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

by Clint Smith

Jefferson knew that slavery degraded the humanity of those who perpetuated its existence because it necessitated the subjugation of another human being; at the same time, he believed that Black people were an inferior class. This is where Jefferson’s logic falls apart, historian Winthrop D. Jordan wrote in 1968. If Jefferson truly believed that Black people were inferior, then he must have “suspected that the Creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.”

Donna seemed particularly appalled by how the institution of slavery had affected the children. “I mean, splitting families,” she said. “Oh my God, how can you split a family?” “It’s happening now,” said Grace. As the three of us held our conversation in July 2018, the Trump administration had already separated roughly three thousand children from their parents at the southern border of the United States, invoking the outrage of millions in the US and abroad. We had heard about mothers and fathers being told that their children were simply going to be given showers, only to have them learn, after hours had passed, that their children had been taken somewhere else—someplace they did not know. These two women, self-proclaimed Southern Republicans, found themselves identifying the parallels between families separated during slavery and those separated while seeking asylum in the United States from violence in Central America.

Not everyone is a fan of the changes the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has made over the past two decades, and some Jefferson loyalists explicitly oppose the contemporary project of Monticello. For example, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society claims that, among other things, Monticello is misrepresenting the nature of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings. Vivienne Kelley, vice president of the organization, has written that the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation “is using Jefferson’s Monticello to make a political statement about the evils of slavery” and “seems to have taken things too far.”

The fact that slavery was a terrible evil, that Jefferson owned slaves, or that evidence points to Jefferson having fathered Sally Hemming's children should not be political. Or controversial, but definitely not political

“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.”

Niya added, however, that she has “zero patience” for those who, when confronted with that history, contend that Monticello is attempting to tear down Jefferson’s legacy. “It’s telling the full truth of who he was,” she said. “Yes, he contributed great things. Yes, he gave us the Declaration of Independence, and the university where I got my degree, but he also owned people. He owned ancestors of people I know. That’s reality. I think in order to really understand him, and to fully understand him, you have to grapple with slavery. You have to grapple with [physical] violence and psychological violence, and family separation. We would not be doing the story justice if we don’t tell those stories.”

In a speech at the time, Louisiana’s commissioner made the state’s priorities clear: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”

I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. 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 Louisiana, in order to ensure there were more convictions, and thus more prisoners available for labor, in 1880 the state legislature shifted the requirement for juries from unanimous to non-unanimous. This way courts could allow a few Black people to serve on the jury—in accordance with their new rights as freed persons—but by requiring only nine of the twelve jurors to convict someone of a crime, they effectively subverted any political power Black people, or those sympathetic to them, might otherwise have had. Those responsible for the change did not equivocate in their rationale. The purpose of the 1898 convention, in which the new law officially became part of the Louisiana constitution, was, as summarized by the chairman of the convention’s judiciary committee, “to establish the supremacy of the white race.”

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.

Later, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the requirement to keep the heat index of the death row unit below the 88-degree maximum the plaintiffs had urged. In 2016, Jimmy LeBlanc, secretary of the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections, claimed that providing air-conditioning for the people on death row would open a “Pandora’s box,” potentially forcing the state to provide air-conditioning to many other prisoners.

Oh my god the horror 😱

Perhaps Martha was right, as Lee’s words suggest that he likely would not have advocated for Confederate monuments to be erected. In an August 1869 letter he wrote, “I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

A letter Lee wrote to his wife in 1856 is often used as a means of demonstrating that Lee couldn’t have fought for the Confederacy in order to protect slavery because he believed slavery was “a moral & political evil.” Devoid of additional context—and an acknowledgment of the fact that Lee owned enslaved people—this assertion might seem to shield Lee from allegations of racism and bigotry. And yet two sentences later: I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things.

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.

In 1902, as Jim Crow continued to expand as a violent and politically repressive force, the state’s all-white legislature created an annual allocation of the state’s funds for the care of Confederate graves. Smithsonian’s investigation found that in total, the state had spent approximately $9 million in today’s dollars. Much of that funding goes directly to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which received over $1.6 million in funds for Confederate cemeteries from the State of Virginia between 1996 and 2018. Cemeteries filled with Black and formerly enslaved people have never received commensurate financial support. The Virginia legislature passed the Historical African American Cemeteries and Graves Act in 2017, to demonstrate its commitment to making amends for this injustice, but at the time of the Smithsonian investigation less than a thousand dollars had been used.

In 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois attacked the decision to erect Confederate monuments as ahistorical and irresponsible: The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments—the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”

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

monuments. We have them here in Petersburg. We have the Union and we have the Confederate monuments. We do have a Monument Avenue also. And they need to be there for generations in the future because they need to know the truth. They can’t learn the truth if you do away with history. You’ll never learn. And once you do away with that type of thing, you become a slave. And if anybody knows education, if you don’t have it, you become a slave to people.”

The same people who argue that we should have the confederate monuments up to “preserve history” are also usually the ones against teaching black history

There have been claims that up to one hundred thousand Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, that Black men fought under General Robert E. Lee, and that these men valiantly died as part of racially integrated regiments willing to sacrifice their lives to save the South. There is no evidence to support this.

The idea of using enslaved people during the war had been suggested by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, but the proposal was scoffed at by the majority of Confederate leadership because it undermined the entire basis upon which the war was being fought. Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept. Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” Another Confederate leader, General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

imposition of federal rule on the Confederacy

They really said “the government tried to govern us, how dare they”

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.