Clint Smith | The Atlantic

The Trump Administration Can’t Kill Black History Month

2026-02-25T08:30:00-05:00

All that’s left of T. J. Semmes Elementary School is the scattered slabs of the building’s brick foundation. The otherwise empty lot on the corner of Jourdan Avenue and North Rampart Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is covered in clovers and dandelions, and surrounded by barbed-wire fencing contorted by time and neglect. Built in 1900 and named after a Confederate senator, the school remained open until 1978, when it closed due to financial problems. Hurricane Katrina accelerated the building’s dilapidation, and in 2019 it was demolished.

But in 1965, when the building still stood and the school still operated, my mother was a 6-year-old student at Semmes, a child with books in her hand and butterflies in her stomach as she entered her new school for the first time. She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn’t want them sitting in class with Negroes.

She shared these stories with my children and me earlier this month, during a visit to my hometown for Mardi Gras. One day, before we made our way out to the parades, my mother and I took my children to the house where she’d lived as a child, and then to the former site of Semmes, down the street. I wanted my children to understand that Black history is not just something that exists in books, or that involves only the major figures they learn about in school: Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman. Black history is something that involved the people they know and love. Their grandmother, after all, had been among the first wave of Black children to integrate her elementary school, when she was the same age that my daughter is now.

[Clint Smith: Those who try to erase history will fail]

After the Supreme Court deemed segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many school districts around the country found creative strategies to avoid complying with the ruling, engaging in years of court battles, slow-walking, and attempts to find legislative loopholes. New Orleans was among these battlegrounds; many white families there fundamentally rejected the idea that their children should be part of what they saw as a misguided social experiment. In 1960, the city became the center of national controversy when Ruby Bridges, Tessie Prevost, Gail Etienne, and Leona Tate—who came to be known as the New Orleans Four—desegregated two different public schools; Prevost, Etienne, and Tate together at McDonough 19, and Bridges alone at Frantz Elementary. Bridges’s journey into the school was immortalized in a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled The Problem We All Live With, in which a young Bridges walks, in a white dress with books and ruler in hand, between two pairs of federal agents. NIGGER is spelled behind her on the wall, and the guttural red residue from a tomato that has just been thrown drips beneath the word. A print of this painting sits in the hallway of my grandfather’s home. Looking at it, I am struck by the fact that federal agents today are being deployed in American cities as aggressors rather than protectors.

So many white parents took their children out of McDonough 19 that before long, it became an all-Black school. With the help of a local NAACP lawyer, Tate’s, Prevost’s, and Etienne’s parents petitioned the school district to send their children to a new school. Soon, the girls were reassigned to T. J. Semmes, where they, along with six other children, became the school’s first Black students. At Semmes, they were left to fend for themselves, without the protection of federal marshals.

In a 2019 interview with Pacific Standard, Leona Tate shared her experience that first year: “At Semmes, the students hated us. And there were teachers that hated us.” The reporter continued, “The small group of black students were spit upon and punched. Two teachers held their noses each time black students passed, implying that they smelled. The girls faced constant insults and physical aggression from white students, who were often egged on by adults within the school.”

Somehow, I had never fully realized before my recent visit how close my mother had been to the history of local and national school-desegregation efforts when she was a student at Semmes, beginning just three years later, in 1965. New Orleans schools integrated on a grade-by-grade basis. She was stepping into a school still in the midst of a harrowing transition.

This trip to the lot of my mother’s old school felt especially poignant during Black History Month, at a time when Donald Trump and his administration have been incessantly attacking, downplaying, distorting, and removing Black history from American public life in ways large and small. The president has said, for example, that the Smithsonian museums spend too much time talking about slavery. His administration has told schools and universities that they should focus on a “patriotic education” that illuminates the uplifting parts of our country’s history while sidestepping anything perceived as too negative.

[Adam Harris: Black History Month is radical now]

The downstream cultural and societal impacts of such pronouncements from the White House have been stark. Schools, libraries, and corporations that once publicly celebrated Black history, both during February and beyond, have now gone quiet. Last year, the Waterloo, Iowa, school district canceled an event celebrating Black authors for fear that it would put federal funding at risk. Last month, Colorado Springs, Colorado, declined to issue a statement recognizing Black History Month, despite having done so for nearly a decade. (After public backlash, the city issued a Black History Month statement earlier this month.) As my colleague Adam Harris has written, in the age of Trump, celebrating Black History Month has become a radical act.

Hannah Scott, a senior agent at Lyceum, a speaking agency that represents some of the nation’s foremost Black writers, including Jesmyn Ward, Imani Perry, Jacqueline Woodson, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Tayari Jones, told me that the firm has noticed a marked drop in speaking requests over the past year or two. She speculated that whereas some companies and organizations that once would have wanted to host these speakers have pulled back from such programming for fear of reprisal, others may have been forced to do so because of state and federal funding cuts. “There are huge numbers of literary and cultural organizations that relied on funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, that relied on funding from their state humanities councils,” Scott said. When budgets shrink, events like Black History Month programming can be the first to go.

