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

by Clint Smith

As we finished our conversation, I asked my grandmother about her thoughts on our trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It was really depressing, very depressing to see that. I had a hard time, even now, trying to accept the fact that we can be so cruel to one another. It’s just so inhumane. Looking at the slavery as it existed with the chains around your neck, hands all bound. You can’t go to the bathroom. That was really real. So it was very, very depressing.” “What about the parts that were specific to segregation?” I asked. “It just kind of made me go back to that time of life when I lived this. I kept saying, ‘I lived this.’ So it wasn’t anything new for me. For some people, it’s like, ‘Oh, really?’ No, it was for real, and I had lived it.” She continued: “I knew about when Emmett Till was killed and dragged. That was just horrible …We knew about the rioting, we knew about the fires, and all those kinds of things. So it was not anything surprising to me, because I lived it. “It’s surprising, even the younger generation today, they can’t believe [it],” she said. “They can’t see how we went through it. How did we allow somebody to treat us that way? And if I show movies in school, the kids would say, ‘Nobody would do that to me. Nobody would do that to me.’ ‘No, I wouldn’t have done that.’ ‘Why didn’t y’all fight back?’ I’m like, ‘Hey, you hear about so many people who fought back. A lot of it is not in the textbooks, but a lot of people ...