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.
Nearly 250 years ago, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence.
His records show he also sold, leased, and mortgaged enslaved people, which helped pay his debts.
Forced labor built his lavish home, and it enabled him to maintain his preferred pastimes of reading, writing, and hosting guests.
Jefferson had an insidious relationship with Sally Hemings, a Black woman enslaved on his plantation, for nearly four decades.
Starting when he was in his mid-forties and she was just 16, the sexual abuse produced six children.
Such exploitation was common in eighteenth-century Virginia, where Black women had no recourse against their white male enslavers; it certainly didn’t stop Jefferson from being reelected as president.
Jefferson was aware that slavery debased the humanity of those who supported and perpetuated it.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, he remarked that it doubtless caused “an unhappy influence on the manners of our people” because it inherently required subjugating another human being.
But he also believed Black people were inferior.
And, ultimately, his personal desires and economic interests trumped any moral ideals.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s efforts to portray a more comprehensive view of the founding father began in 1993 with Getting Word – an oral history project that gathered stories from the descendants of the plantation’s enslaved people.
And in the guide-recruiting process, potential hires are now evaluated on their ability to balance truth and sensitivity.
Because in challenging white people’s view of Jefferson, you’re challenging their view of themselves.
Slavery is an abstract concept for many white people today; they can’t picture the enslaved faces, hear the laughter or fear.
So David recounts the games that children at Monticello played on Sunday afternoons.
He describes the songs that workers sang into the night.
He underscores the humanity of the enslaved people and talks about their desire to live a full life – in the face of overwhelming oppression.
Two women, self-proclaimed Republicans, are having a moment of personal reckoning: “You grow up and it’s…He’s a great man, and he did all this,” they gesticulate.
“But…this really took the shine off the guy.
” “There’s a difference between history and nostalgia,” David later muses.
History is the story of the past; it pieces together all the available facts, while nostalgia is a made-up fantasy.
Memory floats in the middle, a mixture of fact and emotion.
The rhetoric said Make America Great Again – but, according to history, great never existed.
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.
An exhibit at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, they depict the aftermath of the largest slave rebellion in US history.
In January 1811, hundreds of enslaved people marched along the winding river road toward New Orleans.
They attacked several plantations with scavenged weapons and killed two white men.
Within 48 hours, they were overpowered by the militia.
As a warning to others, they were murdered, and their heads were displayed on stakes.
In Louisiana today, plantations are often rented for private celebrations like weddings.
Tours usually focus on the antebellum architecture and emphasize that many plantation owners “treated their slaves well.
” The Whitney, once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in the state, has taken a different approach: it’s centered around the experiences of the enslaved.
Presenting itself as “an open book, up under the sky,” the museum attempts to straighten a story that’s been skewed for a very long time.
Stepping into an imposing white church, Clint’s heart skips a beat.
Dozens of life-size, intricately detailed clay sculptures of children fill the pews.
After the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the domestic slave industry boomed.
By 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people in the US; fifty-seven percent were under the age of 20.
Children were exploited to sustain the institution of slavery.
It was common for plantation owners to keep enslaved women as “breeders” – only white men were allowed to go near them.
Any children that were born were kept as workers, or sold for profit.
The implication is gruesome: plantation owners were enslaving their own children.
Even in death, the bodies of enslaved people weren’t at peace.
In her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry reveals how top medical schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania used the cadavers of enslaved people as research and educational tools.
And now, 150 years after emancipation, descendants of these enslaved workers are still suffering from poverty and environmental devastation.
Many live in the areas surrounding the Whitney, which have been populated by petrochemical plants – resulting in some of the highest cancer risks in the country.
In spite of the continued oppression, Yvonne Holden, the Whitney’s director of operations, makes sure to include a narrative of accomplishment.
Enslaved people endured the unthinkable.
But they also left an incredible legacy.
They built the foundation of the US economy, contributed to the culture that all Americans enjoy today, and greatly advanced the field of medicine.
Yvonne wants visitors to see enslaved people as resilient, determined, strong human beings because, as a Black woman, she knows the unique challenges today’s society poses.
“It’s stemming from this history,” she remarks, “so if I can’t get you to see them, you can’t see the person standing in front of you.
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.
The subversive policy was rooted in post-Reconstruction white supremacy.
Set up in 1880 to replace the enslaved labor force lost through abolition, it ensured that more convictions would be made; these imprisoned Black men were then forced into the convict leasing system, in which they were “rented” out to work on plantations and build railroads under horrible conditions.
Norris reveals he spent the first six months working to pay off his prison clothes at Angola; he then earned seven cents an hour picking cotton.
In their prison journal, the Angolite, convicts have described themselves as “modern-day slaves for the state.
” Entering the prison museum, Clint stops still in his tracks.
A giant photo looms above him.
It depicts a white correctional officer leading a group of Black men to the fields.
But this isn’t the past; this is now.
The unsettling image ushers visitors into the gift shop, full of memorabilia embellished with the prison’s name.
A white mug sports an image of a guard in a watchtower, encompassed by a fence.
“Angola,” it reads.
