The transatlantic slave trade and slavery: memory, memorialization, legacies, contemporary stakes. These are just some of the themes that an exceptional and diverse panel discussed at the conclusion of Black History Month 2016.

Saidiya Hartman, right, and John Cummings. Photo William Farrington.

John Cummings, owner of the famous Whitney Plantation and Museum ; Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Ibrahima Seck, Director of Research at the Whitney Plantation and Museum and author of Bouqui Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860; and Salamishah Tillett, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination had a lively and enlightening conversation moderated by David W. Blight, professor of American History at Yale, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, and member of the Lapidus Center Council of Advisors.

From left to right: David Blight, Salamishah Tillett, Saidiya Hartman, John Cummings, and Ibrahima Seck. Photo William Farrington.

An attentive audience, Photo William Farrington.

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More about our guests and their work:

The New York Times on the Whitney Plantation

The New York Times review of Lose Your Mother

Salamishah Tillett on MSNBC’ s Melissa Harris-Perry