As part of Black History Month, and to commemorate the birthday of President Abraham Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863, today on Democracy Now a special look at the transatlantic slave trade. We’ll examine many of the historical and political questions raised by the largest forced migration in human history with voices as varied as Martin Luther King, Cornel West, Molefe Asante and Nkeichi Taifa of today’s black reparations movement.

But first we want to look at a unique story of the only slave ship in the Americas discovered and then excavated off the coast of south Florida — the Henrietta Marie. The ship, the oldest slave ship ever found, was wrecked off Key West in 1700 and prompted writers Rosemarie Robotham and Madeline Burnside to put together a history of the early slave trade called — Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade of the Seventeenth Century.

TAPE: A SLAVE SHIP SPEAKS: THE WRECK OF THE HENRIETTA MARIE, produced by the Mel Fisher Maritime Society.