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

by Clint Smith

“History is written by the perpetrators,” he said. And his goal is to be a part of writing something that challenges that.

“I was putting myself back in the seventeenth century. I was trying to imagine on how we can treat the human being like this, and how we can pack so many people in such small places. And all around it’s like I can feel the pain myself.”

he kept thinking of the children ensnared in slavery’s grip. He said he couldn’t imagine the speed with which illness would have spread, or the fear that these children would have felt.

Hasan emphasized a central part of his pedagogy: teaching his students that Africa’s history did not begin with slavery. “You must,” he said, “present how Africa was before slavery, and how it is during slavery, and how it is after slavery.” Hasan continued: “If you want to understand the economic situation in Africa, you have to understand what happened during slavery and how slavery has got a huge impact, because slavery has deprived us of the first input for development, which is the human force. We have to understand how colonization impacted negatively on our situation, and also how slavery deprived Africa of its workforce.”

we cannot understand slavery and colonialism as two separate historical phenomena. They are inextricably linked pieces of history. Slavery took a toll on West Africa’s population; millions of people were stripped from their homelands and sent across the ocean to serve in intergenerational bondage. The profound harm continued during colonialism, with much of the continent stripped of its natural resources instead of its people. Hasan reflected, “In both situations, in slavery and colonization, what you have is a system of plunder. First, in slavery, we have a plunder of human beings. Africa had been ripped of its people. And colonization is a plunder of natural resources. We have been exploited by the colonizers. On both systems, what you have is a plunder system.”

he emphasized the need for a sort of moral compensation. “Some people prefer a sense of memory,” he said. “Once you get money, you say, ‘Okay. Now you received money. We repaired everything. Don’t talk about it anymore.’” That is not the outcome Hasan wants. What he wants is an apology for what happened, and then to have that apology, that reckoning, inform how economic, cultural, and political decisions are made moving forward.

it is important that the country develop a curriculum so students can develop a holistic understanding of what slavery and colonialism did to their country and their continent. This, he said, is essential, because knowing their history helps them to more effectively identify the lies the world tells about Africa. It equips students with an intellectual and historical tool kit, so they won’t accept and internalize the idea that Africa has no history, that Africa’s poverty is its own fault, that Africa would be better off if it were under European control. “If they know that the arguments are false,” he said, “they will know that all the rest also is false.”

this knowledge gave their students new eyes, a new sense of freedom and understanding—the ability to know the lie, so they could not be lied to anymore.

I told Hasan that what he was telling me made me think of my trip to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and his eyes got wide. He asked me if I knew Ibrahima Seck. I told him I had indeed met Seck and that I had spoken to him when I went there in those months before coming to Gorée. Hasan smiled. That’s my best friend, he told me. He and Seck used to teach together at a high school in Dakar. The wind howled off the shore and we all smiled together as the sun moved higher into the midday sky.

if enslaved Africans died or became too sick to be useful, “they were put in the sea.” Her face wilted. “They didn’t respect us at all.”

perhaps the central tension of the Enlightenment is that many of these European thinkers were espousing liberalism, rationalism, and human progress while providing the kindling for slavery and colonialism.

toll the remnants of colonization had taken on their country. The unemployment rate is too high. The infrastructure is too old. The schools are too under-resourced. They told me that so many of the most talented young people from Senegal go on to universities around the world, and then don’t come back. They say it comes from the fact that they don’t have the same job opportunities back in Senegal, but also because people have internalized the idea that they are more valuable and more important if they live and work in Europe or America. “Africans don’t believe in Africa,”

it matters less that millions of people were not sent into bondage from this island but that people from this island were sent into bondage at all.

“This is the problem of the memory of slavery, that we have all these gaps.” The gaps. Gaps that have to be filled. Gaps that David Thorson spoke of at Monticello when he said, “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory.” There are the gaps that Monticello is attempting to fill by making clear that the story of Thomas Jefferson cannot be told without the story of the Hemings family. A reminder that we cannot read what Jefferson wrote about the United States in his Declaration of Independence while ignoring what he wrote about enslaved people in his Notes on the State of Virginia. There are the gaps that serve as a catalyst for the Whitney Plantation’s commitment to a story that not enough plantations are willing to tell. It is a place that has refused to accept that a plantation should be a site of weddings and not a site of reckoning, a place that centers on the story of the enslaved, because enslaved people are at the center of the story. There are the gaps that Angola prison tiptoes around even though there are eighteen thousand acres of evidence under its feet, a place where thousands of Black men still dig plows into the soft earth of its fields. There are the gaps that Blandford Cemetery fills with fiction, and flags from an army who fought a war to keep millions of people in chains. It is a place less interested in what truth looks li...

What makes the NMAAHC different is its ambition. This museum recognizes that Blackness is not peripheral to the American project; it is the foundation upon which the country was built.

The year my grandfather was born, a gallon of gas was twenty cents and a loaf of bread was nine. Slavery had ended six decades ago, and twelve years later everyone would forget. The year my grandfather was born, he had eight siblings and two parents and a grandfather born into bondage he tried to bury. The year my grandfather was born, millions of Americans were unemployed and over a thousand banks shut down. The Great Depression had taken a deep breath, and the US didn’t exhale for years. The year my grandfather was born, twenty-one people were lynched and no one heard a sound. The trees died and the soil turned over and the leaves baptized all that was left behind. The year my grandfather was born, there were full trains leaving Mississippi, and only empty ones coming back. *

Lynching was not something he had to hear about in the news or read in a textbook. In 1930s Mississippi, it saturated the air; its possibility was the humidity that clung to his skin. The town was about two-thirds white and a third Black, said my grandfather, and he remembers the separation between the two beginning as early as such a thing was possible.

