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Name: How the Word Is Passed
Rating: 4.6 (147 reviews)
Author: Clint Smith

Clint Smith

A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

4.6 (147 Bewertungen)

36 Min.

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What’s in it for me? A journey through the legacy of slavery in America.

History isn’t set in stone; it has a way of changing over time, of getting rewritten and distorted. Sometimes this distortion is accidental, and sometimes it’s the result of a failure to reckon with the past. But the thing is, the past shapes how we live and think today.

America’s institution of enslavement has left a legacy of oppression. And the rift between truth and deception that pervades the country’s collective memory is widely evident in current events. On one side, protestors are toppling Confederate statues; on the other, various state governments are pushing to ban even basic education about slavery.

In these blinks we’ll visit nine sites – beginning in the author’s hometown of New Orleans – to explore how slavery is remembered, and misremembered, in the US. The portraits of these places and their people imagine how different the country might be if everyone fully understood, and came to terms with, this history.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

a not-so-shiny side of Thomas Jefferson;
the birthplace of Juneteenth; and
what’s hidden at the Statue of Liberty’s feet.

New Orleans

It’s dusk, and New Orleans’ French Quarter is vibrating. Notes from a brass band mingle with sounds of passersby. Above the Mississippi River, the sky is huge. The river itself is still and amber-colored, full of sediment that’s been transported across thousands of miles.

A little over 200 years ago, when the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed, more than 100,000 people were transported south along the same route. Leon A. Waters, a local historian and revolutionary, gestures at a plaque outlining this history.

Signs like this have begun to appear throughout New Orleans, which was once the largest slave market in America. Each details a certain place’s link to enslavement, acknowledging a history that was previously ignored – that paved the way for continued oppression.

For years, Black people in the US have died because of this legacy of oppression. Only now – after a white supremacist shot nine people in a Black church as they prayed, after neo-Nazis marched to protect a Confederate statue, after George Floyd was asphyxiated by a police officer’s knee on his neck – does it seem that the country is starting to reckon with its past.

Leon has worked to highlight New Orleans’ reckoning, leading tours that showcase the city’s hidden history and mentoring members of Take ’Em Down NOLA: a group of young Black activists whose self-proclaimed mission is to remove “ALL symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans as a part of a broader push for racial & economic justice.”

This evening, Leon’s giving a tour to the author, Clint Smith. Despite being born and raised in New Orleans, Clint didn’t know much about the role his city had played in perpetuating slavery. It was only in 2017, when the statue of Confederate general and enslaver Robert E. Lee was toppled from its 60-foot pedestal, that he became curious about how people grappled with the centuries of bondage.

Although some commemorations like the Robert E. Lee statue have disappeared in New Orleans, hundreds of others remain – hiding in the names of streets, parks, and schools that pay tribute to Confederate leaders, enslavers, and proponents of slavery.

Leon and Clint drive past the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, formerly the St. Louis Hotel, where men, women, and children were bought, sold, and divided. They pass tourist-filled Jackson Square, where enslaved people were executed for rebelling. The tour ends on Marigny Street, where Clint’s parents now live. A testament to Bernard de Marigny, who owned over 150 enslaved people, the name echoes a sentiment made by historian Walter Johnson: “The whole city is a memorial to slavery.”

But New Orleans is just a microcosm of the country’s legacy of white supremacy. To understand the bigger picture, Clint will need to visit more places – those attempting to tell the truth, those denying it, and those fumbling somewhere in between.

Monticello Plantation

As Clint walks toward the 11,000-square-foot, 43-room mansion, the air glimmers with heat; mulberry trees dot the landscape, providing respite from the glaring sun.

He’s taking a tour of Monticello: former home to Thomas Jefferson – and hundreds of enslaved people in its heyday. The tour group of almost exclusively white visitors, a jarring sight on a plantation that has had its ratios reversed, looks uneasy. Their guide, David Thorson, is explaining how slavery was a system of inequality and exclusion, justified even by those who knew it was wrong.