“A gated community.
” Is this some kind of sick joke?
Who sees the biggest maximum-security prison in the US as a tourist attraction?
Angola is the only prison that allows people to tour death row.
As Clint’s group walks around the unit, visitors can see the prisoners – and vice versa.
The invasion of privacy makes him feel complicit.
Angola Museum purportedly serves to “establish and preserve Angola’s past and to educate all who visit about the role this sprawling prison farm has played in our state’s history.
” But Clint’s tour guide doesn’t mention that the prison lies on land that once enslaved people.
He doesn’t draw any parallels between chattel slavery and the convict leasing system – or the fact that 71 percent of people at Angola are serving life sentences and three-quarters of the inmates are Black.
Instead, when Clint prompts him to talk about the prison’s plantation past, the guide is dismissive: “I can’t change what happened here.
” Clint thinks of politicians who deflect the blame by saying things like, “Why are we still talking about slavery?
People need to get over it.
” He thinks of how enslavement is made out to be something that happened eons ago – when it was just a few generations back.
As the bus rumbles away from the prison, Clint watches a group of men working in a field, raising and lowering their garden hoes.
He’s in a time warp – one that doesn’t need a metaphor.
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.
In a cruel twist, the Battle of the Crater took place just feet from where these windows memorialize an army built to perpetuate the institution of slavery.
During the infamous battle, white soldiers under Robert E.
Lee’s command were so enraged by the sight of a Black Union division that they callously executed 200 soldiers who were trying to surrender.
When Clint asks how Blandford grapples with presenting such symbols of commemoration without mentioning the Confederate cause, the docent’s response is cavalier: “We try and fall back on the beauty of the windows.
” It’s not just the windows that celebrate a barbaric history.
A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that, as of 2019, there were about 2,000 Confederate monuments across the US.
Over 150 years after the Civil War, they’re being preserved by American taxpayer money – $40 million from 2008–2018.
The Lost Cause, a movement that gained popularity among defeated Southern states in the late nineteenth century, is responsible for these monuments – and for justifying Jim Crow laws.
The movement asserted that the Confederacy was based on heritage and honor; slavery was benign; and the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
But the Confederate declarations of secession themselves show this a blatant lie.
Louisiana laid it out explicitly: “The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.
” The Sons of Confederate Veterans, founded in 1896 to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause” have been central to the effort to rewrite US history – even going so far as to propagate the myth that Black soldiers fought for the Confederacy.
At a Memorial Day event held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose membership is now 30,000 strong, Clint listens as their commander in chief shares an account of the first Memorial Day.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it,” he begins.
On April 25, 1866, he claims, Confederate women “decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers .
.
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forever honoring our country’s heroes.
” This is indeed another falsehood.
The first Memorial Day ceremony was held in May 1865, when Black workmen – freed, formerly-enslaved people – buried and paid tribute to Union soldiers in Charleston, South Carolina.
But to the people at Blandford, the truth seems less important than upholding the lies of their ancestors.
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.
On April 9, 1865, Robert E.
Lee surrendered in Appomattox County, Virginia; the Confederacy had lost the war.
But many enslavers failed to pass on the news to their enslaved workers.
It was more than two months later – and a full two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – that Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order Number 3.
Even then, many in remote parts of the state didn’t hear about the order for weeks or months – sometimes years.
According to historian W.
Caleb McDaniel, “Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day.
It ended through a violent, uneven process.
” And when freedom did finally arrive, formerly enslaved people weren’t provided any resources to become socially or economically mobile.
Despite their significant role in building the country’s wealth, Black Americans own less than 4 percent of it today.
In 1979, Texas legislator Al Edwards introduced a bill that made Juneteenth a state holiday – the first official celebration of Black emancipation in the US.
Galveston’s event has been held annually ever since.
Juneteenth is “our Independence Day,” says Edwards’s son.
Clint thinks of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, in which he declared, “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me .
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.
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This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
” Clint listens as local students from the Nia Cultural Center’s Freedom School deliver a chronology of the history of enslavement.
The school’s director, Sue Johnson, later tells him that by providing youth with the tools to understand their past, she’s providing them with the tools to understand themselves – which influences how they navigate the world.
Local politicians, event organizers, and community leaders proceed to take the stage; they speak about the day’s importance, and what it personally means to them.
Grant Mitchell, a white man whose family has sponsored the event for many years, speaks about the persistent need for reckoning: “This is not just a celebration.
The path towards justice is long and uncertain .
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.
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Today is also a day of reflection, to ask ourselves, ‘Where are we on that path?
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.
There’s no scientific basis in the concept of race.
“In fact,” Damaras continues, “race doesn’t exist.
” Race is a social construct resulting from racism, as outlined by Barbara and Karen Fields in their book Racecraft.
And this legacy of racism has shaped every aspect of our current world.
People in the North often have a self-righteous attitude toward slavery: “We were the good guys, right?
” But, Damaras says, that’s “one of the biggest lies we’re still telling in this country.
” Slavery was introduced to Manhattan in 1626.
Enslaved people cleared the forests, constructed homes, and built the foundations of the city’s infrastructure.