Black history has been erased and distorted in this country from the beginning. In February 1934, during what was then known as Negro History Week, W. E. B. Du Bois gave a speech in New Orleans based on his forthcoming book, Black Reconstruction in America, in which he lambasted white historians for twisting and misrepresenting the past in ways that undermined the public’s ability to understand the present. According to these historians, Du Bois said, slavery was “nobody’s fault,” and “at the close of slavery, the Negro was given the vote”—then “failed dismally.” But this story “is entirely false in interpretation,” he said, “and is entirely misleading.”

The goal of such stories, Du Bois told the crowd, was to justify the second-class social, political, and economic status of Black Americans. He urged his listeners to arm themselves with the truth, and to reject racist narratives. Only by learning their own history could Black Americans fully understand that their social and economic condition had been created by law and policy, and was not a reflection of their capability and worth.

[From the December 2023 issue: How Black Americans kept Reconstruction alive]

The story of Du Bois’s 1934 speech is relayed in a new book, I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, by the Harvard historian Jarvis R. Givens. A major impetus behind establishing a monthlong commemoration of Black history, Givens writes, was to provide “usable histories that inspire black people to see the full range of their humanity and hopefully to help others see it in the process.” This has always required a delicate balancing act. Black History Month must at once demonstrate the various ways that Black Americans have been exploited and oppressed and remind Black Americans that they and their histories are not singularly defined by such barbarism. It must lift up all that Black Americans have achieved, created, and built despite, and in the midst of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These lessons may come in the form of Zora Neale Hurston novels, or in the stories that your grandmother told you in her kitchen. They may come in the form of a Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges, but they may also come in a story told to you by your mother on the empty lot that was once her school.

Perhaps embracing that duality is the best way to honor Black History Month this year. The Trump administration can attempt to remove exhibits from museums, ban books from libraries, and challenge curriculums in schools. But it cannot control what we do in our communities and with our families. We don’t have to wait on the government to give us permission to learn a history we can reach for ourselves.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Those Who Try to Erase History Will Fail

2026-01-19T08:00:00-05:00

Belzoni, Mississippi, a town of about 2,000 people, is known as the “Catfish Capital of the World”; it is also known as the site of one of the first civil-rights-era lynchings. On May 7, 1955, two members of the local White Citizens’ Council shot into the cab of Reverend George Lee’s car; the bullets ripped off the lower half of his face. Lee had been a co-founder of the town’s NAACP chapter and the first Black person to successfully register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction. He’d also registered about 100 of his fellow Black citizens to vote, a remarkable feat given Belzoni’s size and the ever-present threat of violence against Black people throughout the South who dared to exercise their franchise during the Jim Crow era.

The Mississippi NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, began to investigate the death as a murder. But the county sheriff rejected the idea that there had been any foul play, instead suggesting that Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets detected in his jaw were simply dental fillings. The local prosecutor refused to move forward with the case, and the white men went free.

I learned this story recently, after visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—known to many as the National Lynching Memorial—in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial consists of more than 800 rectangular steel pillars, each representing a different county in which a lynching took place. One of them is Humphreys, in Mississippi.

[From the June 2024 issue: The lynching that sent my family north]

It was a cold, rainy day, and my first time seeing the memorial. The space is haunting in its stillness, and overwhelming in its scale. Some of the steel pillars are suspended from above, while others are closer to the ground, forcing you to walk among them, through a steel labyrinth of racial terror.

A man named Lee Perkins was also at the memorial that day, being pushed around in a wheelchair by his son-in-law Chris Brown. Perkins was born in Belzoni in 1937. He was 17 when the lynching took place. As he told me about growing up as a Black child in the Mississippi Delta, he looked up, his eyes tracing the pillars’ long, still bodies. He had a coarse voice with a warm southern drawl. “I never thought I would see something like this,” he said, his neck craning to read the names on each piece of steel. Dusk began to settle around us, and the sky slowly darkened at its edges.

“I pray to God they never get rid of this history,” Brown said. “We as a Black race went through so much, and they’re trying to erase that.”

The lynching memorial has two sister sites in Montgomery—the Legacy Museum, which traces the history of Black oppression in America from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site that uses both contemporary sculptures and original artifacts to illuminate the lives and experiences of enslaved people. All three were created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal organization founded in 1989 that has expanded into narrative and public-history work over the past decade and a half under the leadership of its founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson.

Stevenson began his career as a public-interest lawyer, and went on to argue in front of the Supreme Court on five occasions, winning favorable judgments in all but one. He successfully argued, for example, against mandatory life sentences without parole for children, and for incarcerated people with dementia to be protected, in some cases, from execution. But he has said that as time passed, he came to understand that his legal work would not be enough on its own to effect meaningful criminal-justice reform. The American public, he felt, needed a deeper understanding of how the realities of the country’s history shaped the present-day system.

