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

by Clint Smith

What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together.

One of the first things I noticed about Monticello was how the vast majority of its visitors seemed to be white. It’s not so much unexpected as it is markedly conspicuous, to see a plantation that has had its ratios reversed.

According to Jefferson, he wanted a scenario in which neither husbands and wives nor children and parents would be split apart. But 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.

absolution, in Jefferson’s case, could never be attained by simply refusing to participate in the most heinous aspects of slavery. To own an enslaved person was to perpetuate the barbarism of the institution. And when he felt it necessary to maintain the order that made his life possible, Jefferson engaged in some of the very practices he claimed to so deeply abhor.

Jefferson’s conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn’t have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?

It is true that while Jefferson’s life was always animated by slavery, it was not singularly tied to it. I understand there is much to be shared and explored about his life. It makes sense that people should know about the range of his scientific work, his political work, and his family life. I wonder, however, if we can understand any of these things without understanding Jefferson as a slave owner.

our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? 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 overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

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

a long history in which Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity.

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. I shared some of these parallels with Yvonne, and she nodded before closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, the sort of breath I have to imagine she has taken many times. She reopened her eyes and said that she thought endlessly about this idea of physical agency being stripped from the enslaved, and how one of the most insidious parts of it all was tied to the fact that this stripping away of agency did not end after they passed away. She started talking to me about the role that enslaved people played in the fields of science and medicine, how an enslaved person’s body—dead or alive—was the site of experiments that propelled the entire medical field forward.

Medical schools typically used the corpses of executed criminals or unclaimed bodies from prisons and almshouses, itself an abhorrent practice, 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.

Lineage is a strand of smoke making its way into the sky even though we can’t always tell where it’s coming from, even though sometimes we can’t distinguish the smoke from the sky itself.

The Whitney exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten. It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails.

But what stood out most in the gift shop, sitting on a shelf at the far end of the store, was a white mug with the silhouette of a guard sitting in a watchtower surrounded by fencing. Above the picture it said ANGOLA, and beneath the picture it read A GATED COMMUNITY. I looked around the gift shop once more and wondered whom it was attempting to serve. Who saw the largest maximum-security prison in the country as some sort of tourist destination?

It seemed much of the museum, almost relentlessly, depicted images of violence. And yet, paradoxically, its curators also sought to couple this violence with a narrative of progress, as if to show how bad the prison used to be and tout how incredibly safe it was now.

I felt the shame of being alive in a room built to kill.

Upon realizing what they were building, Norris said, the men refused to continue. And as a result, they were locked inside their cells. “The word spread like wildfire, because it was lunchtime when they was getting locked up, and so when it came time for everybody to go back to work after lunch, everybody was like, ‘We’re not going back to work.’” The prison, Norris said, was essentially at a standstill for three days.

Dobie Gillis Williams—another man who suffered from intellectual disability—was killed on January 8, 1999. For his final meal he ate twelve candy bars and a bowl of ice cream.

Each of these three men was found guilty of taking someone’s life, but standing in this room, I couldn’t understand how taking their lives in return made things any better.

In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the story the country tells about its relationship to chattel slavery is willfully distorted. “Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center…One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.”

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.

White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country—Black and white—to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.

It felt like a profound invasion of privacy to be there, unannounced, walking around in what was essentially their home.

I could not help but feel that something rancid had settled in me, like my presence made me complicit in what was happening here.

The average sentence at Angola is eighty-seven years.

It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor; the land made it literal.

“I think that’s the biggest challenge more than anything else,” he continued. “Not the work but just the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense. I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again.”

Incarcerated workers have not reaped the benefits of the labor movement over the course of the past century, in large part because they are not understood to be “employees.”

The first dragonflies of spring whipped through the light breeze, their translucent wings pulsing against the warm air, their unbridled bodies somersaulting past one another. I watched them dance through the air, land atop a headstone, and pause. I watched their wings twitch once, twice, then take off again, their bodies governed by the wind. I watched and, somewhat mystically, wondered whether these might have been descendants of the dragonflies that flew over this land during the war, more than a century and a half ago. I imagined them zipping past the bullets that turned men into ghosts, their wings warm with beads of blood. I imagined them landing on top of bodies that were strewn on top of bodies, circling the smoke billowing from burning soil.

Each window commemorating a state’s soldiers depicts a saint, with a state seal at the top of the window and an inscription at the bottom.

Beneath each of them was an inscription praising the valor of the Confederate soldiers who fought in the war.i My eyes moved back and forth from the images of the saints to the inscriptions under their feet, the dissonance growing with every second.

Perhaps it was not simply that Black people did not come to a Confederate cemetery because they didn’t want to be in the space; perhaps Black people did not come to these spaces in large part because of how the story of the Confederate cause was told.

a great many people assume that Black Americans would have no interest in visiting the land upon which their ancestors were enslaved, but my visit to the Whitney had shown me that if a place was willing to tell a different story—a more honest story—it would begin to see a different set of people visiting.

I think you could take the Civil War aspect totally out of it and enjoy the beauty.”

Lee’s hesitancy to erect memorials after the war, however, should not be considered exculpatory or a reflection of his desire to move toward an egalitarian society in which Black people were equal to their white counterparts.

While Lee believed slavery would one day come to an end, he also seemed to believe it was up to God when that happened. It was a view common of those in Lee’s world. He, and his fellow enslavers, had no control over it. Everyone, including the enslaved, were simply meant to wait for divine intervention.

In front of the gazebo were two flags, one Confederate, one US, standing side by side as if seven hundred thousand people hadn’t been killed under the weight of the epic conflagration between them.

As of 2020, in both Alabama and Mississippi there is Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day, and Jefferson Davis’s birthday; in South Carolina there is Confederate Memorial Day; in Texas there is Confederate Heroes Day. 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 organization developed and distributed lesson plans for teachers, and placed pro-Confederate books in schools and libraries across the South. They told the children that slavery was an institution that benefited both Blacks and whites alike, and that it was rare for there to be a cruel enslaver. They held essay contests in which students would regurgitate these falsities. Their work proved successful. Many of the children inundated with these messages spread by the UDC during the early twentieth century would grow up to become the segregationists of the civil rights era, and the legacy of the UDC’s teachings has contributed to the country’s collective ahistoricism and has helped shape the ongoing landscape of white supremacy today.

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.

She wanted them to understand that their ancestry, their history, did not begin with the Middle Passage. It did not begin with chains.

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.

Although New York State abolished slavery in 1827, complete abolition came only in 1841 when the State of New York abolished the right of non-residents to have slaves in the state for up to nine months. However, the use of slave labor elsewhere for the production of raw materials such as sugar and cotton was essential to the economy of New York both before and after the Civil War. Slaves also cleared forest land for the construction of Broadway and were among the workers that built the wall that Wall Street is named for and helped build the first Trinity Church.

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.

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.”

According to Berlin, in his book The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, slave catchers and kidnappers, indeed known as “blackbirders,” congregated in Northern cities, taking part in what became an increasingly lucrative endeavor. New York City, per one abolitionist, became a “slaveholders’ hunting ground.”