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

by Clint Smith

When my grandfather was about sixteen, a Black man in Brookhaven—the town to which he had moved to attend high school—told the police about a white man who was selling liquor on the black market. While Prohibition ended nationally upon the signing of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, Mississippi continued to enforce it until 1966. “He was one of the members of the Klan,” my grandfather said of the white man selling the alcohol. “He was arrested based on the testimony of this Black guy, and so they came after this Black guy, the night riders.” He paused. “I can’t know if they were ‘Klansmen’ or not, but they all did the same thing,” He took a deep breath and looked forward, staring at a blank wall. “The night riders, henchmen, whatever you wanna call them, came and got him, and hung him on a tree and cut off his penis and put it in his mouth.” I had never heard this story before. And I had never heard my grandfather describe something so gruesome. “I stayed out of downtown at night, and I made sure when I went downtown that I stayed where people could see me,” he said. I looked at my grandfather as he said this and wondered if he still harbored any anger from these moments. I asked him if there would ever be an America in which white Americans were not actively working to keep themselves positioned atop the racial hierarchy. He thought for a moment and then said, “Some of them will never give it up.”