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

by Clint Smith

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Slavery defined

“I’m going to tell you that about four years ago, as I looked around the crowd for this Juneteenth breakfast, I saw a lot of older people were not returning,” she told me later. “And just like our churches, people were dying off, and their three or four friends who brought them weren’t coming back, and I thought, We need to get kids involved.

Get kids involved!

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.