by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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On a brilliant mid-October morning, Harold Singletary stood before a teal shroud hanging from a building along one of the most famed architectural stretches in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. A Black businessman, he never imagined he would be standing here, for this purpose, along a street he had walked countless times, not knowing.

He prepared to address a group gathered to unveil a historical marker that announced to anyone walking by that the finely restored antebellum structure behind him once housed an auction firm that in 1835 “conducted the largest known domestic slave sale in United States history.”

In all, 600 enslaved people were put up for sale.

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

He held prepared remarks in one hand. But before speaking, he walked over to hug Lauren Davila, a stranger who in 2022 discovered an ad for the sale of 600 people when she was a College of Charleston graduate student. Last year, a ProPublica reporter traced the sale to a wealthy........

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