A reckoning with the history of slavery across America.
In his book How the word is passed, Clint Smith takes us on an unexpected journey across several places, in the United States and one abroad, that have had a connection to slavery and how they are choosing to tell their history in our modern day.
Since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, a wider fire has ignited across the world to rethink our connection to slavery and racism in the past and present. As the author puts it, he became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with since the Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans (his home town) had been taken down from its pedestal in May 2017.
From the way we are taught at school, the selection of textbooks, the training for tour guides in plantation sites and other locations where the slave trade took place, there is plenty food for thought to find a new path forward.
"These monuments are gone now, but at least a hundred streets, statues, parks, and schools named after Confederate figures, slaveholders, and defenders of slavery remain".
The author identifies himself as Black, born and raised in the South, and clarifies that the book reflects his experiences and reflections at these sites. His exploration of the sites mentioned in the book, shed a new light on his upbringing and the consequences of slavery and racism for the generations that followed.
For those readers trying to learn more about U.S. history and its link to the slave-trade, this book is just for you. Clint Smith will take you through New Orleans, the Monticello and Whitney plantations, Angola Prison, Blandford Cemetery, Galveston Island, New York City and Gorée Island.
Monticello Plantation and the Angola Prison
Smith's exploration of the sites exposes some starking contradictions. To start with, the ideals portrayed in the documents created by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for the United States is at odds with the reality for enslaved people in their plantations, Montpelier and Monticello. Monticello is now the only American plantation in the UNESCO World Heritage List and as such, has a responsibility to a worldwide audience of how it tells its history. From his inquiries, the author finds out that "In the first thirty years that Monticello was a museum, ... tours of the house were given by Black men dressed as enslaved people". Something which nowadays sounds unbelievable.
Another site which is imbued with chilling historical contrasts is the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison. A former plantation, the land was converted into a prison where the convict leasing system "allowed Black people to be imprisoned for years under spurious charges and be "rented" to companies". This allowed for the vacuum left in the years following abolition to be patially filled. Furthermore, in 1880, the state legislature's shift from unanimous and non-unanimous juries, created a readily available source of labor.
"(Angola is where every license plate in the state of Louisiana is made). I thought about the cruel irony of people so restricted in their own movements creating something that facilitated mobility for so many others".
The Whitney Plantation
After the insurrection at St.Domingo (Haiti), the United States was more inetrested in continuing with the African transatlantic slave trade, rather than bringing slaves from the Caribbean that might bring with them rebellious ideas to the continent.
Most of the enslaved people that came to Louisiana came from the Senegambia region. At the time, rice and indigo were the centerpieces of many southern plantation's economies and hard labor was needed to produce them under apalling working conditions.
Besides the slave trade being common, the body trade was as well. Well-reknowned universities like Harvard, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, "used the corpses of enslaved people, often purchased on the black market, as tools for their search and medical education".
In Wallace, Louisiana, where the Whitney Plantation sits, over 90 percent of the population is Black. "Wallace is also one of the series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that - as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants - form what is known as Cancer Alley".
Today, the Whitney Plantation means to be "an open book, up under the sky" and has decided to be predominantly staffed by Black people.
Blandford Cemetery and Galveston Island
Located in Petersburg, Virginia, Blandford Cemetery is one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the South. It was a way for women who belonged to Confederate families to pay tribute to their relatives. Clint Smith explains the contrast between Blandford Cemetery and the nearby People's Memorial Cemetery, purchased by members of Petersburg's free Black community in 1840.
"A 2018 report by Smithsonian magazine and the Nation's Institute Investigatve Fund found that over the previous ten years, US taxpayers had directed at least forty million dollars to Confederate monuments, including statues, homes, museums, and cemeteries, as well as Confederate heritage groups."
As the author puts it, the myth of the Lost Cause, still followed by many, does not end with the Confederate monuments, but extends to state-sanctioned holidays in many states.
In Galveston Island, Texas, the Juneteenth celebration remembers the year 1865, where General Order Number 3 was announced, that all slaves were free. But freedom still felt out of reach for many since not enough resources were available for former slaves to build economic and social mobility. The consequences of this are still felt today in social, economic and political disparities in American society.
"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 bring 13 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation's wealth".
New York
Most of the time, New York is presented as "on the good side" having belonged to the North during the Civil War. Today however, we can find out that that historial definition is plagued with inaccuracies.
Before it became New York, it was New Amsterdam under Dutch authorities. "Some Black people were freed by Dutch authorities and given land between New Amsterdam and the southernmost part of Manhattan, and the rest of the island". This land, however, was to serve as a buffer zone between white settlers and Native Americans.
Seneca Village, a former settlement of Blacks in what is now known as Central Park, was destroyed and their people forced to move due to the growth of the city and desire to build a green space that would compare to those of Europe's famous capitals.
Even though New York was in the North, its economy benefitted from the system of slavery. "By 1822, more than half of the goods shipped out of New York's harbor were produced in Southern states. Cotton alone was responsible for more than 40 percent of the city's exported goods".
After the city of Charleston, New York hosted the second largest slave market in the United States. The discovery of the African Burial Ground in the city uncovered the city's tumultuous relationship to its past and slavery. An example of a lucrative activity that that developed in the North were the "blackbirders", slave catchers and kidnappers that roamed the cities to take Black people to the South.
Perhaps one of the greatest symbols of the city, the Statue of Liberty, also holds secrets attached to the meaning of freedom and slavery at the dawn of a new country.
The first version of the Statue of Liberty was supposed to be cluthing a pair of broken shackles - rather than the tablet we see today. Its desisgner, Laboulaye was an abolitionist and wanted to reinforce his ideals onto his project. However, by the time it reached U.S. soil in 1886, "the shackles were no longer in Lady Liberty's hand but had become small pieces of broken chains, less conspicuously, at her feet and partially hidden beneath her robe". Today, you can only see these broken pieces from a helicopter.
Gorée Island - "White sugar menas Black misery"
The final destination of the author is Gorée Island in Senegal. Like N.Y.C. has the Statue of Liberty, the island has its own symbol, the Door of No Return. Here, personalities such as Obama and the pope have stood to reflect on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade. That door however is believed to never have led to ships.
Since the arrival of Europeans in African territory, local tribal wars were taken advantage of to obtain prisoners in exchange for guns. Both in his conviction and in his conversation with teachers, historians and guides, the author emphasizes that it is important to teach that Africa's history did not begin with slavery. Teaching the contrary signals overlooking a culture that was already there and assumes inferiority of the conquered people not being able to defend themselves.
Today, talks surrounding compensation are complicated and ongoing. One of the most important things I believe the author wants to leave us with is that it is important to discern between history, memory and nostalgia and reckon with what happened, no matter the background or cultural baggage you're bringing with you.
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