Simba and I visited the Old Slave Mart at 6 Chalmers Street in Charleston, South Carolina, a surviving physical connection to one of the darkest chapters in Charleston and American history. Behind its distinctive arched entrance is a building believed to be the only known surviving structure in South Carolina that was actually used as a slave-auction gallery.
The relatively small building is easy to pass while exploring Charleston’s historic streets, but its appearance today doesn’t convey the scale of what once surrounded it. During the years immediately preceding the Civil War, it formed part of Ryan’s Mart, a much larger slave-trading complex containing an enclosed yard, jail, kitchen, infirmary, and other facilities used to confine enslaved people before their sale.
Most of that complex disappeared long ago. The Chalmers Street auction gallery survived, leaving an extraordinarily important reminder of a system in which men, women, and children were bought and sold as property…