DeWolf Family: She is the daughter of slaves on both sides of her family. He is the descendent of slave traders and the largest slave-trading dynasty in U.S. history.

A DeWolf descendent tells a story about “the Akan people of Ghana, in West Africa. The people there have long used symbols to communicate ideas and beliefs.

The Sankofa icon is a mythical bird flying forward and looking backward with an egg in its mouth.” The egg represents knowledge of the past, on which wisdom is based and offers as a benefit to future generations. The Sankofa icon urges us to “go back and get it.”

Slavery shaped the ancestry of today’s populations. It has been and is the story of America. It’s not easy to own up to the things we’ve done wrong or admit that the choices we somehow justified to ourselves harmed others’ lives, sometimes beyond our power to repair them.

What helps is to own up to what we did wrong and to “go back and get” the truth on who we are (the good and the bad). And, revel in what we did to make things right. That’s true for an individual and even more truer for a nation.