The Legacy Museum, which opened almost eight years ago, is perhaps the closest thing America has to a national slavery museum. Crucially, however, it is completely privately funded, receiving no state or federal financial support. As such, Stevenson and his colleagues are unburdened by executive orders; they need not bow to pressure to alter an exhibit after a presidential Truth Social post. I wanted to get a sense of how visitors were experiencing the museum and memorials now, when so much of what they depict represents the very history that the Trump administration aims to de-emphasize—if not outright erase—at schools, historic sites, and museums across the country. I also wondered how Stevenson thought about the role these spaces play today, compared with when they first opened, and what kinds of knowledge he hoped they might be able to provide to the visiting public as the country and its politics change around them.

Jars of clay at the Legacy Museum (Equal Justice Initiative)

Erasure was a recurring theme among the people I spoke with in Montgomery. On the opposite side of the memorial, I met two Black women, Jackie Brown and Annette Pinckney, who were also visiting for the first time. “We’re from Florida, where you have Governor Ron DeSantis, who is trying to erase our history,” Pinckney said.

Pinckney is an assistant principal at a high school in South Florida, and she has seen firsthand the impact of the state’s recent laws—such as the Stop WOKE Act—that regulate how schools and businesses deal with issues of race and gender. The Florida Department of Education has also banned AP African American Studies from being offered in Florida high schools, claiming that the curriculum lacks “educational value and historical accuracy.”

Earlier in their visit, Pinckney and Brown had stood inside a real former slave cabin located along the Alabama River, on which thousands of enslaved people had once been trafficked. They described feeling the biting wind whistle into the cabin through holes in the wood-panel walls, and thinking about how susceptible to the elements the family staying inside would have been. Pinckney wrapped her arms tight around her chest. “That right there was just gut-wrenching,” she said. “It makes it more real.”

The visceral experience they had is precisely the point, Stevenson told me. When we met that evening at the EJI office, Stevenson said that the goal of the sites is to force visitors to confront the violence of the past without the counterweight of a more uplifting narrative to assuage their distress. The sites were built with the aim of not repeating the triumphant progress narrative found in some other civil-rights museums, which, as he put it, “would rather tell a story of achievement than a story of continuing struggle.”

“I love those museums,” Stevenson said. “But if people are allowed to walk out thinking, Oh, isn’t that great that we had that civil-rights movement, and that took care of racism in America, that ended the struggle over voting rights, that ended the struggle over integration and access—if we do that, then we’re undermining the effort to achieve racial justice.” Many civil-rights museums rely on resources from state and federal governments, and Stevenson wonders if some of them feel pressure to tell a story that will satisfy those funders.

For many visitors, the EJI museums have become a site of pilgrimage, which has made them a major driver of tourism to Alabama. The museums are consistently one of the two most-popular paid attractions in the state (the other is the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville), and they receive about 500,000 visitors each year. “Eight hotels have been built in this city since we’ve opened, and airports have record levels,” Stevenson told me.

Another Black-history museum that serves as a site of pilgrimage is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., which opened two years prior to the Legacy Museum. Stevenson said that the Smithsonian museum is an essential presence on the National Mall, and that it is more comprehensive than any other museum on Black life in the country. He worries, however, that it, too, can allow some visitors to leave with an incorrect impression of unalloyed triumph. This is in part, he believes, the result of how the museum was designed. Because its primary sections on the oppression and violence that Black people were subjected to during the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow are below the museum’s street-level entrance—while the culture exhibits are upstairs—the history exhibitions are effectively optional for visitors.

According to museum employees Stevenson has spoken with, this design choice poses an educational challenge. “They have a lot of school kids and a lot of groups that come in, and they get in the elevator and they go straight to the upper floors. They want to see Michael Jackson’s coat, and Michael Jordan’s shoe, and B. B. King’s guitar, and then they want to see the stuff on Obama, and then they want to go have a meal,” Stevenson said. In Montgomery, he explained, “it was important to create a narrative journey where you don’t have the option to avoid the hard stuff.”

Still, the hard stuff is a big enough part of the Smithsonian’s offering to visitors that in August, the Trump administration announced it would be undertaking a review of the institution and demanded that the Smithsonian turn over troves of documents including an inventory of all permanent holdings, all internal communications relevant to the approval of exhibitions and artwork, and information regarding 250th-anniversary programming. A week later, on social media, the president castigated the Smithsonian museums for supposedly having an undue focus on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

Stevenson insists that the goal of the Legacy Museum is not to present Alabama as irredeemably racist or forever entrapped by its past. Alabama is a state that he loves. It is his home. He believes it can be different in the future, but not if people turn away from the past. “I don’t think slavery should define Alabama,” he said. “And if we have the courage to talk about it honestly, it won’t. But we can’t not talk about it and have a proper understanding of who we are.”

