How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

A 2018 report by Smithsonian magazine and the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund (now Type Investigations) found that over the previous ten years, US taxpayers had directed at least forty million dollars to Confederate monuments, including statues, homes, museums, and cemeteries, as well as Confederate heritage groups.

But as I think of Blandford, I’m left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told. What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

And as committed as Sue was to teaching young people in Galveston about the history of slavery and its aftermath, she wanted to go even further back than that. She wanted them to understand that their ancestry, their history, did not begin with the Middle Passage. It did not begin with chains. “I didn’t want them to think, Oh, we popped up and we became enslaved. No, we were thriving communities and nations and did amazing things before we were ever found by the white man,” she said with an unfettered insistence. “We did so many things that it didn’t mean that we came here dumb and we had to learn somebody else’s way to become truly educated and actualized. I wanted them to see what they brought to the table, and to try to maintain and preserve who they are, and not think that in order to be successful, I have to let go of my cultural stuff and adopt somebody else’s.”

Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.

The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish.

I walked through the park back to the street, teeming with the familiar sounds of the city. I had walked across this city so many times before, but now its untold history was unraveling all around me. Every corner cast a shadow of what it had once been. New York was unique in that, like Damaras had shared, it presented iteself to me as a place ahead of its time. The pretense of cultural pluralism told a story that was only half true. New York economically benefited from slavery, and the physical history of enslavement—the blood, the bodies, and the buildings constructed by them—was deeply entrenched in the soil of this city.

Her voice is the front porch of a home with everyone you love waiting inside. She speaks with the gentle conviction of someone who has experienced several lifetimes in one, each word becoming a lesson unto itself.

The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.