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

by Clint Smith

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

“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.”

By 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people, 57 percent of whom were under the age of twenty.

The convict leasing system allowed Black people to be imprisoned for years under spurious charges and be “rented” to companies.

Buried here in Petersburg, Virginia, are the bodies of roughly thirty thousand Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the South.

while Lincoln said he had “always hated slavery” and called the institution a “monstrous injustice,” his commitment to ending slavery was not necessarily matched by a commitment to Black equality.

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?

Two of Bank of America’s predecessors, Southern Bank of Saint Louis and Boatmen’s Savings Institution, listed enslaved people as potential collateral for a debt in 1863. Citibank also had ties to chattel slavery.

The country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, was the most deeply entwined in the slave trade.

the African Burial Ground National Monument, the site that contained the remains of 419 free and enslaved people of African descent, buried during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“History is written by the perpetrators,”