At the Legacy Museum, which is built on the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved people were once forced to work, some of the first items you encounter are clay sculptures depicting the heads of captured Africans rising from the earth, many with chains around their necks, as digital ocean waves crash on screens behind them.

Through detailed explanations of the role that slavery played in every region of early America, you learn that Delaware passed a law prohibiting free Black people from moving to the state. You learn that in 1730, almost half of all white residents of New York personally owned an enslaved person. You learn that by the mid-18th century, enslaved people made up 70 percent of Charleston’s population.

In the next room, ghostlike figures projected onto the walls sing in re-created slave pens. I stood next to a man and his young daughter in the long hall lined with cages as we watched a phantom woman sing the chorus of a haunting Negro spiritual. The girl leaned into her father’s side and wrapped her arms around his waist as he held one hand on her shoulder.

After the Legacy Museum’s series of exhibits on slavery, visitors encounter a section that focuses on how the decades following emancipation were less a period of unfettered upward mobility for Black Americans than one of widespread, sustained racial terror—which often came in the form of lynchings. One of the most affecting displays is a wall lined with hundreds of jars of soil excavated from sites of lynchings across the country. As I walked by the jars, I was struck by how the color and texture of the soil in each one was different.

The soil from the site of Will Archer’s lynching in Carrollton, Alabama, on September 14, 1893, was cinnamon-red and gravelly.

The soil from the site of Marshall Boston’s lynching in Frankfort, Kentucky, on August 15, 1894, was light brown and rocky.

The soil from the site of Odis Price’s lynching in Perry, Florida, on August 9, 1938, was black and fine as sand.

One of the Legacy Museum’s walls shows a floor-to-ceiling image of the infamous “Scourged Back” photograph, which depicts the horrifyingly scarred back of a formerly enslaved man named Peter who had received violent beatings. It was taken and published in the spring of 1863, in the midst of the Civil War and not long after the Emancipation Proclamation. The photo first circulated in northern cities in the form of small prints known as cartes de visite. When Harper’s Magazine published it in its July 4 issue, many Americans saw, for the first time, the physical violence wrought by slavery. The photograph boosted the abolitionist cause and challenged the widespread notion that slavery had been a benevolent and gentle institution. Since then, it has become one of the defining images of the brutality of enslavement, and has appeared in countless textbooks, museums, and magazines.

The photo’s presence in the Legacy Museum was particularly conspicuous at this moment. In September, The Washington Post reported that the same photograph had been removed from a national park in accordance with a Trump-issued executive order.

The Scourged Back (McPherson & Oliver)

Less than a mile away from the Legacy Museum is the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis and his family lived in the breakaway nation’s earliest days. This White House receives substantial funding from the state of Alabama, and its mission is codified in Alabama state law: “the preservation of Confederate relics and as a reminder for all time of how pure and great were southern statesmen and southern valor.” In 2023, the Associated Press reported that people who visited the museum, including thousands of Alabama schoolchildren, were taught that President Davis had led a “heroic resistance” in the “war for southern independence” and was “held by his Negroes in genuine affection as well as highest esteem.”

[Clint Smith: Actually, slavery was very bad]

“When I moved to Montgomery in the ’80s, there were 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the city,” Stevenson told me. And despite Montgomery being among the most prominent slave-trading cities in America leading up to the Civil War, “you could not find the word slave, slavery, or enslavement anywhere in the city landscape.”

I asked Stevenson if he thought the United States should have a public, national museum, in addition to the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC, dedicated specifically to slavery, or if it was better to have privately funded institutions like the Legacy Museum focus on that history. He paused and considered the question.

“I’m not sure we’re ready for a state-sanctioned truth telling about the history of slavery,” he said. “We can have a state-sanctioned space, but I don’t know why we would expect it to be a truth-telling space.” He pointed his finger down on the table. “Because the reality is we’re not yet at the point where, some would say, it’s in the state’s interest to be truthful about this history, so it would take a lot to get that truth to come through.”

Touring the Legacy Museum that afternoon, I’d seen a Black family with three children standing in a long hallway that outlined the chronology of Black life in America. The two older siblings ambled from one photo and caption to the next, while the youngest, a boy of about 7 years old, stood with his parents and read the captions out loud as his mother helped him through the words he couldn’t pronounce. They came to an image of a young white boy, about the same age as the Black boy, standing beneath the dangling feet of a Black man who had been lynched from a tree. The man’s face was cropped out of the photograph. The boy in the museum locked eyes with the boy in the image. I heard his parents tell him that sometimes children attended lynchings as well. The father stroked the top of his son’s head, and they walked on.

Tell Students the Truth About American History

2025-11-16T08:00:00-05:00

“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Thomas Jefferson,” I said to a group of about 70 middle schoolers in Memphis. Hands shot up across the auditorium. “What do we know about him?” I asked.

“He was the president!” one said.

“He had funny hair!” said another.

“He wrote the Constitution?” one remarked, half-asking, half-asserting.

I responded to each of their comments:

“Yes, he was our country’s third president.”

