On a March 1998 tour of Africa, then-President Bill Clinton offered a "semiapology" for America's participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The president expressed regret and contrition, admitting that America had not always "done the right thing by Africa,"1 yet he stopped short of a formal apology, asserting that to do so might antagonize race relations in the United States.2 Slavery was permitted by law in the southern United States from the era of British colonial rule in the seventeenth century until the surrender of the Confederate secessionists following the Civil War (1861- 65). Legal in Washington, D.C., slave labor was used to build the U.S. Capitol and the White House. The U.S. government, however, had never apologized to the more than 30 million African Americans living in America whose ancestors had toiled as slaves, nor had an apology been offered to the West African nations from which...