Charleston Unveils Historic Marker at Site of Company That Conducted Largest Known American Slave Trade

On a bright mid-October day, Harold Singletary stood in front of a teal shroud hanging from a building in one of the most famous architectural stretches of downtown Charleston, South Carolina. A black businessman, he never thought he would be standing here, for this purpose, on a street he had walked countless times without knowing it.

He was about to address a group gathered for the unveiling of a historic marker, announcing to anyone passing by that the beautifully restored antebellum building behind it once housed an auction house that, in 1835, had “the largest sale in the history of the United States. he carried out his well-known domestic slave sale”.

A total of 600 enslaved people were sold.

The new marker is notable because these streets, once bustling with businesses critical to the slave trade, offer little of the story to the average passerby. Singletary grew up in this coastal town—once the nation’s busiest slave port—where white locals ignored racial atrocities until recently.

He held prepared notes in one hand. But before she spoke, she walked over to hug Lauren Davila, a stranger who discovered an ad for 600 people in 2022 when she was a graduate student at the College of Charleston. Last year, a ProPublica reporter led the sale to a wealthy plantation operator named John Ball Jr., which allowed Singletary to connect his own family members to those being sold — and opened the door to further research into the fate of the 600 people up for sale. .

Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the United States was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles up the Atlantic coast from Charleston. 436 people were sold at that auction.

A small group then led the creation of the Singletary marker and was ready for unveiling.

“This is a big moment for the ancestors,” Singletary began. Among those sold by the auction house located here was an ancestor Singletary’s mother and grandparents so respected that he named his business, BrightMa Farmsafter. The corporate office is a four-minute walk away.

“America has to face some hard facts,” Singletary said. “And those facts change the stories, which change the narratives.” He thanked the people “who helped change the narrative.” Among them is the man who owns the salmon-colored building at 24 Broad Street and agreed to hang the marker on it.

Lawyer István Schmutz bought the two-story building in 1989 and has been operating his law office there ever since. He had no idea it was once home to a notorious slave auction company.

“I just started thinking about the irony of it all,” Schmutz said. He grew up in segregated schools. Until he went to law school, all of his classmates were white. But when he was young during the civil rights movement, men like Martin Luther King Jr. “opened my eyes to the injustice of segregation.”

Among others, Schmutz represented the families of those killed in the 2015 Emanuel AME church massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered nine black worshipers. Standing in front of the marker, he applauded the more honest account of the city’s history.

The approximately 2-foot-tall sign reads, “DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE SLAVE AUCTIONS.” Jervey, Waring & White, an auctioneer firm that operated in the building between 1828 and 1840, was “part of a network of similar businesses around it” that included banks and insurance companies, the marker explains.

The marker’s story began in March 2022, when Davila, now a doctoral student at Tulane University, was digging through newspaper archives from his home in Charleston. As part of an exercise, he logged ads at slave auctions.

On that day he clicked February 24, 1835. From the sea of ​​classified ads, he read this:

“To-day, the 24th instant, and the following day, on the north side of the Custom-house, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, A very valuable BAND OF NEGROES, Accustomed to the culture of rice; consists of six hundred.” She was amazed.

But the ad he found was short. He gave almost no details beyond the size of the sale and the location of the sale.

A ProPublica reporter then found the original for-sale ad that had appeared more than two weeks earlier. It was published on February 6, 1835, and revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of an estate sale by John Ball Jr., a descendant. slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year and five of his plantations were offered for sale – along with the people he enslaved.

Ball’s descendant, Edward Ball, wrote a bestselling book in 1998: “Slaves in the family,” which detailed the skeletons of his family and the horrors that the Lost Cause narrative of benevolent slave owners had long minimized. Ball found the descendants of the people his ancestors had enslaved—including Harold Singletary.

Davila’s research was supported by the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Margaret Seidler, a white Charleston. At the age of 65, Seidler discovered the infamous slave traders in his own family tree, and then began to identify others – including Jervey, Waring and White.

Seidler wrote a book of his findings and reached out to other white Charlestonians, urging them to help produce an honest account of the city’s slave history. He and historian Bernard Powers, founding director of the Center for Slavery Research, pushed for the epithet.

“Truth can be invigorating,” he said.