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

by Clint Smith

You … could get inmates as cooks, yard boys, house boys; you could have two or three of them if you wanted.

Hidden behind century-old sadistic masks.

The block became known as the Red Hat because when the men went out to work in the fields, they wore straw hats that had been dipped in red paint to make them easily identifiable.

I stepped into the first cell on my right and became acutely aware of my body in the confined space.

They wanted you to smell the stench of your own body waste while eating.”

the men held on the Red Hat block were given the leftovers from other prisoners’ meals and that those meals were delivered to them in wheelbarrows.

Louisiana began using the electric chair in 1941.

The charge was dropped, but the police began questioning Willie about Thomas’s murder in Saint Martinville instead. Soon police had a signed confession from Willie. The boy had no counsel present. Given his age and the circumstances of his arrest, it is unlikely that such a statement could exist devoid of coercion, threats, or violence from the officers in their interrogation room. Willie pleaded not guilty and was put on trial in front of a jury of twelve white men. Willie’s lawyers called no witnesses, refused to make an opening statement, and offered no objections. Two days after the trial began, Willie was convicted of murder. It took the jury fifteen minutes to deliberate.

had been drunk while setting it up earlier that day. As a result, the electrocution did not kill Willie, but it did torture him.

The lawyer argued that subjecting Willie to another attempted execution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Ultimately the Court ruled 5 to 4 against Willie. He was killed, by electric chair, just a little over a year later, on May 9, 1947.

almost like you know something only God should know.”

Roger implied that the Department of Corrections had done this of their own moral accord. What Roger did not mention was the history of recent lawsuits that appear to have pushed the state to make substantive changes to the way it treated those on death row.

Their attorneys asserted that the conditions of the unit violated the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment.

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.

They swerved and dipped and bent their bodies around each slice of wind, flying over the levees and toward the river, as if to look down and wonder, What is a fence if you can fly right over it?

“The first six months you’re paying off all your clothes that we got to give you while you’re here.

Seven cents an hour.”

the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense.

and of newly buried bodies just becoming acquainted with the earth.

The honor guard then turned toward the large stretch of cemetery, lifted their rifles toward the sky, and fired into the air three times. I felt my knees buckle at the sound of the first shot, and a thrust of adrenaline hurtled through me. The boom of the rifles reverberated throughout my body. I shut my eyes for the second shot, and again for the third. I felt a tightening of muscles inside my mouth, muscles I hadn’t known were there.

Those who support these monuments contend that to push back against them is to unfairly apply today’s moral sensibilities to a bygone era.

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.

“Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.”

It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”

The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.

“Well, basically everybody always hears the same things, ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t. It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself,” he said.

you would say they forced you to fight for the Confederacy, we will set you free.’ He said, ‘I will not leave my men.’ He said, ‘Because I know what happened. You invaded the South.’ ”

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.

Another Confederate leader, General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

While running for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories, but he promised not to interfere with slavery in any of the fifteen states where it already existed.

before he was inaugurated, the seven states with the highest numbers of enslaved people per capita, as well as the highest percentage of family slave ownership, seceded from the Union. An additional four would follow.

by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.

“Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependant [sic]

consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.

When our Constitution was formed, [the institution of slavery] was rendered more palpable, for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white men—not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three fifths.

was founded on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,”

Southern people don’t call it the Civil War because they know it was an invasion

“The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution …We seek nothing more than a return to a godly, stable, tradition-based society with no ‘Northernisms’ attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European–derived country.”

“The negro considered freedom synonymous with equality, and his greatest ambition was to marry a white wife,” she wrote. “Under such conditions there was only one recourse left, to organize a powerful Secret Order to accomplish what could not be done in the open. So the Confederate soldiers, as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and fully equal to any emergency, came again to the rescue, and delivered the South from a bondage worse than death.”

his commitment to ending slavery was not necessarily matched by a commitment to Black equality.

I will say …that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Lincoln thought that abolition paired with colonization was the best path forward, as it ostensibly gave Black people freedom and removed the concern that many Americans had about having to live alongside their Black counterparts.

Lincoln’s position was similar to that of many throughout the North, those who believed slavery should be abolished but who did not want to share a society with or live alongside free Black Americans.

A few days before his assassination he endorsed the prospect of limited suffrage for certain groups of Black people, albeit those he deemed “very intelligent” and “who serve our cause as soldiers.”

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Willis’s owner moved his operations to Texas so that he could continue to enslave his workers. According to Bostic, when her great-grandfather, who had been freed by his own former enslaver, learned of this, he convinced his wife’s owner to allow him to purchase his way back into slavery so that he could be with his family.

Pipe of Peace, in their language, Hoboken.

The space between the former walls is now called Wall Street, and its spirit is still that of a bulwark against the people.

I thought again about the formulation of enslaved people’s “humanity” and how it is not contingent on certain moments or actions but is central to the very project of the institution. They were human at the well, and they were human away from it.

“Like Hegel,” she said. The idea that “ ‘Africa is a tabula rasa’—I don’t understand that.”