The Tracing Center was founded in 2009 to build on our work in producing the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.

Our mission is to create greater awareness of the full extent of the nation’s complicity in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and to inspire acknowledgement, dialogue and active response to this history and its many legacies. We do this for the purpose of racial justice, healing, and reconciliation, for the benefit of all.

We accomplish our mission by engaging people of all backgrounds in programming that blends the historical and the contemporary, the personal and the social, “head” and “heart.” As the program area links above indicate, we offer programs aimed at general audiences, as well as programming designed especially for educational settings, communities of faith, public history institutions, and workplaces.

“True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past.”

– Elizabeth Eckford (Little Rock Nine)