Since then, DWP has helped document 18 shipwrecks and logged more than 18,000 hours in six countries. Stewart declared that it was time for the group to dive with a purpose. As the southern regional representative for the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, Stewart had access to lots of divers. He had met the lone archaeologist at Biscayne National Park in the Florida Keys, Brenda Lanzendorf, who needed divers to help find the Spanish slave ship Guerrero, which had wrecked in 1827. Also in the photo was Ken Stewart, the visionary who got DWP off the ground almost 20 years ago. I learned of DWP from a picture of Black women divers that I saw at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is soul-lifting to look at the tired faces of those around me and know these ordinary people-teachers, civil servants, engineers, students-are here despite their busy schedules, volunteering because they love to dive and believe in this important work.īy Ayana FleWellen Archaeologist and DWP instructor It is magic feeling the ocean breeze on my skin and the spray of seawater as the boat races home after a day’s work. And I would argue the last frontier is what’s under the water.” “In some ways, there’s so much we know about slavery. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., showcases DWP’s work as part of the Slave Wrecks Project, a network of groups that uncover and document the remnants of slave ships and work to tell a more inclusive history of the slave trade.ĭiving With a Purpose members are “using their skills to dive to help us find the stories that are buried under the water,” says Lonnie Bunch III, the museum’s founding director and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Your history started Africa at the beginning of time, the beginning of civilization.” Your history didn’t start on the shores of the United States. The other thing you realize is that you have a history. “Every time you go down, you realize basically two things: One is that maybe your ancestors were on the ship. “When you are African American and you’re diving on a slave ship, that’s a whole lot different from somebody else doing it,” says legendary diver Albert José Jones, a co-founder of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers and board member of DWP. The group’s goal is to help Black folks, in particular, find their own history and tell their own stories. Since its founding in 2003, DWP has trained some 500 divers to help archaeologists and historians search for and document such ships. Listen now on Apple Podcasts.)Įnter Diving With a Purpose, a group that trains divers to find and conserve historical and cultural artifacts buried deep in the waters. (A new six-part podcast series, Into the Depths, explores the complex history of the global slave trade and the stories of the estimated 12.5 million Africans forced to make the Middle Passage. “It took at least 36,000 voyages,” he says. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships like these during the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries, according to Nafees Khan, a professor in the College of Education at Clemson University and adviser to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. We’re training as underwater archaeology advocates, gaining the skills necessary to join expeditions and help document the wreckage of slave ships being found around the world, ships such as the São José Paquete d’Africa in South Africa, the Fredericus Quartus and Christianus Quintus in Costa Rica, and the Clotilda in the United States. I am-we are-mapping the remains of a shipwreck. They calmly float in place, despite strong currents off the coast of Key Largo, Florida, sketching images of coral-encrusted artifacts or taking measurements. I dive in. The water is cool against my skin, the silence absolute, and as I hover over the remains at the bottom of the sea, I feel peaceful, thankful, a sense of coming home.ĭescend underwater with me-not too deep now, maybe only 20 feet or so-and you’ll see about 30 other divers, paired in sets of two.
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