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

by Clint Smith

The double yellow line on the single-lane highway swerved back and forth like it was trying to lose someone’s trail.

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.

They originally called it the Anti-Yoke Baptist Church, a statement against their former bondage and a homonymic tribute to Antioch, the cradle of Christianity.*

Some see it as akin to an artistic endeavor, meant to use a range of different exhibits, original and not, to communicate the conditions of Black oppression.

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?

Enslaved Africans arrived in Louisiana largely from the Senegambia, with over 60 percent of Louisiana’s slave population having come from that region.

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.*

“A lot of medical schools, during the history of slavery, largely depended on cadavers of enslaved people.

often purchased on the black market,

schools paid people to go to cemeteries and dig up the bodies of the enslaved.

From twenty to twenty-five children a year were bred on that plantation. As soon as they are ready for market, they are taken away and sold, as mules or other cattle.”

Stampp’s history, unlike many of his predecessors’, was written under the fundamental premise that Black and white people were equal, something earlier white historians did not accept as a given.

A self-proclaimed liberal, he worked alongside Black activists to reopen the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans when the city kept it closed to avoid making it an integrated facility.

There’s a job on the plantation that was ‘good breeder.’ She was a ‘good breeder.’

“The Delta blues is so close to our musical culture in the Sahara of Africa,”

the importation of Africans was responsible for both the economic foundation of this country and its culture.

“We do know, through others, that sometimes enslaved women would kill their own children, because they didn’t want them to grow up in the system.

Perhaps they were members of my own family. 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.

“An open book, up under the sky.”

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. It is a place asking the question How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?

thought of how I had grown up in Louisiana and had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me.

I had never been taught that 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.

“If we want to end mass incarceration, we’ve got to kind of get the history of where it comes from, and how it still exists, and what that looks like.”

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.

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 Thirteenth Amendment barred involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

“Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”

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.

“to establish the supremacy of the white race.”

Despite its history, the law was upheld in a 1972 Supreme Court ruling and amended only slightly in 1973 from nine out of twelve jurors being needed to convict to ten out of twelve.

40 percent of convictions by twelve-member juries had one or two jurors who did not agree with the verdict. Additionally, they found that in these cases, Black defendants were about 30 percent more likely to be found guilty

It was indeed a white person on horseback, herding a group of what seemed to be exclusively Black men into a field where they were forced to work.

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.

Who saw the largest maximum-security prison in the country as some sort of tourist destination?

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.

the fact that it was a plantation and all the awful shit that happened there.

one of the wealthiest men in the state based solely on the backs of convict labor.

He failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States.

they worked on levees and railroads in horrific conditions.

This was the room where the people sentenced to be killed by the State of Louisiana had their final meals.

Meanwhile, in the welding shop of the prison, some of the men were handed a new assignment, though they did not know what for. “One of the guys, one of the clerks, happened to see the whole blueprint laying on the drafting table,” Norris said, recounting the event, “and went back out in the shop and said, ‘Bruh, y’all know what you’re building?’ They’re like, ‘What?’ ‘You’re building the damn deathbed.’ ”

“One of the guys on the welding crew, his brother was on death row.”

‘We’re not going back to work.’ ” The prison, Norris said, was essentially at a standstill for three days.*

The chairs and glass turned this room into a spectacle of state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded death.

Red Hat cell block,” he said, speaking of the prison’s infamous maximum-security housing unit that closed in 1972.

Roger’s “I can’t change that” seemed to provide the pretense of acknowledgment while creating distance from personal culpability. It was reminiscent of a refrain laced throughout our country’s conversations about the history of racism.

“Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right.

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.

as a Black man who grew up in Louisiana, I felt a sense of responsibility to demand more from a place that had enacted so much violence on my community; as a PhD student at an Ivy League school, I didn’t want to come across as someone who had dropped in to critique a place I had no personal ties to. I

was astonished by the lack of institutional contrition, the refusal to admit what was right in front of us.