Shackles used during the slave trade are displayed at the Cape Coast Castle Museum in Cape Coast, Ghana, August 2010. Established as a fortress for the trade of gold and other valuable resources, the castle was later used as a dungeon for holding slaves befo re their transfer to the Americas. It is estimated that around 1 million slaves were transported from what is now Ghana to the Americas between the 1600s and the middle of the 19th century. (CNS photo / Nancy Wiechec)
by GSR Staff
"For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced."
- Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist (1817-1895), from an Independence Day speech given in Rochester, N.Y. on July 4, 1852 (a northern state where slavery was illegal, while approximately four million blacks were still enslaved in the U.S. South)
March 25 is the U.N. International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade