“How the Word is Passed”

“Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today. But it seems that the more purposefully some places have attempted to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath, the more staunchly other places have refused. I wanted to visit some of these places—those telling the truth, those running from it, and those doing something in between—in order to understand this reckoning. In How the Word Is Passed I travel to eight places in the United States as well as one abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery. I visit a mix of plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities.” (p. 6)

This quote explains the central goal of Clint Smith’s book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.

This is a powerful book. Each chapter explores the durability of what slavery meant to America, how we still live with it whether we bother to think about it or not. One chapter describes the author’s visit to a southern plantation that focuses on the experience of the enslaved people; another describes his painful experience attending an enthusiastic meeting of the Sons of the Confederacy (who haven’t really given up their cause). He also participated in a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas, where the original announcement of the end of slavery inspired the traditional holiday. 

These experiences make me think about how we live with our past whether our own personal ancestors were participants in the institution of slavery, or whether they arrived in our country later, whether we are descended from white or black ancestors, and so on.

Awareness of the Past: Views from the University of Michigan Museum of Art

A portrait by Kehinde Wiley in the central gallery, University o Michigan Museum of Art.

About this painting: 

"Wiley’s work challenges us to reconsider what and who contemporary portraiture can and should represent. He invites everyday people of color to select poses from historic paintings of kings, queens, gods, and saints. For this portrait, Wiley’s model—a young man named Keshawn Warren—chose the stance of Saint Francis in Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert. Warren’s open arms and upward glance mimic the Christian saint’s posture, but in Wiley’s reinterpretation, a lush and vibrant floral background wraps around Warren as he claims his space." (UMMA)

From How the Word is Passed:

“In the nineteenth century, Black people lived in fear that at any moment a slave catcher could snatch them or their children up, regardless of status or social position. In the twenty-first century, Black people live in fear that at any moment police will throw them against a wall, or worse, regardless of whether there is any pretense of suspicion other than the color of their skin.” (p. 224)

Randolph Rogers, “Lincoln and the Emancipated Slave,” 1866.

From How the Word is Passed:

“While running for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories, but he promised not to interfere with slavery in any of the fifteen states where it already existed. Despite his promise, many Southern leaders perceived Lincoln’s election as a direct, abolitionist threat to their enterprise.” (p. 150)

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Samuel Levi Jones, “Promises,” 2014

From How the Word is Passed:

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.” (p. 64)

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.” (p. 288)

Review © 2023 mae sander.