This commentary is by Tom McKone of Montpelier, a former English teacher, principal and library administrator.
“How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?”
That’s the central question that Clint Smith asks in his new book “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.”
Smith sought answers to his question by visiting historically significant sites in the South and North and in Senegal to see how the story of slavery is being told today. His question is at the heart of our discussions in Vermont and across the country, in our schools and at school board meetings, in our Legislature and courts, and at our dinner tables. Smith is a worthy guest to invite in.
Smith has a great eye for detail, so he brings the reader right there with him when he visits Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation, where 130 enslaved people kept the Jefferson family living in style.
We go with him to the Whitney Plantation, which makes “the story of the enslaved the core of the experience” and shows how much American slavery depended on “breeding” more enslaved people, more than half of whom were under the age of 20.
Visiting the Louisiana State Penitentiary, named “Angola” after the plantation that once stood there, some readers may get queasy as Smith describes sitting in the same electric chair where, in 1947, Willie Francis was executed and as Smith tells the story of the likely innocent Black teen. After touring parts of the still-active prison, visitors can go to the prison museum gift shop and buy souvenirs.
The stories Smith shares, in themselves, provide a good argument for telling American history differently from how many of us — both Black and white—learned it; however, one of the most important parts of this book is that he shows many ways in which the past has not simply been skipped over but has been distorted. Sometimes, what passes for history is actually legend, myth or nostalgia.
“I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia,” said Smith’s tour guide at Monticello. “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts.… History is kind of about what you need to know … but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”
The myth of the “Lost Cause” is an example of a lie that is still around today.
“The Lost Cause is a movement that gained traction in the late 19th century that attempted to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family, honor and heritage rather than what it was, a traitorous effort to extend and expand the bondage of Black people,” Smith writes. “The movement asserted that the Civil War was not actually about slavery. … The myth of the Lost Cause not only subsumed those sympathetic to the Confederate cause but also laid its claim to broad swaths of the American consciousness. It attempted to rewrite U.S. history.”
Smith describes various ways in which white supremacists have blamed Black Americans for their own enslavement and have cast themselves as a superior group and Blacks as inferior to them.
“White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country — Black and white — to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation,” he says.
“We were the good guys, right?” That’s the assumption many Northerners have, and Smith addresses it on his visit to the site that in the 18th century was the second-largest slave auction in the United States, in Manhattan, at the lower end of Wall Street.
The North made a lot of money off the enslavement of Black people in the South. New York banks financed “every facet of the slave trade” and “New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes the enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish.”
Several Northern states allowed slavery into the 19th century, and many Northerners, including some abolitionists — despite their opposition to slavery — were racists who considered Blacks to be inferior human beings.
Still, despite contradictions in President Abraham Lincoln’s own life and attitudes, and racism in the North, Smith points to a stark contrast: Lincoln and Union troops fought to free 4 million Americans from slavery, while the South fought to keep them enslaved.
Smith’s engaging, eye-opening book shows the enormous impact slavery has had since enslaved people were first brought to Virginia in 1619 and to New York in 1626. There is no end-date to that statement. Even though slavery was ended more than 150 years ago, Smith shows that the racist attitudes that allowed people to own other people for almost 250 years before that are still with us. The past, to paraphrase William Faulkner, isn’t over; it isn’t even past.
Call it a theory or whatever you will, but Smith makes the case that the history of slavery is the history of the United States. That is obviously provocative and central to many of the arguments we are having here and across the country. Many Americans have dismissed that possibility outright, without even considering whether it could be true. Some Vermonters, including school board members and other local and state leaders, are in that group.
It is premature to expect everyone to reach the same conclusion Smith did. After all, most Americans have only a thin understanding of our traditional history, along with its myths and nostalgia, and not enough have read the work of Ibram X. Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Isabel Wilkerson, Clint Smith or others who have taken more authentic looks into our past — and present.
If, on the very ground where Jefferson walked, the tour guide Smith had when he visited Monticello — a self-described “old white guy” — can give a frank assessment of both Jefferson’s greatness and his deep, racist flaws, we can also take a brave look back at how we got where we are.
We don’t have to vote up or down on critical race theory or other red herrings that white supremacists throw in front of us. Not a final step, but a next, healthy step, would be to commit ourselves to learning more about our history and to seeing where that takes us. Those in education, politics and other leadership roles especially need to do this.
Committing to an honest look at our past won’t change it; however, it can help us to see the present in a different light, it can help us to grow into antiracists, and it can help our country to finally make more real the aspirational words of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….” And, yes, we now aspire to recognizing that all humans are created equal.
