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

by Clint Smith

The convict leasing system allowed Black people to be imprisoned for years under spurious charges and be “rented” to companies. These people and institutions, whose businesses had been built on the labor of enslaved people, experienced a vacuum in the years following abolition. But with convict leasing, imprisoned Black men could now be legally forced to provide that labor for their railroads, their plantations, and their businesses.

Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.”

Harrowing.

Damaras described how slavery has existed throughout history, across the world. People would regularly be enslaved because they were prisoners of war or because they owed some sort of debt. Sometimes, she explained, enslavement would endure only for a specific period of time, and even if you were enslaved for your entire life, your children would not necessarily be enslaved after you. Slavery in the United States was different. “This New World enslavement,” Damaras said, “this chattel slavery, was based off of a racial caste system, a racial hierarchy, and it was wrapped around the European ideology that there was something inherently subhuman or inhuman with the genetic makeup of the African, so the only thing that made you eligible for this lifelong sentence was pigmentation, or the color of your skin.

“Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”