, a program of the , seeks to heal the persistent wounds of racism related to the legacy of American slavery. The name of the organization harkens to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech in which he states his dream that “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” I am descended from slave owners and for the last four years have been working with the descendants of the people my family enslaved to bring about racial healing between our families and within their community.

When I began my quest to determine if my family had owned slaves, I initially focused on slavery alone and my family’s involvement in it. But when I discovered descendants of my family’s slaves, I quickly learned that racial wounds inflicted during the Civil Rights era were much more important to them than any scars left from slavery. They had been denied equal educational opportunities and had been terrorized for demanding change. If I were to do something to nurture healing, I would need to address these more modern wounds.

Unequal access to education is a legacy of slavery. Most slave owners barred their slaves from being educated because they thought education could lead to insurrection. After the Civil War, this reluctance to provide a proper education to African Americans continued. Many U.S. communities offered schooling to African Americans but in separate facilities with inferior resources.

This is exactly the situation that the descendents of my family’s slaves experienced. Betty and James Kilby attended segregated schools in Warren County, Virginia. After 8th grade, there was no local high school for them. Their father, James W. Kilby, sought the help of the NAACP in filing suit to open the local high school to his children. This was 1958, four years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

When the courts ruled in the Kilbys’ favor, the Governor of Virginia closed Warren County High School to prevent its integration. The Kilbys received nightly death threats on the phone. Their house was shot at and their farm animals poisoned. I cannot imagine the fear this created. Eventually the Federal court ordered the school reopened. Betty and James Kilby and 21 other African American children entered the school for the first time on February 18, 1959.

On learning of this history, I was at once proud of my Kilby cousins and ashamed of what Warren County and Virginia leaders had done to them. I searched for ways that I could help them heal from these wounds. My cousin James Kilby has formed a group called the Historical Education Movement (HEM) to honor his father’s work to integrate the local high school. He welcomed me to join and I worked by his side to petition the current school board to name the former high school after his father. We were not successful in that effort but we were able to convince the school system to allow us to host a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of the school in February 2009.

After James expressed an interest in hosting a “community conversation on race,” I applied for funding from Coming to the Table to organize such a dialogue. It included both African Americans and whites from the community, many of whom had experienced the desegregation events first hand. At the end of the dialogue, the group came up with an action plan to foster healing from those wrenching events.

Two important action items were to support erection of a historic marker at the school and to host a reconciliation event in the community. These were both accomplished with the dedication ceremony for the marker on June 8, 2011, as documented in local TV coverage: .

Through these actions, I believe some healing has begun. James, Betty, and I have shared our family histories. We have worked together to honor their father and their family’s bravery during school desegregation. We have reached across the racial divide, inviting others to join in dialogue. And we have become friends. In that, I see progress towards racial healing and reconciliation in our families and in the community.

Related stories, with more photos:

• ; An earlier telling of these circumstances, also written by Phoebe

[In addition to the important work described here,  (GC ’04), is the Development Associate for ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.]

(CTTT) is on the cusp of becoming a national movement. Thanks to an infusion of funding from the Kellogg Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, CTTT will expand over the next three years beyond its current occasional gathering of the descendants of slaveholders and enslaved people.

On a national basis, CTTT will be seeking to address the historical legacy of slavery and to show ways of healing the wounds remaining from that legacy.

Coming to the Table began as a pilot event on January 2006, centering around descendants who had ancestors who were linked by an enslaved/slaveholder relationship. In this first meeting, many of the participants were already known to each other, but CTTT enabled them to deepen their relationships.
“The pilot event provided important information about the value of such gatherings,” says Amy Potter Czajkowski, CTTT director. “It helped us learn how to create a place where people could be open and honest as well as feel safety and support.”

Between 2006 and 2009, CTTT was able to tap into resources on trauma awareness and resilience assembled for EMU’s STAR program and to adapt them toward addressing the society-wide trauma inflicted by the practice of slavery.

“We don’t agree with some people’s attitude that ‘it happened a long time ago; it is not relevant,’” says Czajkowski. “We have to know where our social problems come from. We have to start talking about parts of our history that many people would rather forget, because it still has an impact on all of us.”

Sha Jackson, who holds a master’s degree in journalism, joined CTTT in August (’09) to create the project’s website and to run its web-based communications for sharing life stories. “A lot of the research that we are doing in Coming to the Table deals with how historical things might have been transferred to our current lives unbeknownst to us,” she says.

Participants in CTTT share stories about family connections and events that might otherwise be lost. Betty Kilby Baldwin (formerly Fisher), a civil rights activist, told of her children’s surprise in reading her book Wit, Will & Walls (2002) and learning of the abuse their mother endured as one of the first to integrate the previously white high school in Front Royal, Virginia.

“We must first know what happened and how it inflicted harms that continue to this day. Then we can determine together what we must do to put things right,” says Czajkowski.

Kellogg contributed a two-year grant of $400,000 to CTTT. The Fetzer Institute is providing $445,000 over three years. The funding is intended to support the program’s mission to “acknowledge, understand and heal the persistent wounds of the institution of slavery and its aftermath, strive for racial reconciliation and a more unified, just and truthful society.”

Jackson’s revamped CTTT website and the expanded plans for CTTT will be officially unveiled in conjunction with Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2010. Watch the CJP website – 
 – for details.

I was awed and humbled by my 2008 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) session at ��ݮ���� (EMU) where I met, studied, and reflected with students from 46 countries. I spent most of my week with a group of people who share a unique connection to historic slavery in the United States. Almost all of us are descended from the enslaved, the enslavers, and the slave traders; all are committed to confronting, and helping, people – ourselves and others – heal from the legacy of slavery.

In this special SPI session, called Coming to the Table, I joined 15 others to consider and mourn the lingering damage we have inherited – collectively and individually – as a result of slavery. We also explored potential paths toward healing. It wasn’t my first Coming to the Table experience. My first was in January 2006, where I first met white and black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and other families connected to historic slavery. One of the Jefferson descendants was David Works, whose love and transparency was evident even then.

It was more palpable this time, because David had recently experienced severe trauma and was clearly on a healing journey. On December 9, 2007 – just six months before coming to SPI – David’s family was leaving their New Life Church in Colorado Springs when a 24-year-old man went on a rampage and began shooting people in the church parking lot. David and his wife Marie lost two beloved daughters – 18-year-old Stephanie and 16-year-old Rachel – in this attack. David was also shot twice by the gunman.

David shared with us that he didn’t know that Stephanie had been shot and died until he was in the recovery room after his own surgery. Later that night while in the ICU he learned that Rachel had succumbed to her wounds. “As a father and as a Christian, I was trying to sort this through in my mind and my heart,” David said. “I remembered the snail image of the victim/oppressor cycle (a trauma-healing graphic that was introduced at our 2006 Coming to the Table session), and I told myself: ‘I can choose to lose my mind and go down the path of anger and retribution, or I can use the tools I’ve been given and my theology to find something good in this, to break the cycle. I can use this to teach the rest of my family.’ It will not honor Stephanie and Rachel to be angry and bitter about this.” *

David said the grief his family members are experiencing is messy, unpredictable, and may never go away. It is unique to each individual. Yet David, Marie, and their two remaining daughters – 19-year-old Laurie (Stephanie’s twin) and 12-year-old Grace – chose not to go to a place of vengefulness.

Less than a month after the shooting, David and Marie agreed to meet with the Murrays, the parents of the young man, Matthew Murray, who killed their daughters and injured David. In a pastor’s office at the New Life Church where the shootings occurred, the four parents hugged and cried together. Earlier the Murrays had met with the families of two other victims of Matthew’s shootings at another church site. Afterward the Murrays issued a statement: “Thanks to God, these remarkable families and their pastors and churches, healing and reconciliation have begun.”