“That’s actually how many men wore their hair back then. Many men even wore wigs.”

“Close! He was the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Then I asked, “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of enslaved Black people?” Most of the students shook their heads. “What if I told you that some of those people he enslaved were his own children?” The students gasped.

Recently, I visited schools in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, all states where legislators have passed laws and implemented executive orders restricting the teaching of so-called critical race theory. I was on tour to promote the newly released young readers’ edition, co-written with Sonja Cherry-Paul, of my 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, which is about how slavery is remembered across America.

I began most of my school presentations with a similar exchange about Jefferson because, even today, millions of Americans have never been taught that the Founding Father was an enslaver, let alone that Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, gave birth to at least six of Jefferson’s children (beginning when she was 16 and he was in his late 40s). Four of these children survived past childhood; Jefferson enslaved them until they were adults. Talking about this part of the American story with students is just as important as teaching them about Jefferson’s political accomplishments; to gloss over his moral inconsistencies would be to gloss over the moral inconsistencies of the country’s founding—and its present.

[Read: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

It can be hard for people to hear these things about Jefferson, I told the students; many Americans are frightened by the prospect of having to reconsider their long-held narratives about the country and their place in it. According to some of the docents I spoke with at Monticello while doing research for my book, many visitors to Jefferson’s Virginia-plantation home have balked at the site’s portrayal of Jefferson as an enslaver, accusing the museum of trying to be “politically correct,” “change history,” or “tear Jefferson down.”

But the more complex version of the story is not all negative. Jefferson did a lot of good for many people, even as he also did a lot of harm to many people. America itself has helped many millions of people, even as it has also enacted violence on many millions of people.

This duality made intuitive sense to the students. They understood that their country and its heroes, like all of us, aren’t perfect—that everyone makes mistakes, even if we don’t immediately understand them as such. What we do is try to learn from our mistakes to become better versions of ourselves.

“Doesn’t seem that hard,” an eighth grader in Memphis said, shrugging her shoulders. “Just say both things.”

Starting with Jefferson and everything he represents helped set the tone for the rest of my discussions with students. I visited public schools and private schools; schools where a Black child stood out among a sea of white faces and schools where there wasn’t a white child in sight. I spent time with kids in fourth grade and all the way up to 12th grade.

Everywhere I went, I thought about my own experience growing up in New Orleans in the ’90s and aughts, a time when commentators such as Pat Buchanan and Dinesh D’Souza routinely suggested that Black people themselves were primarily to blame for the country’s racism and inequality—that Black people hadn’t worked hard enough or behaved the right way. During my childhood, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote a book suggesting that Black people were genetically predisposed to have a lower IQ than white people. Even some within the Black community, including celebrities like Bill Cosby and scholars like Thomas Sowell, inveighed against Black people’s ostensible moral failings while either trivializing or saying nothing about the history of public policy that created a chasm between Black and white communities. Encountering these messages on television, in newspapers, and even in school led me to internalize them, which left me confused and ashamed.

Not until college and graduate school did I understand—through books, art, and excellent teachers—that American racial inequality could be traced directly to 250 years of slavery, 80 years of Jim Crow apartheid, and decades of laws that gave white people resources to go to school, get a job, and buy a home while denying those same resources to Black people. This context freed me from a sense of shame, and helped me see that the present-day reality was a social and political construct. It could thus be reconstructed into something better—but only if we understood where it came from.

I hoped to share some of this understanding with the students I met on my tour. We talked about Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the country, built on top of a former plantation. I shared that most of the people held there are Black men, and most are serving life sentences—some were sentenced as children, and many work in fields picking crops for virtually no pay while being watched by armed guards on horseback.

We talked about the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, one of the only plantations in the country open to visitors that focuses on the people who were enslaved there rather than the people who did the enslaving. I asked what it tells us about the aftershocks of slavery that some of the original slave cabins, which are still standing, continued to be inhabited by the descendants of enslaved people all the way into the 1970s.

We talked about how the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States that’s now understood primarily as a symbol of welcome to immigrants, was originally intended to be, in part, a celebration of America’s abolition of slavery. The original design, I pointed out, featured broken chains and shackles in Lady Liberty’s left hand, but these items were eventually replaced by a tablet, perhaps to make the statue more palatable for a wider American audience.

We talked about how there are still people alive today, including my 94-year-old grandfather, who knew and loved people born into chattel slavery. What does it mean that this history, which we’re told was such a long time ago, was not in fact that long ago at all? “You see it in black-and-white pictures in books and everything, and you feel like it was forever ago, but this helps me understand that it wasn’t forever ago,” one tenth grader in New Orleans said. “It was more recent than I realized.”

