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

by Clint Smith

The following are excerpts from several declarations of secession, speeches presented at secession conventions, and other documents related to secession (italics are my own): Mississippi: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization …There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. South Carolina: A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. [Lincoln] is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that “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. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some ...

In December of 1860, as the rumblings of war became increasingly more forceful, Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden introduced what would become known as the Crittenden Compromise, which proposed six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions aimed at preventing the South from leaving the Union. Upon introducing the amendments Crittenden said the following: “The questions of an alarming character are those which have grown out of the controversy between the northern and southern sections of our country in relation to the rights of the slaveholding States in the Territories of the United States, and in relation to the rights of the citizens of the latter in their slaves. I have endeavored by these resolutions to meet all these questions and causes of discontent.” Each of the six articles and four resolutions were specifically tied to the issue of slavery. Article 2, for example, stated: “Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in places under its exclusive jurisdiction, and situate within the limits of States that permit the holding of slaves.” Article 4 said: “Congress shall have no power to prohibit or hinder the transportation of slaves from one State to another, or to a Territory in which slaves are by law permitted to be held, whether that transportation be by land, navigable rivers, or by the sea.” Altogether, the amendments would have guaranteed the permanent existence of slavery in states south of the line demarcated by the 1820 Missouri Co...

One of the most egregious features of the Lost Cause is the dramatic about-face that occurred after the war. When the war ended, the leaders of the Confederacy attempted to walk back or completely deny the centrality of slavery to the formation of the Confederacy. In 1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and that there would have been a civil war even if no American ever owned a slave. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, maintained that the explicit rhetoric in his infamous 1861 Cornerstone Speech, in which he stated that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and the Confederacy was founded on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” had in part been newspapers misquoting him. The reporters’ notes of the event, taken contemporaneously and published widely, he said, “were very imperfect.” There is no shortage of documentation demonstrating that the Southern states seceded and began sowing the seeds of war in order to defend slavery. To look at primary source documents and convince yourself that the central cause of the war was anything other than slavery requires a remarkable contortion of history.

Jeff smiled as he watched them and dabbed his brow with a cloth before placing it back in his pocket. He told me that he does not call the country’s deadliest war the “Civil War” because it distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression, against us,’ ” he said. “Because what they call the Civil War is not really the Civil War. Southern people don’t call it the Civil War because they know it was an invasion …If you stayed up North ain’t nothing would’ve happened.” When Jeff said “nothing would’ve happened,” I wondered if he had forgotten the lives of millions of Black people who would have remained enslaved. For these people, the status quo that Jeff seemed beholden to would have meant remaining in bondage. Or did he remember but not care?

It was clear that the Confederacy, and the flag flown in its honor, meant something very specific to Jeff. But for myself, and so many people I love, it meant something different, something far more sinister and violent. Jeff was quick to assert that he believed the symbolism of the flag had become distorted by “other groups” who stole it and have used it as a symbol of hate, which according to Jeff it was never intended to be. Though he didn’t say it explicitly, it sounded like Jeff was talking about the Ku Klux Klan. I asked him directly what he thought about people likening an organization like the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the KKK. “No, they’re not the Klan,” he said, speaking with renewed conviction, his jaw stiffening. “No, that’s what I was just saying. Even the Klan will admit that that flag does not mean that at all. It means something else to them. They just like the flag. They took our flag and used it. They use a Christian flag too and all that. But the thing you’ve got to remember, like I said, here in this area, the Sons of Confederates are representing their ancestors.” Founded in 1896 in Richmond—the former capital of the Confederacy—the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of around thirty thousand members that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is also the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants...

