Author/Filmmaker Ben Raines will talk about his acclaimed book, The Last Slave Ship. Raines will discuss this true story of the criminal transport of slaves to the U.S. in 1860, and his own discovery of the evidence on April 9, 2018.

That day, Raines— the son of Rappahannock resident Susan Raines— dove into a swampy river near Mobile, Alabama and emerged with a shard of The Clotilda, the vessel which had carried an illegal cargo of 110 West Africans to Alabama long after the U.S, had outlawed international trafficking in slaves. The suppressed history of America’s last slave ship came back to life, prompting a complex reckoning for Alabamans, who had largely chosen to neglect or even deny this strange chapter in the harrowing saga of plantation slavery in the American South.