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

by Clint Smith

based newspapers like The Colored American, Freedom’s Journal, The Ram’s Horn, and The Rights of All lifted up the voices of Black abolitionists and their allies. People like James W. C. Pennington, David Ruggles, Henry Highland Garnet, and Thomas Downing put their lives at risk every time they spoke out against slavery or harbored a fugitive. Black-run organizations, like the New York Committee of Vigilance, came together to protect runaways and Black New Yorkers from the omnipresent threat of slave catchers. As historian Manisha Sinha writes, “New York’s black abolitionists kept alive the antislavery impulse even as it atrophied among white Americans.” I remember being taught as a child—sometimes implicitly though often explicitly—that abolitionists were people who wanted to both end slavery and extend equal rights to the formerly enslaved. As I grew older, I learned that the story is not so cleanly demarcated. There were certainly those, like the Tappan brothers, who believed in both ending slavery and supporting Black rights, but for many, the goals of antislavery and antiracism did not go hand in hand. The American Colonization Society (ACS), for example, wanted to physically remove Black people and send them to Africa. In its 1823 annual meeting, the ACS calculated that if they removed thirty thousand Black people from the country every year, the United States could completely eradicate its African American population. In 1829, the New York arm of the ACS concluded t...