was bad to be connected to anything. Africa. And then in africa, the people there are hiding in some measure were from this legacy because of their involvement in sending fellow africans abroad. And so you know, sometimes the only way these kind of things can get brought to light is literally to bring the big, hulking husk of this ship to light and make people confront it and their involvement. To that end, i will say the ship for years after i found it is still buried in the mud in an alabama swamp, which is totally inappropriate. This is an internationally historic artifact that should be dug up. The state of alabama should be chastised and taken to task for not having done really anything so far to move the ball. Theyve done very basic, preliminary archeology. So, you know, i would appeal to the nation. This is one of only 13 slave ships ever found. Its the only one ever found that participated in the american trade. And it tells the story of these hundred and ten people in a way nothing else can. So it should be on display in a World Class Museum in africa town. The community of these people followed and you know, whatever we need to do to get alabama out of the way, lets do it. And i say that as a native son. Can i can i play off of that . So the story of mary lumpkin is also buried in plain sight, right . I was telling you about the archeological dig that dug up lumpkin jail. Well, they had to dig 15 feet in order to to find those remains. But the foundation of pumpkins jail property, half of it is under interstate 95. And the other half is in this little green patch surrounded by a parking lot like state parking lots. And richmond and the dig was in 2008. And guess what . They they covered it up because they had to protect it from the elements. So it was once there was once a creek running through there. And so water was pouring into the site and it was winter and it was in danger of freezing. So they covered it back up to protect it. And i remember, though, these words stuck with me. The arc archeologist who found it said he thought hed come back a year later, you know, to have them doing some kind of amazing work, to display this, to the public so that people could walk where mary lumpkin walked and they could walk where thousands of enslaved people walked before or after sale to the lower south and it still is buried today. You know, its still surrounded by parking lots. And there are just three little metal markers that tell the story of lincolns jail and of mary lumpkin and a few other, you know, little markers around town that tell the story of the domestic slave trade out of richmond. But richmond was the second biggest slave trading city next to new orleans. You know, we shipped an 1840, virginia shipped half of all interstate trade trades were made from virginia. So half of all people going to the lower south came from virginia. But yet and we had this amazing, you know, archeological find, there are very few slave trading sites left in america. You know, if you go looking for slavery, museums, places that tell the story of enslavement through inside peoples eyes, there are none that that really there are very few that still exist. And this is one of them. And to think that richmond, you know, really hasnt made much progress in trying to tell this story, its its very similar to what you said. Theyve made some steps. They preserved some of the land around lumpkin jail that was part of the larger slave trade there. There were other lots of other slave jails there, but its still covered up, you know, and im like, i going even be alive when this, like, you know, when the story finally gets told in the form of the museum, at the very least, there needs to be a memorial that tells the story. And i id love to see a museum so that rich richmond, which you know, is known for celebrating confederate generals with all its monuments, could be known for for being a truth telling city, for being a city that like that told the truth and all of its, you know, and all the tragedy. But that this rich history of so many people who are impacted by the trade there. Absolutely. So putting those to those stories, the narrative of confederate excellence in your mind . Yeah. Is it better . I guess so. Putting the stories of confederate excellence in conversati