The Louisville Daily Courier warned non-slaveholding white Southerners about the slippery slope of abolition and the dangers of racial equality: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper did not stop there, and went right to the issue it knew animated the most fervor and fear among white Southern men: would non-slaveholding white men accept a society in which they “AMALGAMATE TOGETHER THE TWO RACES IN VIOLATION OF GOD’S WILL”? Propaganda like this helped to convince non-slaveholding whites that abolition was an existential threat to Southern society. Without slavery, they were told, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors. This was a proposition that millions of Southern whites were unwilling to accept. Horton finds plenty of examples of Confederate soldiers saying this for themselves. As he notes, one Southern prisoner of war told the Union soldier standing watch, “[Y]ou Yanks want us to marry our daughters to niggers.” An indigent white farmer from North Carolina said that he could not and would not stop fighting, because Lincoln’s government was “trying to force us to live as the colored race.” A Confederate artilleryman from Louisiana said that his army had to fight even against difficult odds because he would “never want to see the day when a negro is...

was born and raised in a city filled with statues of Confederate soldiers. White men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them—where Black people played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that still whistled in the wind. In my hometown of New Orleans there are at least a hundred streets, statues, parks, and schools named after Confederate figures, slave owners, and defenders of slavery. For decades Black children have walked into buildings named after people who thought of them as property. My own middle school, Lusher, is named after Robert Mills Lusher, a Confederate and former Louisiana superintendent of education who fought against desegregation and who believed in “the supremacy of the Caucasian race.” Every time I returned home I would drive on streets named for those who thought of me as chattel. “Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.” So much of the story we tell about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mother...

For many of the people I met at Blandford, the story of the Confederacy is the story of their home, of their family—and the story of their family is the story of them. So when they are asked to reckon with the fact that their ancestors fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved, there is resistance to facts that have been documented by primary sources and contemporaneous evidence. They are forced to confront the lies they have upheld. They are forced to confront the flaws of their ancestors. As Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the New York Times in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston massacre, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters.” Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world. But as I think of Blandford, I’m left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told. What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

THE LONG-HELD MYTH GOES that on June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and read the order that announced the end of slavery. Though no contemporaneous evidence exists to specifically support the claim, the story of General Granger reading from the balcony embedded itself into local folklore. On this day each year, as part of Galveston’s Juneteenth program, a reenactor from the Sons of Union Veterans reads the proclamation at Ashton Villa while an audience looks on. It is an annual moment that has taken a myth and turned it into tradition.

people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

All slaves are free. The four words circled the room like birds that had been separated from their flock. I watched people’s faces as Stephen said these words. Some closed their eyes. Some were physically shaking. Some clasped hands with the person next to them. Some simply smiled, soaking in the words that their ancestors may have heard more than a century and a half ago. Being in this place, standing on the same small island where the freedom of a quarter million people was proclaimed, I felt the history pulse through my body. General Granger and his forces arrived in Galveston more than two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s famous surrender. A document that is widely misunderstood, Lincoln’s proclamation was a military strategy with multiple aims. It prevented European countries from supporting the Confederacy by framing the war in moral terms and making it explicitly about slavery, something Lincoln had previously backed away from. As a result, France and Britain, which had contemplated supporting the Confederacy, ultimately refused to do so because of both countries’ anti-slavery positions. The proclamation allowed the Union Army to recruit Black soldiers (nearly two hundred thousand would fight for the Union Army by the war’s end), and it also threatened to disrupt the South’s social order, which depended on the work and caste position of enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation was not the s...

“I’m Major General Granger, commanding general of the District of Texas. This morning we would like to present to you some of the history of those enslaved in the United States until this day, when they were set free. We’re glad for you to be here with us. This is a very, very important day in the history of Galveston, the history of Texas, and the history of the United States. On this day the promise of freedom became reality.” A student, a young woman who looked to be about sixteen, walked up to the microphone holding a white placard that read “1492.” Everyone in the audience adjusted their chairs and turned their heads to get a better look. She placed the placard over the microphone, her arms extending outward so everyone in the crowd could read what it said on the front, while she read from the other side. “In 1492, Europeans arrived at the Americas searching for the three g’s: gold, glory, and God. Long before enslaved Africans arrived, the Spanish enslaved some of the Native populations against the wishes of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.” As she pulled the placard down and walked away from the microphone and toward the wall, the man impersonating Union general Granger spoke again, setting the stage for the next young person to come up. “In 1528,” he said, “the first non-Native enslaved person arrived in Galveston.” Another young woman walked to the microphone and did the same as the young woman before her. “The first non-Native slave in Texas was Estevanico, a M...

