denied. i was injured in a car crash. i had no idea how much my case was worth. i called the barnes firm. when a truck hit my son, i had so many questions about his case. i called the barnes firm. it was the best call i could've made. your case is often worth more than insuran call the barnes firm to find out i could've made. what your case could be worth. we will help get you the best result possible. ♪ the barnes firm, injury attorneys ♪ call one eight hundred,est resul eight million ♪

hey, good evening. welcome back to our cnn special presentation. tonight we're bringing you a presentation of all new documentary short films that reveal the search for community among diverse groups of americans. up next, we'll meet a pioneering group of black scuba divers seeking to find and honor the more than 1 is is 00 ships and lives that was lost in the slave trade. stay with us. it begins right now only on cnn.

black ie dentsity, blackness has never been confined. has always been a movement. as good as the water that moves around you asry unusual as the water that moves around us. as deep and mysterious as our oceans. as complex. and yet, oftentimes what we are presented with are very flat and truncated history of africa in

the african diaspora. we need complex histories. all the american public wants to hear is the american story of victory instead of the very complex history that made this country possible. the ex traction, the exploitation, the actually death and displacement of millions of people. there's so many histories in the ocean that have yet to be revealed to us. especially with ships involved in the trans-atlantic slave trade. there are a lot of ships that have gone missing. there are not a lot of documentation of where those ships are. the process of actually locating these vessels, it really comes down to who's in the water. for years,s the number of african-american archaeologists

in this country has remained under one person. that is shifting now. diving with a purpose shifts that. diving with a purpose is a nonprofit organization dedicated to oceana, conservation and preservation of submerged heritage resources pertaining specifically to the african diaspora. >> i began to work with diving with a purpose, because they were documenting our history. to ensure that the truth is told. >> that work of uncovering these histories starts by being in the wa water. it matters who was in the water.

>> i started out with diving to connect to my past on a different level. i can't say my lineage to my chi children. like where am i going to tell my children? oh, yeah, we were stolen? what does that do for the identity of someone who's trying to navigate through the world? i know for me, there's a mixture of jealousy and unworthiness and

anger and sadness, deep profound sadness. to the point where there are times where if i meditate long enough, i can hear my ancestors screaming. >> i got really passionate about diving with a purpose, because the work that they're doing is so healing. maybe i can't tell my children

my precise lineage, but i can work to find peace as a recollective history and preserve it. tomorrow, we're actually going to a site that's dear to my heart. my very first mission with dwp. a shipwreck that was previously known as a wreck until dwp helped identify it. now it's preserved for historical record. so these are my teaching materials. this is my bag of teaching stuff. ten minutes, check air. i do work in a male-dominated industry, and diving as a whole is a white thing and while i

love to not make it about those things, that is the reality. that is part of the reality. thankfully i have colleagues like her who i can turn to, especially with regards to being a black woman in science. >> the history of slavery is hard to confront, but i find myself as a historic archaeologist sitting in that space quite often. i think for us to envision a vibrant future it's important for us to con front the darkest parts of our experience. the sort of rise of african

diaspora archaeology found in the late '60s and '70s with the rise of the black power movement. we saw the rippling of that social movement like finding its way in social sciences but there's not a rise in the number of black people who were recruited, mentored and retained and was disciplined. i feel like now with the hyper visibility of black death, with the hyper visible of black injustice in this country, the rise of the black has mattered movement more spefl, there's this new call, figuring out how we can get people connected to their history. dwap have formed this beautiful collaboration centered on training people of african descent were trained to do archaeology on land, to do this

work underwater. so i went to meet my colleague, friend, and his family. i think that a great scuba instructor is someone who can see the student for who they are and also provide a sense of confidence. you see how he's watching her intently and encouraging him. >> diving has been pretty much an elitist kind of recreational activity. the idea was that it was

something not only glamorous but heroic and fearlessness and glamour and hairism wasn't something that most people thought african-americans would engage in. so in career, part of it was getting on a boat and nobody wanting to dive with you because they felt like you couldn't swim, and then the other part was just growing up. you couldn't even swim in a public pool because your black could come off, so when i get on a boat generally there's this distance like, ok, i don't want this guy messing up my dive. for the first dive. we the second dive, i have half the boat around me trying to figure out how do i put my gear

together. how can i swim like you in the water, how do you move so easily through the water, and i end up teaching. >> diver. >> down here in florida, a scuba and yoga instructor and a tech instructor and -- people know just about everything. lots of good energy. >> we met when i was first diving with a purpose. i'd gotten sea sick on the boat. i was a new dive master and i hadn't really had too much experience with the conditions that we were in. i just have to ley on the bow and just ride it out the entire time. i felt like i was letting down

my ancestors. it was like he was just like are you all right? he was concerned but he also had that dad energy like remember? cramer is very -- he's very protective and he's very nurturing. like i see something in you that you may not even see in yourself, but i'm going to help to uplift you, because i know you have a voice. just such a blessing. >> i grew up in north new jersey, one boy with four

sisters. i used to wish that i had an older brother to protect me. softness and compassion were seen as weaknesses. you got that beat out of you if you were going to survive. i'm able to now share that compassion ait part of me that i rejected a long time ago. attempting to put a more positive energy into the world. to potentially give voice to two people who were brutalized inhumanely. everyone that is a part of dwp is in line with that mission. >> i started out with diving to face my fears of the water.

