Slave Trade Ship Exhibition Stirs Waves of Emotion

When Teryl Watkins learned that she had a shot at bringing to Los Angeles a major exhibition featuring artifacts from a slaving vessel that sank nearly 300 years ago, she was ecstatic.

But when she looked at the exhibit catalog, disappointment set in.

What bothered her, she said, was that organizers of the traveling display minimized the horror of the slave trade and favored an interpretation that focused on Europe and Europeans.

Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee consulted Cecil Fergerson, a former county museum curator, about what she should do.

He agreed with her assessment, but decided that “A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie” was worth mounting. He signed on as its local curator.

The exhibit is in its fourth week of a three-month run at a cultural complex on South Central Avenue that Watkins’ organization operates.

So far, about 1,200 people have viewed the Fergerson-curated version, one not envisioned by the Florida-based Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, which owns the artifacts and organized the exhibit.

Fergerson kept intact the artifacts, including Italian-made glass beads that were traded to Africans for African war captives, cannons and other armaments, rare English pewter, ceramic and glass bottles used by the ship’s crew, stoves, navigational instruments and sets of shackles, some tiny enough to have been used on children.

But instead of allowing visitors to take a self-guided tour, as the organizers planned, Fergerson and Watkins brought in volunteer docents, who in their presentations raise issues Fergerson contends were ignored.

Visitors also are given pamphlets that challenge some of the assertions made in the exhibit text, such as one that describes Africans and Europeans as “equal trade partners” in the trafficking of human beings.

Responding to an exhibit reference to Europe’s “Age of Exploration,” the pamphlet notes that the period was an “Age of Exploitation” for Africa and its people.

Fergerson incorporated into the display the works of local artists, an addition he says addresses the brutal aspects of the slave trade and its relationship to the conditions of black people today.

One board of text provided by the Florida organizers was turned toward a wall because it inaccurately refers to Africa as a country.

The portion of the exhibit that disturbed Fergerson and Watkins most--a replica of a section of the hold of a slave ship, with foam figures representing captured African men--could not be altered because of money constraints, Watkins said.

Fergerson contends that the replica does not accurately portray the packed conditions of the slave ship holds. Moreover, the figures are unshackled, which was unlikely, given the constant fear on slave ships of insurrections, he said.

“They look like they are on a cruise to the Caribbean in jockey shorts,” Fergerson said, referring to the figures.

Madeleine Burnside, executive director of the Key West-based maritime society that organized the exhibit and displayed it in Florida for six months before sending it on its 16-city tour, was dismayed when she heard of the complaints.

She defended the exhibit, saying its detractors expect it to be the definitive survey of the slave trade when it was designed solely to depict the conditions aboard the Henrietta Marie.

“It is the story of one particular ship that could be historically documented,” she said.

Burnside insisted that the Henrietta Marie story is atypical of the slave trade. The ship sank 35 miles off Key West in 1700 on its way back to Europe after it had delivered 188 captured Africans to a slave broker in Jamaica. The wreck was found in 1972 by a diver looking for sunken treasures. It was not fully excavated until the mid-1980s.

Brutal conditions that existed on most slave ships, Burnside said, were not present on the Henrietta Marie.

“The ship was not overcrowded because of the difficulty it had in obtaining slaves in Africa,” she said. Shackles were often taken off slaves once they were out of sight of land, Burnside said, adding that African scholars were consulted and they approved the exhibit and its text.

She acknowledged that the Los Angeles stop was not the first time criticisms similar to Fergerson’s had been raised.

Ramon Price, curator of the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago, where the exhibit was shown last, removed at least one section from the exhibit and added what Burnside termed inappropriate elements.

Price said he removed a replica depicting a scene from an African village because, in his estimation, it was misleading and amateurish.

He agreed with Fergerson that the replica of the ship hold presented a sanitized version of reality. As a consequence, Price added more figures to the Chicago exhibit to suggest cramped quarters and hid them behind a thick screen so the original figures, which he described as barely resembling humans, were less visible.

“In one area they asked you to try on [a replica of] shackles,” Price said. “Would you ask someone to sit in an electric chair on a tour of a prison?”

Price said the replica shackles remained in the Chicago exhibit, but no one was invited to try them on. He said the popularity of the exhibit doubled the number of visitors to the museum during its stay.

That had a great deal to do with the reverence for the exhibit’s subject, particularly among African Americans, and its alluring title, Price said.

Meanwhile, visitors to the exhibit in Watts were unaware of the controversy and seemed impressed by what they saw.

Thelma Williams, 72, who visited with fellow residents of Rosecrans Manor, a senior citizens apartment complex in Compton, said it drove home her knowledge of the slave trade.

“I knew about it,” she said, “but I couldn’t actually see it in my mind until I saw it in there.”