After each visit, students came up to tell me that much, if not all, of what we’d covered was new to them. Many wondered why they had never heard it before. One seventh grader in Richmond told me that our discussion about the history and public memory of slavery had changed her understanding of why century-old statues of Confederate leaders had been taken down in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. She now saw that the distorted Lost Cause narrative of the Old South can skew people’s perceptions of racial inequality today. One young woman in Charleston told me that learning this history had inspired her to start an after-school book club with members of her school’s Black-student association; they would focus on learning history they weren’t taught in class. She hoped they might eventually recommend books for teachers to use in class, so that all students could be exposed to these ideas.

I don’t think the students were hearing these things for the first time because their teachers themselves were unaware of the truth, or because they don’t want students to know it. These teachers are dedicated to their students and passionate about their role as educators. But some are also fearful of broaching topics that have been turned into political lightning rods.

[Read: What it means to tell the truth about America]

A teacher in Memphis thanked me for talking about the sorts of issues that she and many of her colleagues are scared to discuss in their classrooms for fear of getting fired. A teacher in Charleston told me that he used to teach an AP African American–studies course until South Carolina’s Department of Education eliminated it as a college-credit class in high schools across the state. A teacher in Louisiana told me that the governor’s executive order banning “critical race theory” in classrooms was so vaguely defined that it felt like it could be applied to any conversation about race and history that makes any student feel bad.

The challenges facing teachers across the country are only mounting. Twenty states have bans on teaching critical race theory. Another four states have related legislation pending. The Trump administration is attacking schools that fail to teach a narrowly defined “patriotic education,” encouraging students, and their parents, to report anything or anyone attempting to “indoctrinate” kids “with radical, anti-American ideologies.”

Proponents of this agenda say that the problem is not Black history per se, but rather concepts such as white privilege and systemic racism. But talking about slavery without addressing the way it continues to shape the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country today is like talking about a hurricane only by discussing the speed of its winds, and not the damage it left behind.

The ability to connect the past and present is one of the most crucial functions of learning history. A curriculum that ignores these connections promotes a kind of lie by omission. We owe it to our young people not to lie to them anymore. A democracy whose citizens operate with fundamentally different understandings of the past and its implications cannot sustain itself. Americans desperately need a shared story, with all its complexities and contradictions. Without that, this American experiment, as we understand it, will end.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What Is Colonial Williamsburg For?

2025-10-10T05:50:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

Updated at 10:53 a.m. ET on December 2, 2025

Thirty-one years ago, there was a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg.

On October 10, 1994, two Black men and two Black women were led up the steps and onto the porch of an 18th-century tavern. They were made to stand in front of thousands of people as their bodies were examined by prospective buyers. An auctioneer informed the crowd that only gentlemen with appropriate letters of credit would be permitted to bid. Some in the crowd looked on in astonishment; some turned away and began to cry. That the people onstage were actors did not make the spectacle easy to watch.

“It was done realistically, with all the horror and pain that you’d expect,” Ron Hurst told me recently. Hurst, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for more than 40 years, was a curator at the time. He now oversees preservation and education efforts at the site. Reactions to the event were mixed, he recalled. Some people thought it was a powerful indictment of the 18th-century injustice. Others were deeply upset; members of the local Black community had tried to stop the auction from happening. Two protesters sat on the steps of the tavern and challenged officials to call the police. How, they wondered, could the event’s organizers not have understood the pain and humiliation it would cause?

The slave auction was the first and last of its kind. But it was hardly unique for Colonial Williamsburg in its blurring of the lines between performance and reality. In the ’90s, visitors might encounter the sounds of human beings being whipped, or the sight of fugitive slaves trying to escape. Black actors would portray enslaved people while white actors portrayed men on slave patrol. A few visitors attacked the white actors, attempting to wrestle away their muskets. Another visitor tried to lead a revolt against the enslavers. “There are only three of them and a hundred of us!” he shouted. The site no longer depicts slave patrols, but it does not shy away from the realities of slavery.

In June, I went there to find out how the nation’s largest living-history museum is telling America’s origin story at a time when questions of how best to convey the truth about the past have become highly politicized. Since January, the Trump administration has put pressure on schools, universities, and museums to provide students with a so-called patriotic education. In March, an executive order outlined a policy to “restore” federal historical sites “to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage” and “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” In this environment, even private historical sites that rely on federal funding have been forced to lay off staff and halt the opening of long-planned exhibits. Colonial Williamsburg, which is run by a private foundation and receives no federal funding, has largely been spared these painful choices.

[Clint Smith: What it means to tell the truth about America]

Still, the site, which welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, has long had to consider questions of whose history it is telling, how, and to whom. The land on which it sits was purchased during the 1920s by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who used his wealth to re-create Virginia’s colonial capital with an eye toward nostalgic patriotism. Colonial Williamsburg’s founders, Hurst told me, holding his thumb and index finger about an inch apart, were seeing “a picture that was this big.” World War I had just ended, and Rockefeller wanted the site to look back fondly on the nation’s founding.

