I broke down and cried when I stood in The Door of No Return for the first time, nearly 20 years ago. Bill Clinton will too, when Joseph Ndiaye, the 74-year-old curator, holds up a rusty set of chains and begins his matter-of-fact recital of the mundane facts about the slave trade that flourished on Goree Island for more than 200 hundred years.
That little speck of rock in the harbor of Dakar, Senegal, is the black-American equivalent of Auschwitz or Treblinka, a blood-drenched monument to a genocidal past that all too often is ignored. On it stands the House of...
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