when i was a kid i got trapped under a jet ski and it took me away from the water for such a long time. growing up, i always loved being in the water. i always thought i was like a mermaid, and having that experience took me away from the water. when i decided to go do archaeology underwater, i was like i can't do that because i'm terrified of the water. i had this fear and i wanted to deal with it. [relaxed summer themed music playing] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ summer is a state of mind, you can visit anytime. savor your summer with lincoln. ♪all by yourself.♪ you look a little lost. i can't find my hotel. oh. oh! ♪ this is not normal. no. ♪ so? ♪ right? go with us and find millions of flexible options, all in our app. expedia. it matters who you travel with. for people who are a little intense about hydration. neutrogena® hydro boost lightweight. fragrance-free. 48 hour hydration. for that healthy skin glow.

neutrogena®. for people with skin.

. on this whole journey of overcoming that fear so i could go do archaeology, so that i could go and make a legacy for myself. when i found dwp, they really helped me overcome my fears. so much of what we're taught is that blackness and black identity is outside of humanity and a lot of the work as an archaeologist pushes against that narrative of black being

outside of history, outside of something, someone worthy of study. i can trace my family's history to the 1850s and i do this research knowing that i have seven generations of women behind me. and that roots me in the understanding of, yes, these horrors took place and there is still black life. my deepest relationships are people that are diving. diving is a sport with -- it's a communal sport. you always dive with a buddy. you go through all these checklists and you do it for yourself, because you do it for your buddy. everything i've done for myself, i will then do for iana. so, for example, with the gauge, i notice that her gauge wasn't streamlined but it's easy to -- that's why a buddy double

checking is always a good thing. >> our program includes field schools and full-on missions. in order to document, we have to teach disciplines how that is done. the first day of training is in a classroom learning how to document chip bricks underwater. learning mapping which is the type of documenting that we're doing, teaching people how to parse the wreck and then how to document items of interest so that we can identify it. then we take the participants to the next stage which would be outside and we set up a mock wreck to give them situational awareness of what it is they're going to be doing once they hit the water. then we take them out to the wreck site .

so everyone gets in the water and swims a survey dive over the entirety of the wreck to get context. once they have that context, then we provide them with either pin flags or stakes to be able to place them at the locations where they've identified something of interest. we call them items of interest, because they're not artifacts until the wreck has been identified and the items have been identified as on some level significant. that person who made that marker is now going to sketch the entirety of that item to scale

from that marker we're going to take a measurement to the baseline so that we can triangulate the exact location of that point of interest that is try latteration mapping. anywhere in the ocean, we can pinpoint where that particularly item is located. >> once we get out of the water, we go back to our work spaces and we'll draw scaled versions of our sectionings of the ship. those scaled versions will then be pieced togethering to create a holistic map of that site. so there are a lot of different ways in which this work exists after the dive itself. part of it are like the memorial

spaces that dwp has been part of. there's the henrietta marie. then you have the word like south africa, right, and how the work was done at that particularly site lives in the museum of african history and culture that shares this larger story about the trans-atlantic slave trade with actual materials from that particularly wreck that make it that much more tangible to the public. there's been a rise in the sort of quest for finding vessels pertaining to the trans-atlantic trade slave. and at the very same time there are also governments at work state to state, systematically making sure that this history isn't taught in our k through

12s. >> how do those things even co-exist. >> you know, but the materiality of that ship can't be denied. the existence of people, enslaved africans, who lived in those bows, who had their entire existence shifted. you can't deny it. so i feel like the role of archaeologist is to actually show the material. that's what this work is about. >> preservation is critical. without having those remnants to tell the story, it becomes virtually impossible to tell the story. when dwp was forming, i didn't even realize that black divers existed. what my ancestors were going through seven generations ago, they could not envision where i

sit today. i can't envision where my progeny will be seven generations from now. my job is to allow them to travel their path, help them figure out how to be whole. most people have a fear of the ocean, many of them have been taught as children to stay away from the water because you could drown. which is insane to me. as educators, the way to make children safe, you teach them how to swim. >> everyone's journey in the water is different. going from snorkeling and crying

my eyes out to then becoming a di diver, to then becoming a dive professional was just like this necessary evolution to learning to trust myself. here i am now taking the lead on creating an entire new program for the organization. in my meditations, there's underlying pain and anger and fear but it's not as loud as it used to be.

whether on happened on under water, archaeology, historically has not been inclusive of black or brown people. there's a way that history itself is often told by those in spaces of privilege and power. you can see in this country based on what's memorialized, what's commemorated, the histories that this country value, and you can see that the struggle to actually state the truth around the history of african diaspora people here in this country. that's not the center of the american america. so when african-american, when black people do this work, when black people center those stories, they completely shift the lens around how we're talking about the history of the present and the future of this country. and it is important for black

people to uncover their history and for young children to see an image of black people, of black women doing this work. it's just light and maybe they'll think "i can do this" or "i can do anything." water is shift ing. val valuable. water is fluid. water is complex. water is refuge water is life.

water is nourishment. water is of us always. water is home. guess what famous an