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

by Clint Smith

coming to a Confederate cemetery and hearing Ken speak about the beauty of a set of windows without exploring what they were meant to memorialize, was not unlike going to a plantation and listening to a talk about the decorative infrastructure of the enslaver’s house without mentioning the enslaved hands who built it.

Lee’s army saw Black soldiers as participants in a slave revolt, an insurrection of the most nightmarish proportions that was being actively supported by Lincoln and the US government.

The Confederate government put in place policies that officially considered Black soldiers slaves participating in an insurrection, and thus subject to re-enslavement or execution. Their white officers, as enablers of the insurrection, could also be executed.

After the Battle of the Crater, captured Union prisoners—white and Black—were made to march through the streets of Petersburg. Levin argues that the display was meant as a message to civilians that this is what was at stake if the war was lost: race mixing and the end of white supremacy.

Across the street from Blandford Cemetery, a smaller, more understated burial ground stood. The People’s Memorial Cemetery was purchased by twenty-eight members of Petersburg’s free Black community in 1840. Buried on this land are enslaved people, an anti-slavery writer whose burial site is recorded among the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom sites; Black veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; as well as hundreds of other Black Petersburg residents. The contrast between the two was conspicuous in ways not dissimilar to that between the two cemeteries at Monticello. There were far fewer tombstones at the People’s Memorial Cemetery than at Blandford, and those there were indiscriminately scattered across the brown grass. There were no flags ornamenting the graves. There were no hourly tours available for people to remember the dead. There was history, but also silence.

I looked around as everyone sang in unison, lifting their voices in an almost paradoxically mellifluous tribute to a fallen ancestral home. A home never meant for me.

“While those who hate seek to remove the memory of these heroes,” another said, “these men paid the ultimate price for freedom, and they deserve to be remembered.” As we stood there listening, I pulled out a small journal and began taking notes. I tried to be subtle, but it felt as if my pen was loudly screeching against the page each time it touched the paper. I felt eyes on me, as more than a few people turned around in their seats and looked with puzzlement, and likely suspicion, at the Black man they had never seen before standing in the back of a Sons of Confederate Veterans crowd. A man to my right, not so subtly, took out his phone and began recording me with its camera. People continued to turn their heads. The stares began to crawl over my skin. I slowly closed my notebook and stuck it under my arm, looking up toward the gazebo, doing my best to give off the sense that I was unfazed. Without moving my head, I scanned the crowd again. The man in front of me had a gun in a holster on his waist. Virginia is an open-carry state.

It did not seem to matter that they had fought against the US; he believed they should be remembered as US veterans themselves.

The Lost Cause is a movement that gained traction in the late nineteenth century that attempted to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family, honor, and heritage rather than what it was, a traitorous effort to extend and expand the bondage of Black people. The movement asserted that the Civil War was not actually about slavery, that the soldiers and generals who fought in the war were honorable men who did so simply for their families and communities, not because of any racist antagonism. The myth of the Lost Cause not only subsumed those sympathetic to the Confederate cause but also laid its claim to broad swathes of the American consciousness. It attempted to rewrite US history.

And then I think about all the monuments across this country that naysayers are decrying, ‘Get rid of them. That offends me. I don’t like it.’… I refer to them as the American ISIS.” He looked out into the crowd, who murmured affirmation, and his face contorted with delight. “I have even written about this in the Confederate Veteran, in my article, because they are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like. And like I said, once they go through the Confederate symbols—US symbols, Christian symbols, will be next.”

The erection of Confederate monuments in the early twentieth century came at a moment when many Confederate veterans were beginning to die off in large numbers. A new generation of white Southerners who had no memory of the war had come of age, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had raised enough money to build memorials to these men. The goal, in part, was to teach the younger generations of white Southerners who these men had been and that the cause they had fought for was an honorable one. But there is another reason, not wholly disconnected from the first. These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded.

former Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson explained that slavery was “the apprenticeship by which savage races had been educated and trained into civilization by their superiors.” After the war ended, white Southern writers took the baton from Confederate leaders and continued to paint slavery not as an institution defined by violence and exploitation but as a mutually beneficial arrangement of eager Black enslaved people and kind white enslavers.

The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.

