Connecticut played a big role in slavery and the Holocaust...but most of us don't know about it.
First, a powerful New London merchant and ship owner sailed his ships to West Africa and the Caribbean for more than 40 years during the late 18th century to trade in slaves whose labor lined the pockets of his most respected family.
Dudley Saltonstall was the grandson of a Connecticut governor, a wealthy New London merchant, and part of a network of traders who collectively and legally captured roughly 63,000 African slaves every year between 1751 and 1775, in a well-traveled circuit that took them from New England to Africa to the Caribbean and back.
Anne Farrow is a Connecticut author whose new book, "Logbooks: Connecticut's Slave Ships and Human Memory," tells the unknown side of the Connecticut slave trade through logbooks kept by Dudley while sailing from New London to the West African island of Bence in 1757.
Almost 200 years later, in 1937, the German Bund purchased land in Southbury to establish a Nazi training camp two years before Hitler invaded Poland. Unfazed, angry Southbury residents banded together to chase them out of their town, creating laws too cumbersome for the Bund to overcome. Southbury was the only town in the nation to say no to the Nazis.
Both stories recount events long forgotten - erased from our collective memory like the dead who once bore witness.
Today, a Connecticut author and a documentary filmmaker talk about why it's important to remember.
GUESTS:
- Anne Farrow is a journalist and the author of “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery" and most recently, “Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory”
- Scott Sniffen is a Southbury resident and filmmaker whose documentary, “Home of the Brave: When Southbury Said Not to the Nazis,” premieres on CPTV next Friday, November 21 at 8:30 pm and rebroadcast Sunday, November 23 at 3:00 pm
