How a grad student uncovered the largest known slave auction in the U.S.

Thanks for following ProPublica; we hope to give you some context about how our newsroom works. Logan Jaffe, our reporter for newsletters, wrote the following about “How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S.,” a recent story by Jennifer Barry Hawes.

In June, my colleague Jennifer Berry Hawes, part of our ProPublica South bureau, published a story that broke some news — and also broke a historical narrative. It featured a discovery made by a graduate student at the College of Charleston in South Carolina:

“Sitting at her bedroom desk, nursing a cup of coffee on a quiet Tuesday morning, Lauren Davila scoured digitized old newspapers for slave auction ads,” Hawes wrote.

“On page 3, fifth column over, 10th advertisement down, she read:

‘This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.’”

In the pages of the Charleston Courier newspaper, dated Feb. 24, 1835, the graduate student had discovered evidence of what is now understood to be the largest known auction of enslaved people in the U.S.?

Until that point, the largest known auction was the sale of 436 enslaved people in Savannah, Georgia, in 1859 — an event devastatingly well-chronicled by historians and journalists. Not even Charleston’s premier Black history expert, Bernard Powers, knew of the auction in his city.?

Powers is professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston, founding director of its Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and board member of the International African American Museum; he is also a mentor to Davila, the grad student who made the discovery.?

“The silence of the archives is deafening on this,” Powers told Hawes. “What does that silence tell you? It reinforces how routine this was.”

The SlaveVoyages project estimates that between 1522 and 1866, more than 12 million African people were trafficked across the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved and sold throughout the U.S. The 600 people who were publicly sold over a short period of days in February 1835 near a busy intersection in downtown Charleston are part of that painful legacy.?

But, as Powers described, the fact that the story of their sale has only recently surfaced is part of that legacy, too; the gap in the archives is a testament to the normalized brutality of not only enslavers, but also of the entire public sphere in which these auctions occurred.?

There’s much more to learn about the auction in the story we published, and I urge you to read it. Since we published the story, it’s been viewed more than two and a half million times. The strong readership is helping to push it towards the top of search engines such as Google. Now, for the first time, when people are searching for information about the auctions of enslaved people in America, they’ll find a new story that for so long was buried.?

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