“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem. Originally written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson to celebrate the birthday of the late president Abraham Lincoln, the poem evolved into a song, and the song evolved into something much larger than a tribute to any singular figure. Scholar Imani Perry, in her book about the origins of the song, May We Forever Stand, writes that it “was a lament and encomium to the story and struggle of black people” that ultimately became “a definitive part of ritual practices in schools and churches and civic gatherings.”

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

The state of Texas currently has a larger Black population than any other state in the country—about 3.5 million Black people call the state home—but as is the case across the country, the Black community experiences profound disparities across income, wealth, education, and criminal justice.* Galveston, and the state of Texas as a whole, extols its history as the origin point of our greatest celebration of emancipation. It is, however, worth interrogating the past century and a half to understand what led to such wide racial chasms in a state that prides itself on its history of freedom.

As Republicans abandoned the Black community, Reconstruction was dismantled. Black American second-class citizenship was recodified through Jim Crow laws and enforced through the omnipresent threat of violence, and Juneteenth celebrations were not only unwelcome but often dangerous. With the threat of lynching always there for Black Southerners, some celebrations across the country disappeared from public view and into private homes and Black churches. And as the decades went by and Black Americans still had nothing close to full equality, to some, Juneteenth seemed like an unfulfilled promise. In 1941, the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper, wrote, “Negroes are not sure whether to be gay on ‘Juneteenth’ or to observe the day with sadness. They do not know whether they are actually free here.” By the early 1970s, Juneteenth celebrations slowly began to reemerge as local cultural organizations throughout Texas, and throughout the country, began to lift up the holiday as a way to celebrate Black culture and Black history. In 1979, newly elected Texas state legislator Al Edwards Sr. introduced House Bill 1016, which would make June 19th a state holiday. Over the course of four months Edwards built a diverse coalition of support across the state legislature. As one Juneteenth celebrant put it, “Even if the American people in the United States didn’t really set that day aside for us, I believe they owe it to us anyway …they ought to give the colored man a day for his freedom. ...

In Jasper, Texas, a woman named Tempie Cummins described what happened to her and her mother: Mother was workin’ in the house, and she cooked too. She say she used to hide in the chimney corner and listen to what the white folks say. When freedom was ’clared, marster wouldn’ tell ’em, but mother she hear him tellin’ mistus that the slaves was free but they didn’ know it and he’s not gwineter tell ’em till he makes another crop or two. Cummins said she and her mother escaped soon after. She remembered their master getting his gun and shooting at her mother as they fled. What Cummins would make clear is that the jubilation of June 19, 1865, was for many short-lived.

“Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

A woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk County, Texas, reported that “lots of Negroes were killed after freedom …bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away. You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.” Merritt also described how one day a man representing the government showed up and told all of the Black workers that they were free. Still, after the “man read the paper telling us we were free … massa made us work several months after that. He said we got 20 acres land and a mule, but we didn’t get it.”

When freedom did eventually come, it often still felt out of reach. There was little financial support for the formerly enslaved, and they were given few resources with which to build economic and social mobility. As Felix Haywood said, “We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”

In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Black Americans owned about 0.5 percent of the total wealth in the United States. Today, despite being 13 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth. Despite the role Black Americans played in gener...

