ICYMI: Charleston Officially Apologizes for Role in Trade of Enslaved Africans

Nearly half of all Africans sold into bondage in the United States came through Charleston. The city council aimed to account for that history with a resolution passed on Juneteenth.

On Juneteenth (June 19), the Charleston, South Carolina, city council gathered in a building constructed by enslaved Africans to formally apologize for the port city’s role in the trade of enslaved peoples.
The Post and Courier reports that city council members heard pleas for an official apology from many Black faith leaders and activists before voting 7-5 to issue an official apology. The resolution recognizes the fact that the city’s economic vitality depended on “more than 15.5 million Indigenous Peoples and Africans” who built the city’s infrastructure and culture (including cuisine and arts) while enslaved. It also acknowledges the history of anti-Black oppression after the legal abolition of slavery, right up to the massacre of nine Black members of the city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by White supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015.

“The world is looking,” council member William Dudley Gregorie, one of the architects of the resolution, told The Post and Courier. “This document…apologizes for the atrocities of the past.”


“And what reminds us of that is what’s going on right now with Brown children who are being torn from their parents and put in detention camps,” Gregorie noted during the public comment period, as quoted by Charleston City Paper. “I hope you heard me, and it sounds familiar. Very familiar.”

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“I hope you heard me, and it sounds familiar. Very familiar.”