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

by Clint Smith

New Orleans Committee to Erect Markers on the Slave Trade,

Compare to the holocaust plaques

Battle of Liberty Place, an 1874 insurrection in which white supremacists attempted to overthrow the integrated Reconstruction-era state government of Louisiana.

“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.”

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

“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”

Word became part of the tours Monticello created based on the lives of the enslaved population there. “This is how the word is passed down,”

What would motivate a Black family to come spend the day at a plantation if they were concerned about how the story of that land would be told, what kind of people would be standing alongside them as it was told, and who was telling it?

“I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,” 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, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”

mean there are just so many ways that 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.

“For nearly seventy years the image of Haiti hung over the South like a black cloud, a point of constant reference by proslavery leaders.”

These faces exemplify how the Whitney Plantation is unlike almost any other plantation in the country. In a state where plantations remain the sites of formal celebrations and weddings, where tours of former slave estates nostalgically center on the architectural merits of the old homes, where you are still more likely to hear stories of how the owners of the land “treated their slaves well” than you are to hear of the experiences of actual enslaved people, the Whitney stands apart by making the story of the enslaved the core of the experience.

Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments.

white Southerners had already watched the Great Migration pull well over a million Black people from the South, and with them, the cheap labor many white landowners had grown accustomed to. In order to prevent the mass migration from continuing at such a high rate, Yvonne said, they started stopping trains of Black people heading north, forcing the passengers off or forcing the entire train to turn back.

“exactly what legacies are. They’re not just the things we choose. A lot of them are the things that we don’t choose.

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. In a harrowing description of the conditions some slave children lived in, Francis Fedric, who was born enslaved in Virginia and escaped in his forties, wrote in his autobiography, “Children feed like pigs out of troughs, and being supplied sparingly, invariably fight and quarrel with one another over their meals.” Children under ten were 51 percent of total Black deaths in 1850 (compared to 38 percent of white deaths). Put differently, as Mississippi planter M. W. Phillips wrote, “Not one-fourth of the [slave] children born are raised.”

This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.

in order to really understand slavery, we have to understand what slavery meant for women.”

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. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.”

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

this cabin, inhabited by enslaved people, continued to be inhabited by their descendants until the year of 1975.”

once the appetite for sugar and chocolate and coffee and cheap textiles and all these things started flooding the market, and people can finally buy into this larger system of capitalism and consumption, who is at the other end of it?”

the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution, the uprising that laid the groundwork for all the slave revolts that followed in its wake.

Only a few weeks before our visit 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.

I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present.

For whites in the Confederate Army, seeing these Black men in Union uniforms represented a profound and infuriating turning point in the war, one that tapped into their worst impulses. The use of Black soldiers was a threat to the entire social order the South had been predicated on. Black soldiers in the Union Army did not simply reflect a new demographic composition of their military opponents; 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.

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege,

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.

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. In the late nineteenth century, states began implementing Jim Crow laws to cement this country’s racial caste system. Social and political backlash to Reconstruction-era attempts to build an integrated society was the backdrop against which the first monuments arose. These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement.

Pendleton has 4 streets named after confederate generals: https://www.eastoregonian.com/news/local/pendleton-recements-confederate-history/article_6ec4f52e-2064-11eb-9c45-77fc60fc7a88.html

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.

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.

“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.”

“Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.” In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Black Americans owned about 0.5 percent of the total wealth in the United States. Today, despite being 13 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth. Despite the role Black Americans played in generating this country’s wealth, they don’t have access to the vast majority of it.

Frederick Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech in 1852, in which he stated: Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine.

the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it. Sue contended that these conversations rarely happen in our own community largely because there is a fear of whom it might offend.

I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. 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.

slavery was central to the US economy: 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.

“Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. 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.”

During parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were more enslaved Black people in New York City than in any other urban area across North America. Enslaved workers made up more than a quarter of the city’s labor force.

The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish.

European and American scholars to be careful and consider whether there is a responsibility to be deferential to local interpretations. To come into a place one doesn’t have any familial or cultural connection to, and upend the story it has told for decades, is likely to be more harmful than helpful. The story of Gorée, Nelson said, is not as simple as which empirical evidence is “correct” or “incorrect.” There are a range of ethical, cultural, and social factors to consider when interpreting the historical significance of a site like the House of Slaves.

Araujo likes to think of Ndiaye as a sort of griot, a person who used the power of storytelling to force people to confront a larger history many had forgotten, or were willing to ignore.

teaching history, a full history, would shape how students navigated the world.

the 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,” Fatou said.

Perhaps 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. When I stood in the room in the House of Slaves that sat adjacent to the ocean, when I opened my arms and touched its wet stone walls, did it matter exactly how many people had once been held in that room? Or was it more important that the room pushed me into a space of reflection on what the origins of slavery meant? When I bent down and crawled inside that small space where I had been told enslaved people who resisted were held, when the darkness of that hole washed over me, did it matter whether enslaved people had actually been held there or did it matter that my sense of what bondage meant for millions of people had been irreversibly heightened? Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?

the trajectory of a child’s life was subject, above all else, to the arbitrary whims of good fortune.

I asked him if there would ever be an America in which white Americans were not actively working to keep themselves positioned atop the racial hierarchy. He thought for a moment and then said, “Some of them will never give it up.”

She spoke, regretfully, about the way she was taught to think about people on the African continent, how those caricatures specifically were designed to make them think of Africans as less than human, and how it contributed to making Black Americans feel as if slavery had somehow rescued them from the backwardness of their ancestral homeland.

When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path.