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

by Clint Smith

We were standing in front of a plaque, recently put up by the New Orleans Committee to Erect Markers on the Slave Trade, outlining Louisiana’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. “It’s doing its job,” Waters said of the plaque. “All through the day people come in, they stop, they read, take pictures…It’s another way of educating people to this.”

Waters, who identifies as a local historian and revolutionary, was not new to this. He and others like him have, for years, been working to illuminate the city’s legacy—and by extension the country’s legacy—of oppression.

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.”

Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today.

Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings.

What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together. I did not turn into Montpelier, but there was something about driving past it on the way to Monticello that reminded me that Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

Jefferson’s records showed who was bought and sold over the course of decades. Jefferson sold, leased, and mortgaged enslaved people—often in an effort to pay off debts he owed, as well as to preserve his standard of living.

Having enslaved workers, David explained, helped Jefferson maintain his lifestyle, by giving him the time and space to do what he cared about most: reading, writing, and hosting guests who came to visit.

David continued to refer to the enslaved Black people living on Monticello as “human beings.” The decision to use “human” as the primary descriptor rather than “slave” was a small yet intentional move.

Despite the horror and oppression of slavery, those families who once lived here, what are they doing? They’re trying to carve out some kind of a normal life. They are passing on tradition. They are giving their kids a chance to learn, and a chance to play. Maybe they’re even trying to shield those children from the reality.”

The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central.

Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideals came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family.

I asked them if, before coming on this tour, they had been aware of Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, how he had flogged his enslaved workers, how he had separated loved ones, how he had kept generations of families in bondage. Their answers were swift and sincere. “No.” “No.” They both shook their heads, as if still perplexed by what they had just learned. There was a discernible sense of disappointment—perhaps in themselves, perhaps in Jefferson, perhaps in both.

Nearly all of his enslaved workers—about two hundred people at the time, at Monticello and another property—were auctioned after his death in 1826 to pay his debts.

If Jefferson truly believed that Black people were inferior, then he must have “suspected that the Creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.”

If Jefferson believed slavery would slowly die out after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, however, it was a hypothesis that ran counter to the evidence available on his own farm.

Donna seemed particularly appalled by how the institution of slavery had affected the children. “I mean, splitting families,” she said. “Oh my God, how can you split a family?” “It’s happening now,” said Grace.

“We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”

convey difficult, honest truths that force visitors to reckon with the brutality of the slave trade and also to understand that such a reckoning looks different based on each visitor’s own set of experiences.

“There’s a chapter in Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said to the five of us, standing in front of the east wing of Jefferson’s manor, “that has some of the most racist things you might ever read, written by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in it. So sometimes I stop and ask myself, “If Gettysburg had gone the wrong way, would people be quoting the Declaration of Independence or Notes on the State of Virginia?” It’s the same guy writing.”

when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves.

Monticello has an important role in helping people reckon with who they are in relation to this country’s history. “I think people come to us because they’re grappling with their own identity,” she said. “And Monticello in particular is a place that is so intimately connected to who we are, or who we believe we are, as Americans with freedom and democracy. Yet it’s also a place of bondage,

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.

There are a number of international visitors that actually have no understanding of American slavery or the transatlantic slave trade…So we just get so many people with no background.”

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

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

Children sustained and embodied the institution of slavery, especially 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.

people couldn’t record their own histories. And so these narratives that we have from the 1930s are the only things that we really have to give us insight outside of, of course, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and the like.

our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

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.

“I’ll show you another narrative,” she said after about a minute. “This one, she’s talking about her sister, and how the plantation owner would come to the cabin to get her sister at night. So I use these as transitions [on the tour] because, in order to really understand slavery, we have to understand what slavery meant for women.”

long history in which Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified.

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.

oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

physical agency being stripped from the enslaved, and how one of the most insidious parts of it all was tied to the fact that this stripping away of agency did not end after they passed away. She started talking to me about the role that enslaved people played in the fields of science and medicine, how an enslaved person’s body—dead or alive—was the site of experiments that propelled the entire medical field forward.

decades of mainstream historical thought, in part thanks to the early-twentieth-century historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who propagated the idea that there were in fact many kind slave owners who provided a good life for their enslaved workers. Phillips’s assertion was built on the premise that chattel slavery was a largely benevolent system designed to uplift, protect, and civilize an inferior African race.

