Tara Roberts Rediscovers History Under the Sea

A FORK IN THE ROAD can take a lot of different shapes—an opportunity, a loss, a life raft or navigational marker. For journalist Tara Roberts, a simple photograph of divers sparked a renewed sense of purpose, sending her on an adventure of discovery and healing.

In 2017, Roberts accepted a ticket from a friend to the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C. She visited with some trepidation, she says, regarding the stories she knew she’d encounter. She wandered up to the second floor, among archival records and farther from the flashier exhibits and tourists. That’s where she spotted a photo that helped unearth untold stories.

“It was just a normal photograph of a group of primarily Black women in wetsuits on a boat, but for whatever reasons in that moment in time that picture just stopped me in my tracks,” she says. “I wanted to do something to help bring some healing around our racial conversation.”

At the time, Roberts had also wandered away from her storyline of storytelling. A journalist by trade and former editor at publications like Essence and CosmoGirl, she’d been working instead in a nonprofit job. The divers, Roberts would soon learn, helped search for and document slave-ship wrecks through an organization called Diving With a Purpose. They helped point the way back to her calling.

In the years since the museum visit, Roberts earned her own diving certification and joined Diving With a Purpose at shipwreck sites around the world. She documented the work through her podcast, Into the Depths. She’s been featured on the cover of National Geographic, and this year published Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging. She’s now a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, with a second phase of her project ahead. Indeed, there’s more work to do.

During the time of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, about 12,000 ships brought 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. Approximately 1.8 million Africans died in the crossing (not counting those who died while enslaved) and 1,000 ships wrecked. Only about 20 have been discovered today. Ships like the Henrietta Marie and the São José, the lives lost and the world-changing events of the trade have not received the same level of attention from history books as the Mayflower or the Titanic. But Roberts says she no longer calls this history “difficult,” but rather rich and complex.

“One thing that I was very clear about from the very beginning is I’m not interested in the stories of trauma—stories that lead us in and leave us in trauma,” she says. “It’s not just a history of sadness. It’s a history of resilience. It’s a history of resistance. It’s a history of survival. It’s all of these other pieces. I became more interested in bringing more of that to light, while at the same time acknowledging what has happened, what has gone before.”

At a recent book event in her hometown of Atlanta, Roberts took the stage as Janelle Monáe’s “Float” played: I used to walk into the room head down / I don’t walk now, now I float. Friends from Frederick Douglass High School cheered her on, along with neighbors and family, including her mother. She shared her experiences in the city, where she used to ride her bike as a kid and dream of adventure. Her stories brought up emotions of all kinds, tears to joy.

“There is something that is so beautiful about all these Black folks under the water with intent, who are actually out there finding our history on the ocean floor and bringing it up into collective human memory,” she told the group.

Roberts said she feels power, pride and agency under the water alongside her fellow divers, historians, archaeologists.

“We’ve all raised our hands and said we are not going to wait for anyone else to prioritize this history,” she says. “That is profoundly joyful work in my mind, because it’s like we’re saying to the ancestors, ‘I see you, I honor you, I haven’t forgotten you.’”