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

by Clint Smith

In May of 2019, a new museum opened on Liberty Island that put forward a new interpretation of the Statue of Liberty’s origin—that it “was also intended, in part, to celebrate the abolition of slavery in the United States.” After going through airport-like security at the harbor’s terminal, I boarded the ferry, and it rumbled its way to the island where the monument has sat for more than 130 years. It had been two decades since had I visited the Statue of Liberty, and as the ferry approached Liberty Island, I was struck by the sheer scale of it. What I quickly discovered was that no plastic replica or photograph can prepare you for how enormous the statue is—the largest in the world at the time when it was built. The details, too, were more intricate than I had remembered: the creases of her robe as it drapes over her shoulder and the folds of her sleeve as it slides down her outstretched arm; the small parts and waves in her hair; the texture of the muscles in her arms. How the crown sits like a half-sun atop her head, rays reaching into the sky. Similarly, I had never noticed the torch’s golden flame, at least not as I did now. It was an image that felt at once so familiar and yet so profoundly new. For most of my life the Statue of Liberty was one of a number of pieces of American iconography that seemed to memorialize an idea that had never materialized. It is a feeling I suspect many Black Americans experience with respect to pieces of history that commemorate an idea...