We have to talk about who they were, we have to talk about their resiliency, we have to talk about their resistance, we have to talk about their strength, their determination, and the fact that they passed down legacies.

“If we want to end mass incarceration, we’ve got to kind of get the history of where it comes from, and how it still exists, and what that looks like.”

Norris had successfully led a coalition of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, and their allies to end Louisiana’s practice of non-unanimous jury decisions via a ballot measure that had amended the state constitution. Up until that point, Louisiana was one of only two states in the entire country—Oregon being the other—in which someone could be convicted of a felony without the jury coming to a unanimous decision. In his book Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana, historian Thomas Aiello describes how the rationale for such a policy is not simply an innocent difference in respective state constitutions but grounded in a history of racism. The policy, stemming from post-Reconstruction white supremacy, was meant to funnel Black people into the convict leasing system, replacing in part the labor force lost as a result of emancipation. The policy also had the effect of suffocating the political and judicial power of Black people in Louisiana.

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.”

There were ashtrays, built from license plates, stacked on top of one another (Angola is where every license plate in the state of Louisiana is made). I thought about the cruel irony of people so restricted in their own movements creating something that facilitated mobility for so many others.

A hot rush of blood pulsed behind my ears, as I felt the shame of being alive in a room built to kill.

when the State of Louisiana transitioned from the electric chair to lethal injection in 1991, the prison needed a bed on which to lay the condemned. Meanwhile, in the welding shop of the prison, some of the men were handed a new assignment, though they did not know what for. “One of the guys, one of the clerks, happened to see the whole blueprint laying on the drafting table,” Norris said, recounting the event, “and went back out in the shop and said, ‘Bruh, y’all know what you’re building?’ They’re like, ‘What?’ ‘You’re building the damn deathbed.’” Instead of purchasing a bed, Norris said, the Department of Corrections found it cheaper to direct the prisoners in the machine and welding shops to build it, with each part of the bed assembled separately. Norris paused, shaking his head at the memory. “One of the guys on the welding crew, his brother was on death row.”

I thought of how slavery—a history with which Angola is inextricably linked—was only being alluded to in a sort of offhanded way. Roger stood at the front with a microphone in his hand, glancing around to see if anyone had a question as we traveled to our next destination. I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the prison’s relationship to slavery.” I was nervous to ask the question. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling nervous. Roger paused, then nodded. “He’s asked me to talk a little bit about the prison’s relationship to slavery,” he said, repeating my question, perhaps to buy time, or so people in the back of the bus could hear.

Roger’s “I can’t change that” seemed to provide the pretense of acknowledgment while creating distance from personal culpability. It was reminiscent of a refrain laced throughout our country’s conversations about the history of racism. I thought about all of the times, growing up, when I had sat in class and heard a white classmate say, “Well, my ancestors didn’t own slaves,” or heard a political commentator on television say, “Why are we still talking about slavery? People need to get over it.” Or a politician say, “We can’t wallow in the past. It’s time to focus on the future.” When I hear these deflections, I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present. How slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago.

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.

White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country—Black and white—to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.

I was astonished by the lack of institutional contrition, the refusal to admit what was right in front of us. I have no way of knowing Roger’s intentions, but it was evident that he had little interest in talking about the role slavery had played in shaping Angola, which in its early days had a “big house” of “the old Southern plantation style” on the grounds, in which the person responsible for all of the people held here—the warden—lived with his family.

As I stepped out of the Red Hat, the air smelled like smoke even though nothing was on fire. Or maybe everything was.

From the window, we saw a group of two dozen men in white-and-blue sweatshirts with garden hoes methodically rising in their hands and then falling to the earth. Their bodies were set against a backdrop of trees that had tumbled into autumn, draping them in a volcanic sea of red and orange. It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor; the land made it literal.