DeWolf descendant Katrina Browne, standing outside Linden Place, the home of her ancestors in Bristol, is exploring her family’s prominent role in the slave trade. Providence Journal photo / Frieda Squires

PROVIDENCE — Should Rhode Island, which sent more slave ships to Africa than any other state, apologize for its role in the slave trade?

Should lawmakers jettison the last half of the state’s official name, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations — a reference to the state’s colonial farms, often worked by slaves?

A provocative new documentary is sparking these and other questions about the state’s responsibility for transporting an estimated 100,000 Africans into New World slavery.

That’s fine with filmmaker Katrina Browne, who has spent nearly a decade working on the 85-minute film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.

The film tells the story of the DeWolfs of Bristol, the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. In it, Browne — a DeWolf descendant — paints a graphic picture of Rhode Island’s slave past. At one point, she reads from an 18th-century Newport City Council report. A shopkeeper near a whipping post complains that the blood from beaten slaves is spattering his storefront.

“The film is striking a chord,” said Browne, who has been showing rough cuts of Traces since 2003.

The screenings, including one in Bristol next week, “are designed to spread the word and to get people talking about the state’s history,” said Browne, who is working with the Providence-based Rhode Island for Community & Justice and other groups on local showings.

Until New Englanders start talking about the past and their obligations, racial tensions will continue to simmer, she said.

At a Tuesday screening at the Providence Black Repertory Company, viewers reacted strongly to the film’s history and message.

H. Philip West Jr., the retired executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, called it “the most moving film I’ve seen in 30 years.” West urged those present to ask state lawmakers to apologize for Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade.

Others wondered why the state’s slave trade history isn’t taught in public schools.

But one viewer said African Americans know the story well. “It’s in our DNA, it’s in our blood, it’s in our cellular memory,” she said. Whites know the history too, she added, but they’ve rubbed it out.

Browne, who is talking to television executives, hopes to air the film nationally on TV and in theaters early next year, to coincide with the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. The federal ban on the trade took effect on Jan. 1, 1808, although some Rhode Island captains continued to buy and sell slaves illegally.

From 1769 to 1820, the DeWolf clan — fathers, sons and grandsons — sailed from Bristol to West Africa, where they traded rum for men, women and children. Some of the captives were shipped to the five coffee or sugar plantations the DeWolfs owned in Cuba. Others were sold at auction in such ports as Havana and Charleston, S.C.

During a 50-year span, the DeWolfs transported thousands of Africans in 47 ships. Business was good. The family owned a bank, an insurance company, a distillery, a warehouse and several mansions. By the end of his life, slave ship captain James DeWolf, a U.S. senator, was considered one of the richest men in the nation.

Other Northern states were involved in the trade, too. By 1755, more than 13,000 slaves worked in New England.

KATRINA BROWNE knew none of that before she decided to make a documentary about her family.

As a little girl, she grew up in a “fairy-tale world” of New England abolitionists and founding patriots. Every year, she and her family gathered on the summer lawn of Linden Place to watch the Bristol Fourth of July parade.

“My DeWolf ancestors were known as the Great Folk,” she says at the start of the film.

Then, in 1996, while she was in seminary school in California, her grandmother sent her a family history. The DeWolf tree boasted professors, artists, architects and writers, she said.

It also contained three generations of slave traders, she added, declining to elaborate.

With help, Browne was able to trace her family back seven generations to Mark Anthony DeWolf, the father of the largest slave-trading family in New England.

In her first year at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, the truth hit her hard. “It haunted me and it nagged me,” she said.

Two years later, she decided to explore her feelings in a documentary. But she didn’t want to do it alone.

She sent letters to 200 DeWolf descendants, asking them to accompany her on a trip to Ghana, Cuba and Bristol, all haunts of the slave-trading DeWolfs.

Nine relatives — from siblings to seventh cousins — joined her.

In summer 2001, the DeWolf descendants, including a Colorado rancher, a former county commissioner from Oregon and an Episcopal priest, flew to Ghana, where they huddled inside a dark room in a former slave dungeon. In Cuba, they walked through the ruins of the DeWolf plantations.

The trip frayed the nerves of some. At one point, they flew over the route taken by the DeWolfs’ ships, the terrible Middle Passage where many Africans died.

A year later, the family met in Bristol to decide what to do next.

ACCORDING TO Browne, the group is exploring ways to atone for actions of the early DeWolfs.

One, Thomas Norman DeWolf, has written a book about his experiences, called Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. The memoir, from Beacon Press, will arrive in stores in January.

Browne, meanwhile, continues to speak to audiences.

Her timing is good. This year, lawmakers in Alabama, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina have expressed regret for the role their states played in perpetuating slavery and segregation.

“A lot of Southern states have apologized for slavery, but no Northern state has done that, and Rhode Island should be the first,” Browne said.

“I’ve heard from people who have issues with the film” and its call for discussion and action, she said. “They say I shouldn’t bring all this up. I say that the division is already there. It’s better to confront it.”

According to scholars, Rhode Island accounted for as much as 60 to 90 percent of the American slave trade. At its peak, Rhode Island had a larger percentage of slaves — 11.5 percent — than either Massachusetts or Connecticut.

pdavis@projo.com