“Some of you aren’t from here”—Miss Annie was looking at my friends—“so maybe you don’t know. But this nation was built with the stolen labor of black people and on the stolen land of native people. A century and a half ago, the southern part of this country was, by itself, one of the richest places in the whole world, and the vast bulk of that wealth was held not in cotton nor gold nor oil, but in the form of enslaved human beings.”
