A personal 'Voyage' to Washington

The author, Liz Milewicz 09PhD (center), helps a visitor navigate the Voyages database during Destinations: Washington, DC on November 18. Voyages is an interactive, innovative, web-based resource that documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries. Milewicz serves as Voyages project manager.

Learn about Voyages by the numbers

See the photos from Destinations: Washington, DC.

After being sniffed by security dogs and emptying our pockets down to loose string and chewing gum wrappers, we trudged up two flights of marble staircases, carrying cardboard boxes, easels, and laptops.

Breathless, we arrived at the Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room, then gasp again. The room was awe-inspiring—lofty ceiling, gilded moldings, crystal chandeliers—and already filled with people busily preparing for our November 18 presentation of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Clangs and bangs bounced off the walls and ceiling as the tech company assembled a 12-by-9-foot projection screen and the catering staff lined up chairs. Stepping carefully around ethernet cables and electrical wires duct-taped to the floor, my Emory co-workers Julie Delliquanti and Julie Braun unpacked and set up the exhibit posters, while Nafees Khan 10PhD and I plugged in and checked (and rechecked) the computer kiosks to be used for searching the nearly 35,000 slaving voyages recorded in the Voyages database.

Two hours later, boxes and wires and supports were hidden away under draped fabrics, black velvet and glossy gold, the room communicating an atmosphere both celebratory and solemn. Along the walls, oversized posters depicted Africans liberated from slave ships, statistical graphs, and maps charting the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were gathered.

As the most comprehensive resource on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and available freely online for public research and contribution, the Voyages database is a powerful tool for discovering the global and personal impact of this once legitimate business, and a growing memorial to the over 12 million enslaved Africans whose lives were devastated or destroyed.

I don’t recall when guests started arriving, only that one moment I was surfing through the database with a few early arrivals and the next I found myself surrounded by conversations and questions—one couple responded to an image of slaves crowded on a ship, another debated the reasons behind Brazil’s overwhelming portion of the traffic. Another woman engaged me directly in a discussion of the northern United States’ role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Before long, President Jim Wagner stepped to the podium to begin the evening’s presentation. I sat in a corner behind the kiosk tables, doing last-minute checks of the slides and transitions for David Eltis’ talk (the Emory professor is the driving force behind the database and one of the world’s foremost experts in the material).

Soon, the second speaker, Georgia Rep. John Lewis began to speak. Maybe it was the cadence of his words or the words themselves that moved me, but I stopped what I was doing and stood up to listen, transported. I felt as though I was church, called to witness centuries of suffering and urged to take action. Lewis’ words set a tone for the rest of the evening: reverence for this history of struggle, and praise for efforts to reach beyond ourselves to accomplish something greater.

Watching and listening to Eltis’ presentation later that evening, I was reminded again of how much work and time, and how many people, helped bring us together that night in Washington, and helped bring Voyages and the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the public.

My role in this effort is a blink in comparison—a couple of years spent managing resources, schedules, and workloads for our motley team of historians, programmers, designers, educators, and more, versus the decades the historians themselves spent visiting archives, collecting data from fragile documents. Working with this project afforded me a rare view of how much digital scholarship in general, and this database in particular, relies upon collaboration: from scholars like David Eltis sharing and merging their decades of archival research into a single, searchable repository, to independent researchers and members of the public contributing their own historical research and expanding the database; from programmers building and maintaining the code base, to institutions backing up and sharing this data to help ensure its preservation.

Later that evening, as I walked among the crowds of people orbiting laptops and sharing their reflections on the history of the slave trade, I meet a woman who, through genealogy, had been conducting her own multidecade research into the history of slavery.

Excitedly, she talks about the connections the Voyages website shows between Africa and the Americas, and the significance this has for people seeking to discover their heritage. I was impressed by how long she had been involved in her own research into African-American history and how many people and organizations she had worked with along the way. I was especially taken by her quick understanding that the database is not a tool for charting one’s personal ancestry but for tracing the history of peoples and movements and connections across space and time.

As we talked, I remember thinking she would have made a great member of our project team. Now, I realize she is part of that team already, as one of the many scholars worldwide who are part of this larger project to uncover the African and American connections forged by the slave trade.

When I joined the Voyages project, I learned it was, foremost, an effort to make the database freely available online, to make it accessible to the public—a public that wants to know more about this history and will help build that knowledge by contributing their own research to the database. The Voyages team had its own role to play in creating the database and website and making it available. How the database continues to grow, influence, and instruct depends a great deal on people who are personally committed to discovering as much as they (and we) can about this history, and sharing it with others.

As the last guests slowly made their way out the door, the buzz of conversation faded away, replaced by the clinking of glasses and bottles as the caterers began to clean up. Our moment of celebration was over; it was time to get back to work. I walked over to the kiosks and started unplugging cords.—Liz Milewicz 09PhD