60 Minutes reports on the Smithsonian and the Slave Wrecks Project's journey to recover the first artifacts known to be preserved from a slave ship
Two hundred years ago, a ship named for St. Joseph, sank in a terrible storm. Half the passengers survived but the sea closed over more than 200 men, women and children who were locked below the deck. You would think a disaster like that would be legendary. But the St. Joseph was a slave ship. And the screams bursting from the hold were the cries of cargo.
Today, the silence of those lost voices is unbearable to Lonnie Bunch. He's the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, now under construction in Washington. Bunch found that to tell history the Smithsonian would have to make history. And, so began a quest for the remains of a shipwreck in a land so unchanged that an 18th century slave would recognize it today as the last shore he called home....