The Whitney Plantation

Clint is facing a gruesome scene: the heads of 55 Black men, affixed atop metal pikes, their eyes shut and faces frozen in expressions of anguish.

The ceramic statues glint in the light.

Angola Prison

As a kid, Clint traveled on the I-10 West from New Orleans many times for family visits, Boy Scout camps, and soccer tournaments. But this time, the bus takes an unfamiliar exit. It slowly merges onto Highway 66 and heads toward Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola – a prison built on a former cotton plantation belonging to Isaac Franklin, who ran one of the country’s biggest slave-trading firms.

Clint is sitting next to Norris Henderson, a former inmate who spent 27 years in Angola for a crime he didn’t commit. Since his release, Norris has worked toward criminal justice reform; he recently placed a successful ballot measure that ended Louisiana’s practice of nonunanimous jury decisions. Until then, a person could be convicted of a felony with only nine out of twelve jurors in agreement.

Blandford Cemetery

The smell of freshly cut grass infuses the air. Clint watches as Black men push lawn mowers around gravestones bedecked with Confederate flags. He’s standing in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, where the bodies of close to 30,000 soldiers lie.

During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who died in battle were often buried where they fell; the South didn’t have the means to transport them to cemeteries. In 1866, a year after the war ended, a group of women in Petersburg wanted to rectify this. They formed the Ladies’ Memorial Association and began exhuming remains – and reburying them at Blandford Cemetery. Eventually, the ladies turned the cemetery’s old church into a memorial, with stained-glass windows honoring the fallen from each Confederate state.

Galveston Island

June 19, 1865 – Union general Gordon Granger is standing on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas. In his hand, he holds an order and declares, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Or so the story goes.

While there’s no evidence to support that the event unfolded exactly like this, the myth has become tradition. Each year, this scene is reenacted as part of the Juneteenth celebrations in Galveston, a small island off mainland Texas. Clint watches people in the audience reacting to the words. Some are shaking. Some close their eyes and smile. Some embrace. History is alive in the room.

New York City

The wind whips around Clint as he walks from the station to the National Museum of the American Indian. A small group is already gathering around their guide, Damaras Obi, for a walking tour on slavery and the Underground Railroad in New York City.

Throughout history, she begins, people have been enslaved for various reasons: they owed money or were prisoners. But New World enslavement – chattel slavery – was a different story. It stemmed from the European idea of a racial caste system – from the idea that Africans were inherently subhuman.

Gorée Island

The ferry from Dakar takes just 15 minutes, but it transports Clint to another world. The hustle and bustle of the city is gone; in its place are swaying palm trees, weathered homes, and the gentle lapping of waves.

He’s standing on Gorée Island, which lies just off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean. Gorée played a key role in the slave trade from the 1500s until 1848, when France abolished slavery in its colonies. During that time, the island was the main hub for enslaved Africans taken to the New World.

Epilogue

After traveling across the US, and an ocean, to better understand the past and how it’s shaped the present, Clint turned his focus to his own lineage. He interviewed his living grandparents – his mother’s father and his father’s mother – and was shocked to learn something he’d never known: his grandfather’s grandfather had been enslaved.

Together, they walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), a museum in Washington, DC, that puts Blackness at the center of America’s narrative.

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Worum geht es in How the Word Is Passed?

How the Word Is Passed (2021) is a travelogue that underscores how slavery has shaped America’s collective history and its reality today. Nine locations serve as gateways to important stories that are hidden in plain sight. They exemplify how communities have reckoned, or not, with their roles in the history of slavery and invite us all to dig deeper into what we believe – and why.

Wer How the Word Is Passed lesen sollte

Anyone who wants to better understand America’s relationship with slavery
Community members seeking historical context on Black Lives Matter
Activists and history buffs interested in how the past informs the present

Über den Autor

Clint Smith is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of Counting Descent, an award-winning book of poetry. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. Smith has been awarded fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canem, New America, and the National Science Foundation. He holds a BA in English from Davidson College and a PhD in Education from Harvard University.

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