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

by Clint Smith

Roger moved from discussing the Indigenous communities and French exploration of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries straight to post–Civil War America—skipping the period in which Angola existed as a plantation worked by enslaved Black people. He mentioned convict leasing without explaining that it was an explicit tool of economic and racial subjugation, in which men were starved, beaten, and housed in former slave quarters. He failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States. The plantation produced 3,100 bales of cotton a year, a yield higher than most other plantations in the South. He failed to mention that Samuel Lawrence James, who purchased the plantation from Franklin’s widow, was a former major in the Confederate Army. James agreed to a twenty-one-year lease with the state to purchase access to all of the state’s prisoners as long as he was able to keep all of the profits. James subsequently subcontracted the prisoners to labor camps, where—as Roger had told us—they worked on levees and railroads in horrific conditions. A prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.