This sensibility persisted through World War II and well into the Cold War. The site made extensive efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to incorporate more stories of Black life—hence the slave auction and the whippings. But critics argued that these efforts did little to change the overall narrative put forward by Colonial Williamsburg, in which, they said, slavery was not so much part of a greater set of American contradictions as a speed bump on the otherwise straight road of progress. In 1997, the scholars Richard Handler and Eric Gable referred to the site as a “Republican Disneyland.”

Black people visiting and working in Colonial Williamsburg have felt these tensions keenly. Parts of Colonial Williamsburg, notably its facilities for employees, remained segregated throughout the 1950s and ’60s. In more recent decades, up through the present, Black “interpreters”—Colonial Williamsburg’s word for its employees who dress in period costume—have shared stories of being subjected to harassment and abuse from visitors: Are you going on the auction block today? How much do you sell for? On other occasions, Black interpreters have had “boy” shouted at them jeeringly or had the old Dixie anthem whistled in their direction.

As we sat in front of the Governor’s Palace, a reconstruction of the residence where Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry once lived, Hurst said that Williamsburg has tried to become more thoughtful about the way it depicts the history of Black life, both free and enslaved. Today, for example, one can go on the Freedom’s Paradox walking tour, which examines how America’s revolutionary ideals of liberty and freedom could exist at the same time as the savagery of chattel slavery. “I think our founders in the 1920s and ’30s would be shocked at the stories we tell today,” Hurst said.

So are many contemporary Americans. In 2023, Hurst said, Colonial Williamsburg was criticized by both “The 1619 Project” docuseries and the Heritage Foundation: “ ‘1619’ saying we weren’t doing enough history of the enslavement. Heritage Foundation saying we were doing too much. So we figure we must be in the right place.”

To Hurst, talking about things like slavery is a matter not of politics, but of empirical truth. He cited the fact that more than half of Williamsburg’s population was Black at the time of the Revolution. Colonial Williamsburg, he said, has a duty to tell the stories of the people who were, in fact, the majority, most of whom were enslaved. If that makes some visitors uncomfortable, so be it.

[From the December 2023 issue: Lonnie G. Bunch III asks why America is afraid of Black history]

According to Hurst, the foundation’s board deliberately reflects a mix of political views and professional backgrounds; Carly Fiorina, who ran for president in 2016 as a Republican, serves as chair. Interpreters are careful not to give contemporary political opinions when interacting with the public, and to ground their commentary in the historical record. “We’re not trying to convince them of anything,” Hurst said. “We’re teaching them American history.” Mostly, visitors are grateful. “What we hear most often, and we hear it again and again, is ‘I had no idea. Thank you for doing this.’ ”

The goal, Hurst said, is “to tell you everything that happened—the good and the bad.” But of course that isn’t as simple as it sounds.

“So my nephews were shocked to hear that you owned slaves,” a woman behind me said to the man playing Thomas Jefferson. How, she asked, could this Founding Father have held people in bondage—more than 600 over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children—while proclaiming that all men were created equal?

Beneath a canopy of white oaks and red maples, “Jefferson” stood onstage in a knee-length navy-blue coat and a black tricorn hat. He leaned forward with both hands on his cane to make eye contact with the woman’s 5-year-old nephew, Nathan. “Is that the question, young friend?” Nathan nodded.

The actor, Kurt Smith, straightened up. “The truth is, I grew up in one world,” he said as Jefferson, extending his left arm, “and I’m hoping to create another”—here he extended his right arm. He explained that when his father died, he, as the eldest male, had inherited everything, including his father’s enslaved property. “This is a strange thing,” he said, “to be 14 years of age and own people.” His voice became softer. “I grew up with them. I grew up in that society. And yet, in ’76 we had the opportunity to convert what we grew up with, what we literally inherited, and ask ourselves, Can we do something else? Can we do something better? Can we create a society that is different from the one that we inherited? ” Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, of course, failed to rid the nation of its original sin; in many ways, they actively codified it.

Earlier, during Jefferson’s monologue, Smith had posed another rhetorical question. “We have asked ourselves an audacious question in 1776—is mankind ready to self-govern?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” a woman said from the back row. Some in the audience laughed nervously. Others shook their head.

A few hours later, I met Smith, who was still in costume, under the shade of an oak tree behind Wetherburn’s Tavern, a popular gathering place in Williamsburg in the 1750s. It was swelteringly hot and humid, and sweat rolled down both of our faces. “Can I take this thing off?” Smith asked, pointing to his wig. He fanned himself with his tricorn hat. Even when he was out of character, his voice carried the melodic cadence of theatrical performance, as if he was always within a moment of transitioning into song or soliloquy.

Smith started playing Jefferson nearly 10 years ago, and is one of two people in the world who play the role full-time. (The other, Bill Barker—who plays an older Jefferson—worked at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years before moving to Monticello in 2019.) His job involves research as well as acting: Smith told me he’s read tens of thousands of documents written by Jefferson. The day we met, he had just come back from the Huntington’s library in San Marino, California, which has an extensive collection of the third president’s letters.

