BOB ABERNETHY: Now our "Cover Story": re-creating the experience of slavery. At St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood has developed a powerful program of music, dance and theater. The pageant is called the "Ma'afa Suite". Ma'afa means 'catastrophe' in Swahili. All the performers are members of the congregation. Ma'afa is now being commemorated in more than 50 other black churches. The objective is to help African-Americans heal slavery's hidden wounds. Our reporter is Samuel Freedman.

Reverend JOHNNY RAY YOUNGBLOOD (St. Paul Community Baptist Church): In my growing up, slavery was not talked about at all. Any mentioning of the slaves took place, of course, in the two paragraphs in the history book, first of all, in terms of school. And at home, if slaves were ever mentioned, slaves were always other people, people we did not know, people who basically were dead and gone. There were no designated periods of time set apart where we could mourn. And I felt that one way to go about it creatively was to deal with our pain in order to find the strength in memory.

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: For two weeks every September, St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, commemorates the Ma'afa in song, dance, film, lectures, and poetry. Ma'afa, a term which means catastrophe in Kiswahili, is increasingly being applied to the African-American slave experience.

Ms. MONICA WALKER (Coordinator, Ma'afa Commemoration): There has been an almost unexplainable level of shame attached to this experience. When we began to talk about this level of degradation to our children, there was, I think, a certain kind of fear of what might this engender in the young to know that parents and grandparents and the ancestors went through this.

FREEDMAN: The Ma'afa suite, the centerpiece of St. Paul's remembrance, takes its audience on a harrowing journey from Africa into slavery and up through the Jim Crow South.

The Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, long an innovator in the Black church, first conceived the commemoration six years ago. He believed that his congregation and African-Americans as a whole could only surmount the legacy of slavery by confronting it.

Rev. YOUNGBLOOD: In order to get well, you have to go back through what made you sick in the first place. So this regret and this repulsion to remembering was something I had to find a way to fight against. The question was: What are we going to do with the emotions? You know, when we start to realize this and feel the pain, the anger, the agony, what do we do with that? And my point was you will be in good company, we will keep an eye on you and we will get you through this.