Anne Arundel County will apologize for its role in supporting and enforcing slavery on Nov. 1 — Maryland Emancipation Day — and host a conversation to reflect on the future, County Executive Steuart Pittman announced this month.

Pittman, a term-limited Democrat, said he could not allow his time in office to end next year without responding to a request to acknowledge and apologize for the county’s part in the institution of slavery.

“I understand that there is no way to undo the past‚” Pittman said, but his office has worked with historians and descendants of enslaved people so that the apology can be a “meaningful step toward repair.”

Pittman described himself as the “direct descendant” of people who owned enslaved people. He grew up, and currently lives, on a 550-acre farm called Dodon in Davidsonville where his ancestors lived.

Pittman is a descendant of Dr. George Hume Steuart, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1721. Steuart “made his fortune in the tobacco industry on the backs of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa‚” Pittman said during Gov. Wes Moore’s inauguration in 2023.

“I learned that that there aren’t many white folks, especially white folks in powerful positions like politics, who are willing to talk about the hard stuff like that,” Pittman said in an interview this week.

Pittman’s announcement comes as President Donald Trump has complained about institutions such as the Smithsonian for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of American history.

But Pittman said the work of evaluating American history “is not done just because the president says it’s all over.”

“It’s not about the president, we would be doing this regardless. But we’re not going to not do it because of the president, either," he said.

Pittman, who was recently appointed chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, said he saw a lot of appreciation from Black and white constituents after his remarks at the inauguration of Moore, the state’s first Black governor.

“I have this in my history, and I have strong feelings about it, and I might as well take the risk of talking about it,” Pittman said. “I felt like it was important to make a big deal of it because I see the impact of it, that it actually does bring people together, and address wounds that sometimes we know haven’t healed yet.”

Anne Arundel County spokesperson Renesha Alphonso said she was not aware of any other Maryland county issuing a formal apology for slavery, but noted that the Annapolis City Council did in 2007.

The Maryland legislature issued a joint resolution in 2007 apologizing for slavery, expressing “profound regret” for it. That came shortly after Virginia became the first Southern state to issue a public apology for slavery. The U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have both adopted resolutions apologizing for slavery, though the Senate specified that its apology could not be used in support for claims of restitution.

The event next month, “A Day of Acknowledgement: Confronting the Legacy of Slavery,” will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Nov. 1 at Maryland Hall’s Bowen Theater. It came after a request from the Anne Arundel County Human Rights Commission, the NAACP, and the Caucus of African American Leaders. It will include historic exhibits and panel discussions, including one about reparations.

The Anne Arundel County NAACP said the apology will hopefully be a way for the county to “begin to atone both privately and publicly,” for slavery, which the organization characterized as terrorism and theft against Black Americans and their African ancestors.

Attendance is free, but space is limited, county officials said, and online registration is required.

Earlier this year, Moore vetoed a bill that would have created a commission to study reparations in Maryland, saying he wanted to see “urgent action” instead.

On Juneteenth, the federal holiday memorializing the end of slavery in the U.S., Moore told a packed crowd at a historically Black church in Cambridge that “repair doesn’t require more analysis,” pardoned thousands of people with cannabis convictions and named more than 400 communities in the state for prioritized funding to close the state’s racial wealth gap.