New York City burgeoned, and so did the enslaved population.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved workers comprised more than 25 percent of the labor force – more than any other urban area.
The tour group arrives at the intersection of Water and Wall Streets.
A small plaque reveals that the area was the site of an historic market where enslaved people were auctioned from 1711–1762.
By the start of the Civil War in 1861, slavery had been around for over 200 years; the four million enslaved people were the US economy’s greatest asset, valued at $3.
5 billion.
And New York City’s financial industry bolstered every aspect of the slave trade: businessmen built ships, transported cotton, and made the enslaved workers’ clothes.
Arriving at the New York Stock Exchange, Damaras speaks of the area’s importance to the Underground Railroad.
Here were the offices of wealthy merchant brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappen, who used their silk business fortunes to support local abolitionists.
And that JPMorgan bank was once the opulent Thomas Downing Oyster House – where Thomas Downing, a free Black man, schmoozed with rich white bankers upstairs while his son George hid people in the basement.
Finally, they arrive at their last stop: the African Burial ground.
In 1697, New York City instated a “mortuary apartheid,” which forced Black people to bury their dead on a barren piece of land outside the city.
It’s estimated that thousands were laid to rest there from the 1690s to 1975.
Time and construction erased the burial ground from public memory – until 1990, when a proposed office tower elicited a site audit and hundreds of remains were unearthed.
A 1993 article in Archaeology magazine stated that the discovery “challenged the popular belief that there was no slavery in colonial New York.
” Even the Statue of Liberty bears traces of the city’s past of enslavement.
One of Édouard René de Laboulaye’s early iterations clasped broken shackles as a celebration of abolition.
In the end, Laboulaye went with a broader message: a tablet inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence.
But pieces of a broken shackle and chain can still be found at Liberty’s feet, partly hidden beneath her robe.
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.
Gorée was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978 and has since served as a site of reckoning for many – including activist Angela Davis, Pope John Paul II, and US presidents Barack Obama, George W.
Bush, and Bill Clinton.
The Maison des Esclaves, or House of Slaves, is central to the island’s narrative.
It was once the residence of Anna Colas Pépin, a French-African woman who owned and traded enslaved people.
After Senegal gained independence from France in 1960, Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, a Gorée native, was tasked with documenting the house’s history with the slave trade.
He conceived the idea of the “Door of No Return,” through which millions of Africans were herded onto ships that would deliver them into bondage.
The House of Slaves’ curator, Eloi Coly, notes that as slavery advanced the US economy, Europeans sought to justify it.
How did they rip people from their homes – and families – and ship them across the sea to a life of servitude?
By dehumanizing them and viewing them as merchandise.
Eloi wants to counter the detrimental effect this ideology has on the human psyche.
His mission is to help the world reckon with slavery’s history, but also to ensure history emphasized who Black people were before enslavement – and who they are despite it: “Africans have to know that the starting point was Africa.
” As Clint later finds out, even the most admirable accounts of history can be tarnished by exaggeration.
Scholars estimate that 33,000 enslaved people passed through Gorée – a huge number, but not the alleged millions.
And the Door of No Return likely never really led to ships; it was probably used to throw waste into the ocean.
He mentions the numbers to Eloi, who tells Clint, “The number of slaves is not important when you talk about memory .
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.
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One slave is too much.
” Clint stands in front of the Door of No Return and looks out at the ocean.
The door is flanked by two tiny, dark rooms where enslaved people were held before their torturous journey.
He wonders whether the exact number held in them really matters: “Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?
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.
They passed a statue of Thomas Jefferson – flanked by bricks emblazoned with the names of people he’d enslaved, including his own children.
They stopped at an exhibit about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was brutally murdered in 1955 by two white men, based on an accusation that he’d catcalled and physically accosted a white woman – an accusation she later admitted had been a lie.
The exhibit hit close to home: as a young man, Clint’s grandfather lived just a few miles away from where Emmett was killed.
He told Clint about growing up in 1930s Mississippi, a state where lynchings were common.
He spoke of the palpable segregation, and of “night riders” – mounted white supremacist vigilantes whose mission it was to spread fear and violence through his town’s Black community.
But Clint’s grandfather considers himself lucky; he was academically gifted, which his elementary school principal took notice of.
The principal made sure he attended high school, even if that meant sending him to live in a county 20 miles away.
“Really depressing.
” That’s how Clint’s grandmother described her visit to the NMAAHC.
Born in Florida in 1939, she’d experienced segregation everywhere: in restaurants, grocery stores, bathrooms, public transportation .
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She recalled her grandfather being forced to stand during an eight-hour bus ride because the driver wouldn’t let him sit in the white section.
At the museum, she wasn’t an outsider learning about a tragic past; she was revisiting old memories.
She remembered what had happened to Emmett.
She remembered the fires, riots, and lynchings.
“I lived it,” she told Clint.
I lived it.
In those three words, Clint heard an affirmation – This museum is a mirror – and a warning – Always remember what this country did to us.
His grandparents’ stories were monuments to the history of slavery: the history of the United States.