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

by Clint Smith

It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’ I don’t know how else to explain it. When you wonder, How could this have happened and I didn’t know about it? How could that happen?”

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.