Brittany Binford, 18, of Clinton, Md., is a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, but Tuesday afternoon she laid head-to-toe with other young students on the deck of a British slave ship.
Binford and more than 200 other students gathered on the university’s campus to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The students were packed into the outline of a British slave ship marked on the grassy university mall as a guitarist played “Amazing Grace.”
Just as slaves were forced into tight quarters during months-long trips from Africa to the New World, students packed into the roughly 100-by-25-foot mock ship to simulate their experience. Filled plastic bags strewn among the students represented the estimated 25 percent of slaves who did not survive the journey.
“This may be just a trash bag with newspapers in it, but I’m seeing a body,” Binford said.
Reactions such as Binford’s were what Teresa Leslie, an organizer of this “artistic expression” and a university lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, intended.
“Everybody is talking about Jamestown,” said Leslie, of the Virginian colony’s 400th anniversary this year. “But no one is talking about those who endured that trip.”
While the British prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade on May 1, 1807, helped to slow the practice, it did not stop it. The trade continued arguably until the 1860s and slavery in the Americas did not cease until 1888.
