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

by Clint Smith

Unlike other rebellions, such as Nat Turner’s or John Brown’s, the 1811 slave revolt has received little attention in the collective public memory.i

the federal government committed to defending the institution of slavery by officially granting Louisiana statehood, as a slave state, in 1812. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union.

the Whitney stands apart by making the story of the enslaved the core of the experience.

The land that is now the Whitney Plantation was originally purchased, in 1752, by a German immigrant to Louisiana named Ambroise Heidal

Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

museum dedicated to documenting the history of racial terror in this country: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama. Operated by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization founded by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, the museum, among other functions, documents the history of lynching throughout the South, naming the people killed in each county across each state.

“Does it matter, then, that the black people imprisoned in the structure may or may not have been slaves? What is freedom in a world of slaves? What is incarceration?”

These statues are The Children of Whitney, designed specifically for the plantation by artist Woodrow Nash to add a new layer to the landscape of the plantation.

the reality of slavery is child enslavement.”

after the formal end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. By 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people, 57 percent of whom were under the age of twenty.

Children under ten were 51 percent of total Black deaths in 1850 (compared to 38 percent of white deaths). Put differently, as Mississippi planter M. W. Phillips wrote, “Not one-fourth of the [slave] children born are raised.”

“Each visitor gets a lanyard with an image of this, and the image is paired with an excerpt from the Federal Writers’ Project. A slave narrative.”

The Federal Writers’ Project plays a significant role at the Whitney, enhancing its ability to center the voices of enslaved people. Created as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the project included an initiative to document the experience of slavery. In the late 1930s, staff collected more than 2,300 firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people, including 500 black-and-white photographs. The material was edited into seventeen volumes.

“There are so many tragedies embedded in this history,” she said. “But for me, one of the most profound ones is [that] people couldn’t record their own histories.

There were also oral history projects involving formerly enslaved people conducted at historically Black colleges and universities—including Fisk University, Southern University, and what is now called Prairie View A&M University—beginning in 1929.

This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.

This is an exceptionally important realization

is its own quiet violence.

In 1795, there were nearly twenty thousand enslaved people in Louisiana, almost three thousand of whom were on the German Coast. Taking effect in 1808, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the United States officially prohibited the transatlantic slave trade. While the transatlantic slave trade did not come to a sudden halt, it became a criminal offense to capture and import Africans to the United States. Some ships, however, continued to smuggle in persons from West Africa and the Caribbean. Half a century later, in 1860, the number of enslaved people in Louisiana had multiplied sixteenfold, with over 331,000 enslaved. Much of the increase was due to the domestic explosion of the enslaved population as a result of the internal slave trade, though some of the increase was because of the continued illegal slave trade.

The stories added devastating emotional texture to the sea of solitary names, recounting pain, trauma, exploitation, and sexual violence.

in order to really understand slavery, we have to understand what slavery meant for women.”

Sexual violence was ubiquitous throughout slavery, and it followed enslaved women wherever they went.

Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity.

Historian Walter Johnson aptly notes that the “language of ‘dehumanization’ is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to be the most ‘inhuman’ of slaveholders’ actions and those that most ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.”

he did not have to believe her to be less than human. He simply had to know that she did not have the power to stop him.

The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost—oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

“A lot of medical schools, during the history of slavery, largely depended on cadavers of enslaved people. That’s who they practiced on…Black women’s bodies were used in experiments to advance medicine, like the field of gynecology. We learn about ‘from cradle to grave’ in history, but what about postmortem? What happened to Black people postmortem? It’s like their bodies are constantly being exploited at every age, even in their death.”

it wasn’t until the 1956 publication of Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South that this widespread interpretation began to change. Stampp’s history, unlike many of his predecessors’, was written under the fundamental premise that Black and white people were equal, something earlier white historians did not accept as a given.

The emotional power of the structure makes it the sort of place where, no matter how many people are around, you feel like you are the only person there.

While the cabin at Monticello was a powerful re-creation of an old slave quarters, there was something unique about running my hands over a two-century-old piece of wood and knowing that an enslaved person’s fingers had once traced those same cracks. There was something about listening to a creak of the floor and thinking how the board must have groaned under the bodies of the people with no choice but to sleep directly on it.

“This is how also we link this history to the present,” Yvonne said. “Because this cabin, inhabited by enslaved people, continued to be inhabited by their descendants until the year of 1975.”

It was the entire society. And it was entire countries.

“It’s so easy for people to just look at these plantation owners and be like, ‘This history is awful. They were the bad guys.’” Yvonne paused. “They were the bad guys, but what are the larger implications of a global society?

While the majority of the staff might be Black, John, who bought the property and developed it into a museum at his own expense, is a white man in his eighties.

It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’

John believes that it is not enough for people to write about slavery from the towers of academia if so many of those works never reach a wide audience. He thinks the Whitney offers something different, something more dynamic. “I’ve seen some of the greatest empirical studies, and they sit on library shelves gathering dust. Nobody reads them. We want to go to the masses, man. We want to go to the masses.”

“No, I was not worried,” he said, shaking his head. “Sometimes he may say something that may upset some people, but it is not like the willingness to hurt. It is just a misunderstanding.”

Lineage is a strand of smoke making its way into the sky even though we can’t always tell where it’s coming from, even though sometimes we can’t distinguish the smoke from the sky itself.

The Whitney exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten. It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails. It is a place asking the question How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?

In Louisiana, in order to ensure there were more convictions, and thus more prisoners available for labor, in 1880 the state legislature shifted the requirement for juries from unanimous to non-unanimous. This way courts could allow a few Black people to serve on the jury—in accordance with their new rights as freed persons—but by requiring only nine of the twelve jurors to convict someone of a crime, they effectively subverted any political power Black people, or those sympathetic to them, might otherwise have had. Those responsible for the change did not equivocate in their rationale. The purpose of the 1898 convention, in which the new law officially became part of the Louisiana constitution, was, as summarized by the chairman of the convention’s judiciary committee, “to establish the supremacy of the white race.”

Despite its history, the law was upheld in a 1972 Supreme Court ruling and amended only slightly in 1973 from nine out of twelve jurors being needed to convict to ten out of twelve.

Innocence Project New Orleans, an organization committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people, has found that in the last thirty years split juries played a role in upwards of 45 percent of exoneration cases in Louisiana that were eligible for a non-unanimous verdict.

If a prosecutor could go into a room, he said, and tell someone, “Look, all I need to do is get ten of the twelve people on this jury to flip; I don’t even need them all to believe me,” it instills fear in the defendant that their odds of being found not guilty in court are incredibly limited.

A prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.

“I can’t change that” seemed to provide the pretense of acknowledgment while creating distance from personal culpability.

“Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center…One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.” 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.

But simply because something has been reformed does not mean it is now acceptable. And even if something is now better, that does not undo its past, nor does it eliminate the necessity of speaking about how that past may have shaped the present.

I wanted Angola, where 71 percent of people are serving life sentences and three-quarters of the population is Black, to not pretend as if that was a coincidence.

Willie Francis’s reflection, an observation both profound and devastatingly youthful: “Boy, you sure feel funny when you know you’re going to die; almost like you know something only God should know.”

panopticon,

I could not help but feel that something rancid had settled in me, like my presence made me complicit in what was happening here. The incessant, multidimensional surveillance tightened my chest. Before I could fully come to terms with the gravity of where we were, the humanity of who we were seeing, we were quickly ushered out, leaving the men behind.