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

by Clint Smith

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.”

“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.

“Of the two thirds of a million interstate sales made by the traders in the decades before the Civil War, twenty-five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family—many of these separating children under the age of thirteen from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the dissolution of a previously existing community. And those are only the interstate sales.”

over the course of chattel slavery’s existence about one million enslaved people were sep...

Jefferson, like other antebellum Virginians who considered themselves enlightened, preferred that his enslaved property be sold in family units. Typically, he only sold individuals when he was hard-pressed financially.

Jefferson did allow families to be separated under his watch. He separated children as young as thirteen from their parents by sale, bought children as young as eleven, and separated children under ten from their families by transferring them between his own properties or giving them to family members as gifts. 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. Jefferson understood, as well, the particular economic benefits of keeping husbands and wives together, noting that “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.”

By 1860, about one in three Southerners was an enslaved person.

As much as he said he detested slavery, Jefferson did not spend a large portion of his life attempting to limit it in the United States.

Donna and Grace and so many people—specifically white people—often have understood slavery, and those held in its grip, only in abstract terms. They do not see the faces. They cannot picture the hands. They do not hear the fear, or the laughter. They do not consider that these were children like their own, or that these were people who had birthdays and weddings and funerals; who loved and celebrated one another just as they loved and celebrated their loved ones.

identifying the parallels between families separated during slavery and those separated while seeking asylum in the United States from violence in Central America.

(A reference to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore at least six of Jefferson’s children. The two were never married.)

their names appear in Jefferson’s Farm Book on a page entitled “Roll of Negroes,” their cursive monikers easily lost amid the other names. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affections to us children,” said Jefferson’s formerly enslaved son, Madison Hemings, to an interviewer in 1873.ii “We were the only children of his by a slave woman.”

“We’re not changing history,” Theresa said, unfazed. “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.”

essential that a guide be able to find the balance between telling the truth and not pushing people so much that they shut down. He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves.

“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.”

“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.

The voices and stories of enslaved people are the foundation of how visitors experience the Whitney. They are especially important because, apart from a single photo of an enslaved man, there are no images or stories of the many people who once lived on the plantation itself. “Their voices are forever gone and silenced,”

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.

When women were put on slave ships that crossed the Atlantic, it was common for white sailors to rape them during the journey. Sexual violence was ubiquitous throughout slavery, and it followed enslaved women wherever they went.

There were laws stating that almost any crime committed by a white person against a Black person was in fact not a crime at all.iv The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost—oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

“A lot of medical schools, during the history of slavery, largely depended on cadavers of enslaved people. That’s who they practiced on…Black women’s bodies were used in experiments to advance medicine,

but when there were not enough of those needed bodies for their anatomy classes, schools paid people to go to cemeteries and dig up the bodies of the enslaved.

“Most African Americans don’t know much about Africa and Africans, and most Africans don’t know much about African Americans. They may know the music. They may know something related to the culture. They don’t really know about the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere,”

“And if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony.”

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.

I wanted Angola, where 71 percent of people are serving life sentences and three-quarters of the population is Black, to not pretend as if that was a coincidence.

It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.

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.

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.

These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities.

In both Alabama and Mississippi, Robert E. Lee’s birthday is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

There is no shortage of documentation demonstrating that the Southern states seceded and began sowing the seeds of war in order to defend slavery. 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.

the Klan was founded by former Confederates as a secret society before it became a terrorist group, and the early Klan was filled with Confederate veterans.

Lincoln was in charge of an army that was fighting to free four million Black people, while the other side fought to keep them enslaved.

almost half of those Confederate soldiers either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, and had business relationships with them.

Propaganda like this helped to convince non-slaveholding whites that abolition was an existential threat to Southern society. Without slavery, they were told, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.

White Southerners’ commitment to the Confederate cause was not predicated on whether or not they owned slaves. The commitment was based on a desire to maintain a society in which Black people remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

1941, the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper, wrote, “Negroes are not sure whether to be gay on ‘Juneteenth’ or to observe the day with sadness. They do not know whether they are actually free here.”

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

When freedom did eventually come, it often still felt out of reach. There was little financial support for the formerly enslaved, and they were given few resources with which to build economic and social mobility.

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.

estimates that there were anywhere from a few million to 15 million Indigenous Americans living in North America upon Columbus’s arrival in 1492. By the late nineteenth century, the population had dropped to approximately 250,000.

I thought of all the times I had heard “But why didn’t they fight back?” when slavery was discussed in my classes. I thought of the bell at plantations like the Whitney, which had been rung to tell the enslaved people to gather round and watch one of their loved ones being lashed until they bled. I thought of the rooms in Angola’s Red Hat cell block, how the smallness of those spaces had closed in on me. The cramped cavern might have been where the lessons on first resistance had taken place in a person’s earliest days of enslavement. Where spirits and bodies had been broken.

they forced the [Native Americans] to work for them. And it was because the Natives died in great number that they turned to Africa, and the purpose was to replace these Natives with Africans.”

“History is written by the perpetrators,”

Part of what Hasan teaches his students is that 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.”

“If Europe is what it is nowadays, it’s because of the blood and the efforts of Africans who have been taken to America to work on plantations and generate profits. It favored the industrial development of Europe, since part of Europe’s development was made possible by the fact that we [sent] to America slaves who worked hard to create development. That’s the root of Europe’s current development.”

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.