Filling Gaps in Knowledge of Civil Rights History
Book cover from King Country Library for How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
Filling Gaps in Knowledge of Civil Rights History
In the fall of 2019, I saw an advertisement for a bus tour called Let Freedom Ring: A Civil Rights Tour. After traveling internationally to many different countries with tour groups, I decided it was time to get better acquainted with my own country by joining an educational tour to parts of the country I had not visited before. The itinerary would take me from Memphis, to Jackson, Birmingham, Selma, and Mobile, ending up in New Orleans. Of the listed destinations, the only one I’d been to was New Orleans and that visit had nothing to do with civil rights. I registered for the tour right away and shared my plans with friends. A high school friend, living on the East coast, decided to join me and we looked forward both to learning a lot on the trip and spending time with each other. COVID intervened.
The trip we planned to take in October of 2020, got postponed one year by the tour company. While I was disappointed with the delay, I understood the hardships the pandemic had made for everyone. Looking on the bright side, I figured I’d now have an extra year to read background materials and participate in seminars on civil rights topics. When the time came to travel in 2021, we were disappointed to learn the trip had been cancelled due to low enrollment. We rescheduled to May of 2022, only to find out that trip was also cancelled. The next date that was available and that fit our schedules was in March of 2023. For the fourth time, we made our travel plans. About 30 days before our planned departure the trip was cancelled for the last time. There would be no rescheduling. The tour company had determined there was insufficient interest in the itinerary, so rescheduling was not possible.
That aborted travel history helps to explain my enthusiasm for How the Word is Passed: a Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America by Clint Smith. Published in 2021, this book is a literary travelogue of visits to nine locations, which beautifully describes each setting, includes interviews and descriptions of people met during the visits, and explains the historical and current significance of each site.
As Americans are starting to understand, there are many gaps in our early education about slavery, its origins, its geographic distribution, its cruelty and how essential it was to the economy when our country was formed. It’s only recently that many of us have become aware of the lingering effects of this aspect of our history.
Clint Smith fills some of those gaps for himself as well as his readers. His chapter on New York City, a place I lived in for a summer and have visited several times, contained numerous surprises for me. I never thought of New York as an important player in the process of enslavement and the treatment of enslaved people, but I learned how misinformed I was. Smith describes the walking tour he took around the city and explains that the first enslaved people arrived in New York in 1626. They cleared land, built homes and roads, and generally laid the foundation for the new Dutch settlement. Wall Street originally was a wall, probably built by enslaved people, separating the Dutch settlement from the native population, and providing some protection from British incursions.
He visited the New York National Museum of the American Indian and observed four human sculptures at the top of the building, first built in 1907 to house the US Customs House. The four marble sculptures represent Africa, Europe, America, and Asia. The only one that is half naked, in a reclining pose, and asleep is the one representing Africa. The local guide attributed this depiction to a belief that Africa was savage and barbaric, not human enough to be represented in the royal manner of the other three personas.
Some of the early enslaved people were freed by the Dutch and given land intended to create a buffer between the Dutch and the indigenous people. By the middle of the 17th Century free Black people made up a third of New Amsterdam’s Black population. However, when the British ousted the Dutch, that changed. Enslaved men and women were separated, with men working in the fields outside the city and women working in British homes and caring for children. The British in New York imported an average of 150 enslaved people each year. Forty percent of the British households in Manhattan owned enslaved people.
On the eve of the American revolution, New York had the highest proportion of enslaved Blacks of any northern settlement, approximately 3000 enslaved in the city and 20,000 more in the vicinity. New York State abolished slavery in 1827, but it persisted until 1841. However, the city continued to benefit from slavery occurring elsewhere, since their economy was based on raw materials coming from Southern states, where the production came from enslaved people. In addition, money from New York bankers financed every facet of the slave trade.
There are many more surprising facts in the book, but I’ll leave it to the reader to discover them. Meanwhile, there are interesting author interviews easily found on the web. The links below are for those I particularly recommend. One is 30 minutes and the other about an hour. I highly recommend watching them before or after you read this important book.
Washington Post Live interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsBiRTUypKk
Hour long conversation between Clint Smith and author Min Jin Lee, sponsored by Harvard Book Store:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?512546-1/how-word-passed
Note 1: There are several other blog posts on my website that relate to civil rights and diversity. Take a look:
Book Review of Black Cake: http://www.commonsensereflections.info/blog/2023/1/1/black-cake-a-story-of-family-secrets.
Friendship topic inspired by Michele Obama: http://www.commonsensereflections.info/blog/2022/12/25/thankful-for-friends
Book review of A More Perfect Union: http://www.commonsensereflections.info/blog/2022/5/25/i-loved-this-book
Racism discussion inspired by Ibram Kenji: http://www.commonsensereflections.info/blog/2021/7/9/understanding-and-fighting-racism
Note 2: One of my friends recommends listening to the following podcast to hear from two people who recently participated in a Civil Rights tour like the one I had hoped to go on. One of their tour guides also participates explaining why he continues to lead these tours:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-of-faith-for-justice/id1549703393?i=1000601269509