In my experience—as both educator and student, as researcher and writer—there was little mainstream discussion of who Black people were before they reached the coasts of the New World, beyond the balls and chains. This was something I had heard when I lived in Senegal, a decade prior, that we Black Americans were taught so little of our traditions, our cultures, our voices before we were taken and forced onto ships that carried us across the Atlantic. As Sue pointed out, the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it. Sue contended that these conversations rarely happen in our own community largely because there is a fear of whom it might offend. Specifically, in the states of the former Confederacy. “In the South, I think there’s a hesitance to talk about it openly because nobody wants to offend white people,” she said. Sue believed there was an unwillingness “to look at the ugliness of slavery and discuss it, because you talk about what whites did to us, and there’s a hesitance to talk about that. They don’t want to hear it, so we don’t want to say it. You know what I mean?” Her voice grew lower. “Or because it conjures up so much pain, people don’t want to talk about it.”

“They may discuss in the school system that you were a slave, but they’re not going to talk about what happened after slavery.” Her face sank. “How you were emancipated, how others came and took your land …if you got anything at all—how you weren’t given anything.” She continued: “They’re not going to tell you the real story of how you went and you fought in every war that this country has ever fought, including the Civil War, where the most people have died in this country than in every war we’ve fought in. They’re not going to tell you those things. They’re not going to put that in the history books, because they want to glamorize the Confederacy.”

Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.

“Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.”

The land we were standing on was the oldest part of New York City, originally founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1624. When the Dutch arrived, they were met by the Lenape Native Americans, an Algonquian-speaking people who had lived on the land since 10,000 BC. Originally, it is said, their interactions were friendly, but their relations deteriorated as tensions over land increased. Two years later, the Dutch West India Company “purchased” the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for a price of sixty guilders’ worth of goods, equivalent today to about a thousand dollars. Damaras held up a copy of the earliest known reference to the purchase, a letter from 1626 reporting the news to the Dutch government. The original contract did not survive, but it may have meant something quite different to the Lenape than it did to the Dutch. “You see, this idea or this concept of owning land or resources—that was a European concept. Owning land to the Native Americans was like owning water or the moon or the stars, and in fact, there wasn’t a word for [land] ownership in their Algonquian language.” The first enslaved people to arrive in New York were eleven African men brought to the shores of New Amsterdam in 1626. They were tasked with clearing the land, building homes and roads, and generally helping to lay the infrastructural groundwork of the early Dutch settlement. It’s likely that some of the wood they cut from trees in lower Manhattan was used to build ships that eventually...

The red people from Manhattan Island crossed to the mainland, where a treaty was made with the Dutch, and the place was therefore called the Pipe of Peace, in their language, Hoboken. But soon after that, the Dutch governor, Kieft, sent his men out there one night and massacred the entire population. Few of them escaped, but they spread the story of what had been done, and this did much to antagonize all the remaining tribes against all the white settlers. Shortly after, Nieuw Amsterdam erected a double palisade for defense against its now enraged red neighbors, and this remained for some time the northern limit of the Dutch city. The space between the former walls is now called Wall Street, and its spirit is still that of a bulwark against the people.

three city blocks with traffic churning on either side of it. Sweeping across the sandy-hued facade of the seven-story structure are a dozen cylindrical columns, each with the head of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, resting at its peak. The columns frame the windows that reflect slices of the skyscraper sitting across from them. On either side of the steps and sitting at the far corners of the building are four intricate marble sculptures of human figures, each in a different position atop its stone pedestal. Designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French, the four statues are meant to represent the regions of Africa, Europe, America, and Asia. French was also the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. “Notice how Africa is the only one of these four statues depicted sleeping on her throne. That is because, throughout history, Africa has been known as the Sleeping Continent. She’s also the only one of the four statues sculpted lying in a half-naked state. It was playing into the archetype of the African being savage and barbaric in nature. All four of these statues are seated on some kind of throne. Africa’s throne is sculpted from a boulder from the inland of the continent. At this time in history, the Africans were not considered human enough to warrant a royal symbol.” In February 1915, French wrote: “It is usual to depict the negro with a snub nose and exaggerated fullness of lips, in fact the lowest type of negro that exists. As a matter of fact there is ...

During parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were more enslaved Black people in New York City than in any other urban area across North America. Enslaved workers made up more than a quarter of the city’s labor force. As the city grew, so did the number of enslaved people. As the American Revolution began, about a sixth of New York’s population was of African descent, and almost all of them were enslaved. In the early days of the Dutch settlement, write historians Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris in their anthology Slavery in New York, the norms governing slavery were different than they were in later iterations of the institution. There was a racial hierarchy in place, but how people moved within this hierarchy varied. For example, many enslaved people were paid for their work. And some enslaved people who were not compensated for their labor petitioned the Dutch West India Company for what they deemed their monetary due. Some Black people were freed by Dutch authorities and given land between New Amsterdam, in the southernmost part of Manhattan, and the rest of the island. This land, however, was not given out of benevolence but to create a buffer zone between the white settlers and the Native Americans who lived farther north, as tensions between the two were on the rise. As a result, by the middle of the seventeenth century, free Black people made up a third of New Amsterdam’s total Black population. Many of these free Black people participated in the s...

The British in New York became increasingly dependent on the transatlantic slave trade to find new workers, importing an average of 150 enslaved people each year from Africa and the West Indies. According to historian David Brion Davis, around 40 percent of households in British Manhattan owned enslaved people. But the mortality rate of Black people in New York skyrocketed, as enslaved people were made to work harder than ever before and as an increasing number of Africans with little defense against new diseases were brought to the New World. Even before they arrived on the shores of New York, the death toll was staggering. According to historian Jill Lepore, for every one hundred people taken from Africa, only about sixty-four would survive the trip from the region’s interior to the coast. Of those sixty-four, around forty-eight would survive the weeks-long journey across the Atlantic. Of those forty-eight who stepped off the ship in New York Harbor, only twenty-eight to thirty would survive the first three to four years in the colony. Berlin and Harris referred to New York at this time as “a death factory for black people.”

The largest rebellion came in April 1712, when between twenty-five and fifty enslaved people rose up and killed nine white people and wounded six more. More than seventy Black people were arrested, forty-three brought to trial, and twenty-three executed—some hanged and others burned at the stake. Following the rebellion, the laws governing enslaved life became even more severe—restricting their movement, preventing them from owning property, and requiring slave owners to pay exorbitant fees if they wanted to free the enslaved people they owned.

Two of Bank of America’s predecessors, Southern Bank of Saint Louis and Boatmen’s Savings Institution, listed enslaved people as potential collateral for a debt in 1863. Citibank also had ties to chattel slavery. Moses Taylor, a nineteenth-century banker who was the director of the City Bank of New York, Citibank’s predecessor, managed the capital coming from Southern sugar plantations and was intimately involved in illegally trafficking enslaved people into Cuba. The country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, was the most deeply entwined in the slave trade. A 2005 statement from the company read as follows: “JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company’s history for any links to slavery …we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.” By the early nineteenth century, the New York financial industry became even more deeply entrenched in chattel slavery. Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish. As the cotton trade expanded, New York City became the central port for shipmen...

Despite New York having fully and formally abolished slavery in 1827,* slave catchers still roamed the streets looking for fugitive slaves—and even free Black people—to capture and bring back to the South. Slave catchers made little distinction between Black people born free and those who had run away. Parents worried desperately about their children, and for good reason. In the 1830s, a seven-year-old Black boy was “dragged from school on suspicion of being a runaway.”

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...

poverty, housing, food insecurity, and mass incarceration, how all of these things were tied to a legacy of slavery and US apartheid.

In 1697, New York City instituted “mortuary apartheid,” which prohibited Black people from burying their loved ones in churchyards across lower Manhattan. The Black community, free and enslaved, was forced to bury its dead on a desolate piece of land outside the city limits. Historians estimate that this burial ground, in use from the mid-1690s to 1795, contained the remains of between ten thousand and twenty thousand free and enslaved Black people—the earliest and largest African burial ground in the country. At the end of the eighteenth century, the burial ground closed. And as the city grew, streets were paved, buildings were erected, and the burial ground was largely erased from public memory.