As David showed us by his example, a key component to healing is understanding trauma and its potentially infinite, destructive cycles. Natural responses to trauma include reacting with aggression and/or feeling like a victim. The “survivor/victim” response can result in a cycle of physiological changes. Instinctual reactions include fight, flight or freeze. We feel shock, injury, denial, anxiety, and fear.

The “aggressor/enemy” response can result from seeing one’s self as victimized. We may feel shame and humiliation. We can develop a good-versus-evil narrative and dehumanize and demonize the enemy. If I eliminate the human qualities of those who harmed me, revenge is easier.

We may justify using violence and see it as redemptive. We may decide to pursue our own needs, even at the expense of others. There may be social and cultural pressures to do so. We act in selfdefense and believe we are restoring honor and justice.

Vengeance creates more victims. People move easily between the “survivor/victim” and “aggressor/enemy” cycles, creating one giant, vicious, circle-eight cycle – the sign for infinity.

Healing and reconciliation require us to break out of these cycles and pursue a different path. The path to reconciliation – either individually or as a community – includes truth-telling (facing all the facts within their historical context and considering the impact on, and feelings of, both victims and victimizers), justice (acknowledging the harm and taking action – agreed upon by the victims and the victimizers – to repair it), compassion (accepting one’s self, having empathy for “the other,” and forgiveness), and peace (relationship-building, communication, understanding).

As if hearing David Works’ story were not enough, I heard a second story at EMU last summer that provided another living example of the ability of people to experience ultimate harm and grief and to choose grace and forgiveness on their path to survival and healing.

Angelina Atyam from Uganda spoke at a luncheon about the kidnapping of her 14-year-old daughter, Charlotte, by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel guerrilla army fighting against Uganda’s government. During her nearly eight years in captivity, the daughter gave birth to two children fathered by her captor. During this period, Angelina visited the mother of the rebel commander holding her daughter, came to understand that this mother had lost many members of her family too, and extended her hand in friendship and forgiveness. Now that Charlotte is free, Angelina is focusing on caring for her grandchildren and helping her daughter to resume her education.

At Coming to the Table, we recognized the challenge of comprehending collective trauma (such as the holocaust of WWII or the transatlantic slave trade) because the magnitude is on such a large scale. Getting a handle on healing from such large-scale trauma can feel overwhelming and unlikely. Yet we participants in Coming to the Table were committed to using the model of facilitated dialogue, study, and reflective encounter to bring together people who are normally isolated from each other. Coming to the Table is an effort to identify the harms of slavery and its aftermath and work toward healing.

As for other summer classes taking place at the same time as Coming to the Table, I had heard that EMU has international appeal, but I figured that meant a small percentage of students come from outside the United States. One morning at a “gathering celebration” where all 105 of us students joined together for breakfast and announcements before beginning our various classes, each of us stood and shared our name and where we are from. I wrote down as many countries as I could. I didn’t catch them all. If you can resist the inclination to skip through the list in the next paragraph and actually read the names of each country you’ll get a sense of just what an international gathering this truly was.

In addition to people from 14 states in the United States, my fellow students were here in Virginia from their homes in Jordan, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Egypt, Italy, Ukraine, Iran, Scotland, Belgium, Palestine, Indonesia, Philippines, Nepal, India, Uganda, Somaliland, Pakistan, Vietnam, Burma/Myanmar, Malaysia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Canada, Rwanda, Fiji, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Chile, England, Ghana, Cambodia, Haiti, Kenya, Zambia, South Korea, Uganda, Congo, Netherlands, Tanzania, Liberia, and Ireland.

At EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, all are dedicated to serving others with an emphasis on peace and non-violence. Students come to learn and to share, exchanging wisdom and energy.

I was, and remain, in awe. I am grateful to have been part of this transformative learning experience.

[Thomas Norman DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (Beacon Press, 2008), a book about his family’s quest to face the true history of their ancestors and the founding of the United States. DeWolf and several of his cousins now tour the country speaking about our nation’s desperate need for honest dialogue and healing. For more information visit . DeWolf also participated in the making of the documentary “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” which first aired on PBS in June, 2008. For more information visit .]