Persisting in keeping his wife pregnant though aware how pregnancy, which ultimately killed her, had put her life at risk, what sort of man was our third president? He demeaned African Americans as inferior and defamed black women as unattractive even to black men. Thomas Jefferson’s aerie at Monticello, Virginia, attests to how those so invested in maintaining Confederate memorials might consider that even antebellum architecture or old silver can be imbued with the taint of slavery’s oppression.

But noting that “at least a hundred streets, statues, parks, and schools named after Confederate figures, slaveholders, and defenders of slavery remain”, Smith suggests the task of eliminating symbols which hurt and humiliate is only just beginning. Smith “had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me … that the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution”.Ĭolossal, sculpted to endow Robert E Lee with an appearance of valor no captioning could rectify, the ignoble commander’s New Orleans monument is gone now.

In a time when youth of color, despairing of the elusive American Dream, seek Wakanda instead – with many whites afraid to acknowledge either privilege or disparity and the role, since the beginning, slavery has played in both – the way “the word” about our history has been passed is with half-truths and delusion, but most of all through denial. It answers the title’s question with often elegant emphasis.

This is an elegiac discourse, sometimes a trifle overwrought. But because of his scholarly curiosity and zeal, his quest includes many more. New Orleans, the poet-author’s home town Jefferson’s Monticello the revisionist tourist attraction at the Whitney Plantation the infamous maximum security prison at the 16,000-acre Angola Plantation Blandford Cemetery, a Confederate shrine with Tiffany windows Galveston Island, commemorating Juneteenth New York City, enriched by slave-based enterprise and Gorée Island, with its gate of no return, in Senegal.Īll are stops on Smith’s pilgrimage. Engaging our nation’s “curious institution” – “our un-atoned original sin” – the book purports to examine just eight sites.

Dr clint smith how the word is passed