The myth of Black Confederate soldiers emerged in the 1970s, pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This story was a response to changing public perceptions of the Civil War in the years after the civil rights movement—away from Lost Cause mythology and toward recognition that slavery was central to this conflict. The SCV appears to have thought that if it could appropriate the stories of men like Richard Poplar, it might, despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, protect the Confederacy’s legacy. A Confederate sympathizer could argue, if the war was fought over slavery, why were Black soldiers fighting for the Confederates? If Black soldiers fought for the Confederates, how could it be considered racist to fly the Dixie flag? The idea of using enslaved people during the war had been suggested by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, but the proposal was scoffed at by the majority of Confederate leadership because it undermined the entire basis upon which the war was being fought. Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept. Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” Another Confederate leader, General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery i...

The idea that slavery was “just a very small part” of why the Civil War began is not unique to Jeff; it is reflective of decades of Lost Cause propaganda.

In 1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and that there would have been a civil war even if no American ever owned a slave.

To look at primary source documents and convince yourself that the central cause of the war was anything other than slavery requires a remarkable contortion of history.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center and a group of New Orleans lawyers put it in a recent amicus brief: “Although the Sons of Confederate Veterans has disavowed racism in its official pronouncements in recent years, the group is still deeply invested in elevating and legitimizing its version of the Confederacy’s ‘history’ and ‘traditions,’ which implicate an inherently racist, white supremacist vision of society.”

when they are asked to reckon with the fact that their ancestors fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved, there is resistance to facts that have been documented by primary sources and contemporaneous evidence. They are forced to confront the lies they have upheld. They are forced to confront the flaws of their ancestors.

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters.” Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world. But as I think of Blandford, I’m left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told. What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.

As the Lost Cause mythology continued into the early twentieth century, Juneteenth was not only a celebration but also a seizing of public memory. As historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner notes, “Memories represent power to people who are oppressed, for while they cannot control much of what occurs in their lives, they can own their own memories.”

there was little mainstream discussion of who Black people were before they reached the coasts of the New World, beyond the balls and chains.

the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it.

as committed as Sue was to teaching young people in Galveston about the history of slavery and its aftermath, she wanted to go even further back than that. She wanted them to understand that their ancestry, their history, did not begin with the Middle Passage. It did not begin with chains. “I didn’t want them to think, Oh, we popped up and we became enslaved. No, we were thriving communities and nations and did amazing things before we were ever found by the white man,” she said with an unfettered insistence. “We did so many things that it didn’t mean that we came here dumb and we had to learn somebody else’s way to become truly educated and actualized. I wanted them to see what they brought to the table, and to try to maintain and preserve who they are, and not think that in order to be successful, I have to let go of my cultural stuff and adopt somebody else’s.”

One thing that Bostic is especially committed to is ensuring that while Emancipation Park provides a place for people to celebrate Juneteenth, these celebrations don’t come at the expense of people understanding what the history of Juneteenth actually

has experienced a number of high-profile embarrassments with regard to how schools in the state have taught Black history, particularly slavery. In 2015, the State Board of Education and publisher McGraw-Hill Education came under fire for providing students with a textbook that described how the transatlantic slave trade brought “millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” It seemed to many to be a deliberate obfuscation of the fact that Africans were forcibly and violently stripped from their homelands, not people who were just “workers” who simply agreed to come help cultivate North American land.

The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.

the 1 train barreled down the tracks, the doors opening at each stop as passengers buried themselves in their phones, in their books, and in the shoulders of people they love.

This is not Black history. This is not New York City or American history. This is world history”—she paused briefly—“that has been completely whitewashed and wiped out of our education systems globally, because history is no longer taught. Or when it’s taught, it’s taught incorrectly. A lot of the information you hear today is going to make you feel very, very uncomfortable. That’s okay.” She smiled. “That’s what learning and development is as a human being, being uncomfortable.

by 1860 the nearly four million enslaved people were by far the country’s most valuable economic asset; valued at approximately $3.5 billion, they were worth more than all of the country’s manufacturing and railroads combined.

slavery has existed throughout history, across the world. People would regularly be enslaved because they were prisoners of war or because they owed some sort of debt. Sometimes, she explained, enslavement would endure only for a specific period of time, and even if you were enslaved for your entire life, your children would not necessarily be enslaved after you. Slavery in the United States was different. “This New World enslavement,” Damaras said, “this chattel slavery, was based off of a racial caste system, a racial hierarchy, and it was wrapped around the European ideology that there was something inherently subhuman or inhuman with the genetic makeup of the African, so the only thing that made you eligible for this lifelong sentence was pigmentation, or the color of your skin.

“Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been...

Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race…so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” A statement like “Black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color,” they say, is something students might find in textbooks and never blink an eye at. As Barbara Fields and Karen Fields explain in their book, that passive construction makes it seem as if segregation were completely natural, which absolves the enforcers of segregation—both systemic and interpersonal—from any sort of culpability.

Manhattan from the Lenape for a price of sixty guilders’ worth of goods, equivalent today to about a thousand dollars. Damaras held up a copy of the earliest known reference to the purchase, a letter from 1626 reporting the news to the Dutch government. The original contract did not survive, but it may have meant something quite different to the Lenape than it did to the Dutch. “You see, this idea or this concept of owning land or resources—that was a European concept. Owning land to the Native Americans was like owning water or the moon or the stars, and in fact, there wasn’t a word for [land] ownership in their Algonquian language.”

I watched as the Financial District churned and hummed all around us. Sound emanated from every direction: the staccato of jackhammers cracking blocks of concrete in their search for softer earth; cranes stretching their steel joints to lift rubble from one corner of the street to another; ambulances mazing their way through cars and crosswalks, their red flares howling a loud and urgent incantation. This was a significant contrast to the quiet, insulated mountains that encircled Monticello, or the soft rustling of long grass that surrounded the Whitney, or the haunting silence of Angola.

four would survive the trip from the region’s interior to the coast. Of those sixty-four, around forty-eight would survive the weeks-long journey across the Atlantic. Of those forty-eight who stepped off the ship in New York Harbor, only twenty-eight to thirty would survive the first three to four years in the colony. Berlin and Harris referred to New York at this time as “a death factory for black people.”

I thought again about the formulation of enslaved people’s “humanity” and how it is not contingent on certain moments or actions but is central to the very project of the institution. They were human at the well, and they were human away from

Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish. As the cotton trade expanded, New York City became the central port for shipments of raw cotton moving between the American South and Europe. By 1822, more than half of the goods shipped out of New York’s harbor were produced in Southern states. Cotton alone was responsible for more than 40 percent of the city’s exported goods. Once we all made our way back to the group, Damaras explained, “One of the biggest lies we are still telling in this country—and I know because I’m trying to combat it—[is that] during the Civil War we were the good guys, right? New York City was good. Everybody else in the South, they were bad.”

you’re not the same race as many other people in New York, and people’s lived experiences may be different from yours. Your perspective might be valid in your social circle; in other social circles it may not be. That’s all.”

In the nineteenth century, Black people lived in fear that at any moment a slave catcher could snatch them or their children up, regardless of status or social position. In the twenty-first century, Black people live in fear that at any moment police will throw them against a wall, or worse, regardless of whether there is any pretense of suspicion other than the color of their skin.

for many, the goals of antislavery and antiracism did not go hand in hand.

The harm done did not end after a person’s funeral but continued after their death. It was not uncommon for local doctors and medical students to illegally exhume bodies from the cemetery to use them for dissections and experiments.

“If there’s anything I can leave you with, question everything. Myself, everything you read, everything you hear. Fact-check, fact-check, fact-check.” She pulled her hands apart and swept them across each other. “Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”

The pretense of cultural pluralism told a story that was only half true. New York economically benefited from slavery, and the physical history of enslavement—the blood, the bodies, and the buildings constructed by them—was deeply entrenched in the soil of this city.

The museum stated directly that for many groups—Black people, women, Chinese immigrants, and a host of others—the statue’s torch of liberty did not glow for them.

My eyes moved to Lady Liberty’s feet, and I thought I could see the faint contours of broken chains. But I might also have imagined seeing them because I finally knew they were there.

Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.

Downtown Dakar was bustling and vibrant. Sauntering bodies jostled at the edges of dusty street corners while cars swept between one another, coiling the road in a garland of exhaust. Minibuses teeming with passengers swerved around corners with alacrity and precision, their exteriors bursting with color, the blues, yellows, oranges, and reds bleeding together as they accelerated by. People crossed the street with purpose, moving between the taxis and minibuses they presumed would stop for them. The smell of baguettes and roasted nuts snuck through the exhaust, letting my body know that the apple I had eaten for breakfast was not enough. Every sound, every smell, was a layer of fog lifting itself to reveal a memory I had forgotten was there.

The Door of No Return is a famous symbol of the slave trade, appearing at historical sites across the western coast of Africa. The story goes that it was through these doors, looking out onto the Atlantic, that millions of enslaved Africans walked as they boarded ships that would bring them into bondage on the other side of the ocean.