By John W. Fountain
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 14, 1998; Page B01

Drums pounded. The red, black and green African Liberation flags flapped in the wind. And the procession of about 60 people flowed down Georgia Avenue in Northwest Washington yesterday. As they marched, they offered up silent prayers.

Prayers of forgiveness. Prayers for the souls of Africans who perished in a different time in a different America, when blacks were sold as chattel. Prayers for healing.

The Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage is being carried out by about 50 people -- blacks, whites and Asians -- assembled from various religious, political and social organizations across the country. It is a journey that began in May and will lead them down the Eastern Seaboard, to the deep South and eventually back to Africa.

"We're collecting the spirits and taking them back home," Mariah Richardson, of St. Louis, said yesterday at Lincoln Park in Southeast Washington, where about 100 people, including the marchers, assembled for an afternoon prayer service in the sun. Richardson, 38, said she took a year off from graduate school to take part in the pilgrimage.

Washington is the latest stop for the group, which plans a number of prayer vigils across the city this week. One will be at 10 a.m. today on the Mall. At 7 p.m., the pilgrims will stage what they call an African Waterside Ancestral Ceremony in West Potomac Park.

Organizers say that at the root of the pilgrimage is the effort to "highlight the relationship between the centuries-old Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the conditions of the U.S. and the world today" and to "retrace the history of slavery by foot and continue by boat, reversing the direction of the Middle Passage."

"You can't heal the world until you heal yourself," said Gregory Dean Smith, 46, of Amherst, Mass., who has been with the group since it began the year-long journey on Memorial Day. "My rage is directly linked to my ancestors' " being enslaved.

"I could be like any of these brothers sitting around poisoning myself to heal the rage," Smith said as he passed several black men standing around drinking as the walk from an African American bookstore to the park in Southeast Washington got underway. "As we heal, I think we're sending forth a healing for America and our ancestors. I walk for the ancestors."

Since beginning their journey, Smith and others have traveled to other Eastern states, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and will eventually tour the deep South, where slavery flourished. They have toured sites where African slaves were housed or worked and, in some cases, were lynched.

"At some point, we have to face the history honestly and then we can move forward," said Marjani Dele, of Northeast Washington, who helped organize the Washington portion of the pilgrimage. "We haven't done that as a nation."

The group said it chose Washington as a prayer site because of its relevance to the history of the slave trade in America.

In Washington's Decatur House in Lafayette Square, for instance, African slaves were held captive while waiting to be sold to plantations in the deep South, and their agonizing screams are said to have often filtered into the street. Slavery once thrived in Washington, which served as a port for the "black gold" shipped by the boatload to Southern states, according to several historical accounts.

"Until 1808 when, by the terms of the Constitution, the importation of African slaves was outlawed, the volume of the trade in the District was small," according to an account by Constance McLaughlin Green in "Washington Village and Capital 1800-1878." "But when cotton planters of the deep South could no longer get field hands from Africa . . . markets for the surplus of Virginia and Maryland plantation owners expanded. . . . Gradually the trade in Washington swelled as owners of the exhausted soil of the surrounding countryside shipped their one profitable crop to dealers at the Potomac port."

An account in Charles Ewing's "Yesterday's Washington, D.C." reads, "Slaves were auctioned weekly from the yard of a house barely a block from the White House, and the Bowling Saloon on D Street between Eighth and Ninth advertised in 1856 for 'six colored boys (slaves preferred) to set up ten-pins.' "

The 50 people who began their journey two months ago have walked their prayer route for the most part, averaging about 15 miles a day, organizers said. Occasionally, they will hop in the vans that carry their luggage, or a church or community group will organize transportation. They sometimes sleep overnight in churches and, on one occasion, in tents, but mostly in YMCAs or school gymnasiums. Last night, they stayed at a shelter for the homeless.

Over the next four months, the pilgrims plan to journey through the Eastern United States. In November, they are scheduled to travel by boat to the Caribbean, retracing the path of slave ships, and then travel to Brazil and western Africa, where they will again take up the journey by foot. They plan to conclude in Cape Town, South Africa, next May.

Yesterday, the walkers made their way from the streets to Lincoln Park in the hot sun. The drums and the Buddhist priests who are part of the group caught the attention of people in the neighborhoods, who pointed and stared.

Arriving at Lincoln Park after about an hour's journey, the pilgrims stood on the grass between the statues of the Great Emancipator and Mary McLeod Bethune. They sang and prayed.

"I do it to get back to myself," said Kathleen Anderson, of Massachusetts.

And where exactly is that?

"I'll know that when I get back to Africa," she said, smiling.

Pilgrims Retrace Slave Route

Members of the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage are spending a year retracing the transatlantic slave trade route. The trip began on Memorial Day in Massachussetts and will end in May 1999 in South Africa. The route they will take:

A look at local events connected to the pilgrimage:

Tuesday

10 a.m.: Procession on the Mall

7p.m.: Waterside ceremony, Hains Point

Wednesday

10 a.m.: Vigil at the World Bank

7 p.m.: Gospel Requiem at Shiloh Baptist Church, 1500 Ninth St. NW

Thursday

10 a.m.: Memorial walk through Arlington National Cemetery

3 p.m.: Vigil at the Pentagon

For more information, call 202- 543-8050

SOURCE: The Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage