Slavery's descendants say a reparations check won't make the pain go away
CHARLESTON, S.C. - Five years before the first shots of the Civil War rang out from the harbor here in 1861, alderman Thomas Ryan and a business partner opened Ryan's Mart at No. 6 Chalmers St.
Their merchandise was slaves: African men, women and children who were prodded, picked over and auctioned off to the highest bidders.
The finest adult males could fetch up to $1,600 apiece - $49,000 in today's dollars. The most able-bodied women could sell for $1,400.
The first slaves were brought to America in 1619. By the start of the war, every other person in this Atlantic Coast seaport was the property of someone else.
"Charleston as we know it wouldn't exist today without enslaved Africans," said agricultural historian Richard Porcher, who lives a few miles outside Charleston and has written about the area's reliance on slave labor.
Today, the former showroom in Charleston's historic quarter, hidden on a narrow lane of row houses blazing with pink blossoms and palmetto trees, serves as the home of the Old Slave Mart Museum.
The museum and other historic sites in the American South lay bare a shameful chapter in the nation's past, one that's getting new attention in the debate over whether