For so much of my life my grandfather existed as a paragon of strength and fortitude. His once-domineering physique and deep voice made it impossible to imagine that he was ever on the receiving end of another man’s intimidation. In my childhood imagination he was a mountain that no storm could erode. And yet here was this story of my grandfather, an anecdote that transformed him from the mythos of my memory into a small and fragile boy—a boy being told to perform under the thinly veiled threat of violence in a state where boys like him could so easily be disappeared into the night. Emmett Till’s life had been taken because of an alleged whistle and a lie; surely it was not inconceivable that my grandfather’s life could have been taken for explicitly refusing to do what a white man asked him to. It was eight decades after emancipation, but this was still Mississippi.

be okay, he said, “as long as you stayed in your boundaries.” He said he always thought they would be safe because his family “stayed in our place.” I was surprised to hear my grandfather say this; history is laden with examples of Black families who did exactly as they were supposed to and still found family members hanging from a tree or at the bottom of a river. I can understand, however, why the twelve-year-old version of my grandfather would believe this. It makes sense to cling to a rationale that will make you feel as if you still have some semblance of control. It is something we all do and often the only thing we can do to continue to move through the world without being paralyzed by fear. Still, I was surprised that he had held on to such a notion for so long—long after he had left Mississippi and the lynching ropes of the early twentieth century had disintegrated into the soil. But time does not always create the emotional distance we might hope. Such recollections remain in the marrow of our bones.

It wasn’t that the stories themselves were something I was unfamiliar with, it was that whenever I had encountered these stories, these images, I had not fully considered the way they might have affected my own family—perhaps because of the way we talk about certain episodes of US history. Black-and-white photographs and film footage can convince us that these episodes transpired in a distant past, untouched by our contemporary world.

She added, “You have a very deep fear…you stay in your place. You knew your place as a Black person—I’m using the word ‘Black,’ but we were called Negroes. You just knew there were things you could and could not do and you didn’t have freedom. I didn’t have a feeling of freedom that we could accomplish or achieve. It made you—I don’t want to say less than a person, or less than a human…” She paused. “I used to have a really, really bad inferiority complex.” This fear extended out into every facet of my grandmother’s life. She told me how, because they lived in the rural South, they did not have many transportation options of their own, and as a result they walked almost everywhere, following the road, praying for safety.

children were not born to hate this way. They had been taught. They had watched their parents and they had watched the world and this is what they had been shown.

“It’s surprising, even the younger generation today, they can’t believe [it],” she said. “They can’t see how we went through it. How did we allow somebody to treat us that way? And if I show movies in school, the kids would say, ‘Nobody would do that to me. Nobody would do that to me.’ ‘No, I wouldn’t have done that.’ ‘Why didn’t y’all fight back?’ I’m like, ‘Hey, you hear about so many people who fought back. A lot of it is not in the textbooks, but a lot of people fought back, and they were killed. You never hear about them anymore.’” Then, again, she said, “I lived it.” A silence settled between us, and I kept thinking about her refrain. I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. It echoed throughout the room and became the gravity around us. It crept into my ears and made a home in there. I watched the realization wash over her like a tide had risen around her body. There was so much I had not known about my grandmother’s life until this moment. So many painful experiences that she still carried deep in the marrow of her bones. I thought of how easily these memories might have slipped away with her, had we not sat down—these stories might have remained grains of sand at the bottom of an hourglass. I thought about all of the ways the world today is at once so different, and not so different at all.

The exhibits at the museum were not abstractions for my grandparents; they were affirmations that what they had experienced was not of their imagination, and harrowing reminders that the scars of that era had not been self-inflicted. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was This museum is a mirror. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was My memories are an exhibit of their own. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Always remember what this country did to us. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Don’t let them tell you we didn’t fight back. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was I did not die. I have somehow made it here when so many did not. I escaped the jaws of a cruel thing and lived to tell this story. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was I am still alive.

so many of the people who threw rocks at Dr. King are still voting in our elections.

spending the day with my grandparents in a museum documenting the systemic and interpersonal violence they witnessed—the hand that beat them and the laws that said it was okay—reminded me that in the long arc of the universe, even the most explicit manifestations of racism happened a short time ago.

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. Across the United States, and abroad, there are places whose histories are inextricably tied to the story of human bondage. Many of these places directly confront and reflect on their relationship to that history; many of these places do not. But in order for our country to collectively move forward, it is not enough to have a patchwork of places that are honest about this history while being surrounded by other spaces that undermine it. It must be a collective endeavor to learn and confront the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today.

There were many occasions throughout the book, especially when I was in an environment in which there were no other Black people present, when I wondered how a tour or conversation might have been different if I was not Black. Would the tour have been exactly the same if everyone on it was white? Would different language have been used? Different framing? What things may have been included or excluded as a result of my presence?

Much of what shaped my desire to write this book was my experience as a high school teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, right outside Washington, DC. Though I was an English teacher, history informed both the way I approached the texts that we read and how I made sense of the social realities of my students’ lives. It was as a teacher that I first began to fully account for the way the history of this country shaped the landscape of my students’ communities, from slavery to Jim Crow apartheid to mass criminalization and beyond. I have come to realize that those conversations with my students, now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the world around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud.