The Dean’s Hour: Special Guests: Dain & Constance Perry Descendants, Educators, and Facilitators — Traces of the Trade

Join us as Dean Katz welcomes Dain and Constance Perry for a conversation about history, healing, and what it means to reckon honestly with the past.

Dain Perry is a descendant of the DeWolf family — the largest slave-trading dynasty in American history. Constance Perry is African American and a descendant of enslaved people. Together, they have spent over a decade leading screenings and facilitated conversations around Traces of the Trade, a documentary that follows Dain and fellow DeWolf descendants as they retrace the Triangle Trade — from Bristol, Rhode Island, to the slave forts of Ghana, to a family plantation in Cuba.

Their work is built on a conviction that honest, cross-racial conversation is not the end of the journey — it’s the beginning. What does repair look like? What do we do with inherited privilege and inherited pain? How do faith communities lead the way? These are the questions Dain and Constance bring to every room they enter, and they’ll bring them to ours.

This Dean’s Hour will set the stage for a full screening of Traces of the Trade the following Friday evening — details below.

All are welcome. No registration required.

The Dean’s Hour is a weekly Sunday morning conversation series exploring what it means to live faithfully in a complex world.