“Almost all of our country is a burial ground,”

“What I will tell you is that many enslaved children were not allowed to breastfeed,” Damaras said. Some mothers were enlisted as wet nurses for white children; others were prevented from breastfeeding because they were expected to work without interruption. Damaras also told us about the damage that researchers found in the bodies of young people—including cases of osteoarthritis, a condition that normally doesn’t affect people until they are beyond their fifties. But here they saw osteoarthritis in the remains of children as young as sixteen. Damaras’s face, ever so briefly, became swollen with grief before she quickly recomposed herself.

Historian Christopher Moore—a descendent of Groot Manuel (or Big Manuel), who was one of the first eleven enslaved Africans brought to the city of New York—wrote that those burying their loved ones in the cemetery did their best to use traditional practices but were limited by stringent legal restrictions that dictated the lives and movements of Black people at that time. No more than twelve people were allowed to take part in funeral processions or graveside services at a given time. Burials could not take place at night, despite this being a standard element of many African burial practices. Black people who were enslaved needed a written pass to travel more than one mile away from their homes. The distance between their homes and the cemetery was often greater than one mile. The harm done did not end after a person’s funeral but continued after their death. It was not uncommon for local doctors and medical students to illegally exhume bodies from the cemetery to use them for dissections and experiments. In 2003, after time at the lab at Howard University, the remains from the African Burial Ground were returned to New York City in a grand ceremony. Each of the 419 sets of remains was placed in its own hand-carved coffin made in Ghana. The coffins were split between seven crypts. Each crypt—along with nearly eight thousand handwritten letters “from the living to the African ancestors”—was lowered into the ground and marked with seven burial mounds. The site was designate...

Before leaving to catch my train, I asked Damaras if there was anywhere else in the city that I should visit. “Central Park,” she said. “Central Park was built on Seneca Village, which was a neighborhood for free Black people [in the nineteenth century]. That was their settlement. That was their territory,” she told me. “I don’t think a lot of people know that. So you go to Central Park—it’s one of the most visited places in the United States of America—and people don’t know they’re sitting on the remains.”

I walked up to a three-sided kiosk, which told me I was standing at what was once the center of Seneca Village, an independent Black community that existed from 1825 to 1857. By 1855, the village had around 225 residents, two-thirds of whom were Black; about a third were Irish immigrants, and a small group was of German descent. Evidence based on church records suggests the community lived together peacefully, with Black and white families attending baptisms together, being buried alongside one another in the same cemetery, and intermarrying. The historical significance of Seneca Village was not simply that the Black people living there were free, or even that the community eventually became peacefully integrated; it was also that many of the Black residents owned property. Owning property gave them stability, some measure of economic security, and, as per the law passed at the 1821 Constitutional Convention, the right to vote. The village was built after a white couple, John and Elizabeth Whitehead, who owned a significant portion of land in the area, divided their estate into smaller pieces of land and sold them as two hundred separate lots. Black New Yorkers, eager to escape the density of the city and the racism that undergirded their daily lives, jumped at the opportunity to purchase small parcels of land and build a community. The Whiteheads’ first sale was to a twenty-five-year-old Black shoe shiner named Andrew Williams, who purchased three plots of land for $125. ...

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...

