Former U.S. President Harry Truman once said: “The only thing new under the sun is the history we don’t know.” This week’s show marked the beginning of the Black History Month with a lecture from Boston University’s African American Studies lecture series, “Blacks and Asians in the Making of the Modern World.” The lecture, entitled “Illegal Aliens from Africa: The Clandestine Slave Trade to the United States from 1808 to 1859,” was presented by Professor Robert Hall of Northeastern University.

Slavery was legal in many southern states right through the Civil War. However, the importing of slaves became illegal in 1808, and was then made a crime punishable by death in 1820. As Professor Hall claimed, that still did not deter slavers from transporting thousands of blacks into the U.S. from Africa and Cuba. Professor Hall also explored different estimates on the demographics of the imported American slave population between 1808 and 1859.