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

by Clint Smith

The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labor. It is in the detailed architecture of some of the city’s oldest buildings, sculpted by enslaved hands. It is in the roads, first paved by enslaved people. As historian Walter Johnson has said about New Orleans, “The whole city is a memorial to slavery.”

there are just so many ways that our public education is failing people by just not giving them the context to understand that Monticello is a plantation, and that slavery was a system that created the economic prosperity that enabled our country to exist.

“The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

The violence enacted on Julia’s mother and sister are part of a long history in which Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity.

“If you can’t see them for being people, you can’t see me as a person. I want to get you to see them, because I know as a Black woman what my challenges in society have been. It’s stemming from this history, so if I can’t get you to see them, you can’t see the person standing in front of you.”

The problem with [this] country—and also all around the world—is…miseducation. The miseducation of the mind and hidden history.

I thought about the cruel irony of people so restricted in their own movements creating something that facilitated mobility for so many others.

If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted.

These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. In the late nineteenth century, states began implementing Jim Crow laws to cement this country’s racial caste system. Social and political backlash to Reconstruction-era attempts to build an integrated society was the backdrop against which the first monuments arose. These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement.

You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.” White Southerners’ commitment to the Confederate cause was not predicated on whether or not they owned slaves. The commitment was based on a desire to maintain a society in which Black people remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

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.

In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Black Americans owned about 0.5 percent of the total wealth in the United States. Today, despite being 13 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth. Despite the role Black Americans played in generating this country’s wealth, they don’t have access to the vast majority of it.

you don’t remember where you’ve been, you can’t be sure where you’re going.

“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.

It’s likely that some of the wood they cut from trees in lower Manhattan was used to build ships that eventually carried captured Africans.

Yes, well, you’re not the same race as many other people in New York, and people’s lived experiences may be different from yours. Your perspective might be valid in your social circle; in other social circles it may not be. That’s all.”

“I think part of it is because there’s an unwillingness to acknowledge that there’s a problem.”

“If there’s anything I can leave you with, question everything. Myself, everything you read, everything you hear. Fact-check, fact-check, fact-check.” She pulled her hands apart and swept them across each other. “Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”

“Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country [exists for the] colored man.”

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.

At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.