From an aerial view, Gorée Island looks like a small hook. The Portuguese arrived on the island as early as the 1440s, and set up a trading post there not long after. Its position just off the west coast of the Senegambia region made it a place of strategic importance for trade, and a place where European ships could restock supplies before leaving the continent. European powers spent two centuries fighting for control of Gorée, which was occupied in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French. As the island’s colonizers changed, so did its name. The Senegalese called the island Ber. The Portuguese called it Ila de Palma. The Dutch changed its name to Goede Reede, meaning “good port.” The French, who officially took charge of the territory in 1677 and who would largely maintain control until Senegalese independence in 1960, amended it to Île de Gorée. The island was a site of the slave trade from the sixteenth century, when it was under Portuguese control and slaves were part of its economy, until 1848, when, under French control, France abolished slavery in all of its colonies. For decades Gorée Island was thought of as the central point of departure for enslaved people leaving West Africa and headed to the New World. It was also a place from which captured Africans could not easily escape, as the small body of land was surrounded by water. So sweeping was its global reputation that in 1978 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization...

Where spirits and bodies had been broken.

“I believe that it’s very important to keep the memory,” he said to me directly in English, preferring not to use Momar. “How to keep this memory and how to teach what’s happened. How to talk more about all of the violations of human rights.”

Eloi told me that the island was not originally a place Europeans intended to use to capture and sell enslaved Africans. As I had read, Gorée was coveted by European nations because of its strategic value as a trading post for the alleged trove of resources in West Africa. “The purpose was not to find slaves,” he said. “The purpose was discovery. “Many of the other European nations came to Gorée Island to fight each other, just so they could occupy the place,” he told me. It wasn’t until the inception of slavery in the Americas, Eloi said, that the purpose of Gorée Island changed. “After the discovery of America, because of the development of sugarcane plantations, cotton, coffee, rice cultivation, they forced the [Native Americans] to work for them. And it was because the Natives died in great number that they turned to Africa, and the purpose was to replace these Natives with Africans.” As slavery became central to the economic prosperity of the United States, increasing numbers of Africans were imported from the Senegambia region. I thought back to something Yvonne Holden had told me during my tour of the Whitney Plantation, how many of the enslaved people in southern Louisiana were from the Senegambia region and how they possessed specific knowledge about cultivating rice and indigo seeds.

As the desire for enslaved people increased, Europeans had to justify the human plunder. In order to rationalize taking a person from their home, separating them from their family, and shipping them across an ocean to work in a system of intergenerational bondage, Eloi said, these Europeans could not see these Africans as people. “They considered Black Africans not as human beings but as a simple merchandise. If they consider Africans as merchandise, that is because they understand the necessity to dehumanize Africans in order to work for the acceptance by all the Europeans. The necessity to use Africans because Africans are not human beings.”

the sixteenth century, Africans used only arrows, not firearms. So the Europeans came with firearms, alcohol, and iron they [would] give to the African tribes living in and along the coast.” Eloi said that during the African tribal wars various factions fought one another. The white Europeans were more than happy to give guns to these different groups. They cared less about who was fighting than about the payment they received in exchange: humans, the prisoners of war who had been captured from other tribes. “The only currency that was accepted by Europeans,” Eloi said, his voice punctuating each word, “was slaves.” This created a cycle in which certain tribes were encouraged to capture even more prisoners of war, in order to sell those prisoners to the Europeans for more guns and other goods.

“Not all Africans were involved in the slave trade,” he said. Many, he told me, organized themselves to resist the Europeans and fought to maintain sovereignty and control over their land and their people. He also rejected the idea that Africans were as culpable as their European counterparts. “It was the Europeans who organized this,” he said. “[Africans] didn’t know what the final destination was.”

“In Senegal, we are rewriting the history on Senegal from the origin until now. But it is something very difficult. They told us that Black is nothing.” His voice hovered over the final word. “They try to forget that things start in Africa,” he said. “The slave trade or colonization was not the starting point of Africa.” This forgetting, Eloi said, has deleteriously affected the collective self-esteem of African peoples. He noted that Senegal, along with other West African countries, has to make sure that it teaches a history that highlights who Black people were before slavery and who they are in spite of it. “We have to use education to deconstruct, in order to reconstruct,” he said. “Africans have to know that the starting point was Africa.”