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We have far more options for black Americans to tell stories outside of slavery, but whenever it comes to slavery, it's an uncomfortable subject. Why? Because it's the most unresolved subject in American history.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It's seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.

Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate is not always the more gracious.

You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.