Smith often does a presentation on the contentious election of 1800, in which Federalists in the House of Representatives, faced with a choice between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, two Democratic Republicans, began plotting how they might steal the election, preventing either candidate from being elected by appointing someone of their choice. After January 6, 2021, Smith said, people would ask, Are you trying to say something? “And the truth is, no. This is just what’s in Jefferson’s life.”

During his tenure, which has included two Trump presidencies, COVID‑19, and the murder of George Floyd, Smith has encountered visitors from all across the political spectrum. Most audiences, he said, ask about Jefferson’s slave ownership. Some people think that Jefferson has been unjustly castigated by the woke mob, while others see him as an indefensible monster. “I had someone right down the street put his finger in my chest,” Smith told me. “He said, ‘You are America’s original sin.’ ” Another time, a man stood up in the middle of Smith’s performance and yelled, “Why do you hate white people?”

“I think in many ways, our job here is just to provide a place where we can talk about ourselves,” Smith said. As visitors learn America’s founding story, he believes, they inevitably make connections to the present, and think about the ways America is moving closer to, or away from, what is laid out in its aspirational documents. “It’s safer to talk about them”—colonial Americans—“even though we’re actually talking about us.”

Stephen Seals grabbed his wide-brimmed straw hat to stop it from blowing away. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his brown waistcoat. Seals, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for 17 years, portrays James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved man who served in the Continental Army. He estimates that he has performed as James Lafayette more than 1,000 times.

Many Black people would find the idea of playing an enslaved person at a public historical site emotionally taxing or simply humiliating, and Colonial Williamsburg has always had a difficult time finding actors to fill those roles. I myself was uneasy when I realized that Seals would be doing a first-person interpretation of an enslaved man. I worried, in part, that he would try to use an exaggerated 18th-century Black vernacular in a way that can render enslaved people as caricatures and obscure their humanity and intellect.

But Seals doesn’t use dialect; he wants the audience to focus less on how he’s speaking and more on James Lafayette’s story. Born on a Virginia plantation, James was enslaved by William Armistead, an ardent Patriot who allowed him to enlist in the Continental Army. James may have done this hoping his service would be rewarded with freedom. He soon began working for the Marquis de Lafayette as a spy: Pretending to be a runaway slave, he crossed British lines, pledged his allegiance to the redcoats, and became a courier on their behalf. During the remainder of the Revolutionary War, James operated as a double agent, sharing important tactical and operational information with the Americans and feeding British officials false information about American military plans. Many historians credit his espionage with helping American and French forces defeat the British during the siege of Yorktown, which effectively ended the war. In 1787, James was granted his freedom by the Virginia Assembly, in part thanks to Lafayette’s personal advocacy. After he was emancipated, he chose to adopt Lafayette as his last name.

Seals is constantly reading new documents that historians have discovered and refining his presentation, and he keeps in touch with James Lafayette’s descendants. He finds it particularly gratifying when people tell him that he’s helped them understand enslavement, and the revolution itself, in new ways. Growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, and later Richmond, Virginia, Seals attended predominantly white schools that he said mostly overlooked the role of Black Americans in their curriculum, except during February. “I don’t want any Black kids coming to a historic site and not seeing themselves reflected in their history like I did,” he told me. “Because it made me worry that maybe there was no place for me in this country.”

We stood together outside the Williamsburg Bray School, one of the first schools in America created to educate Black students. Ann Wager, the founding teacher, opened the school in 1760 with the aim of using it to convince hundreds of Black children between the ages of 3 and 10 that their position at the bottom of the social hierarchy was a natural one, ordained by God, and that, as such, they should be “obedient to their masters.” The school closed in 1774, after Wager died, and is the oldest remaining 18th-century structure in which Black children were educated. After undergoing an extensive renovation and relocation, it was reopened to the public this summer as a new exhibit in Colonial Williamsburg.

To Seals, the site is a moving testament to the creativity, ingenuity, and resilience of Black people in 18th-century Williamsburg. Even though the school’s intent was to use education to indoctrinate Black students about their own inferiority, he said, many of them used the education they received, specifically the ability to read, to more fully imagine a future where freedom was possible, and to advocate for it. (This was before white Virginians made it illegal, in 1831, to teach an enslaved person how to read.)

Seals never planned to remain at Colonial Williamsburg for this long, but he hadn’t anticipated how fulfilling he would find it to talk about slavery every day. Discussing it made him emotional. “I’m realizing just how powerful what I’ve been able to do over the last 17 years has been, and how much of an honor it is to give a voice to the ancestors after all this time.”

Not every Black person working at Colonial Williamsburg has had such a straightforwardly positive experience. For Janice Canaday, who has worked at the site in various capacities for 22 years, it’s been far more complicated.

Canaday attends and serves on the board of the same nearby church to which her relatives belonged generations ago. It traces its origins to the American Revolution, when a small group of free and enslaved Black worshippers began gathering on plantations near Williamsburg. They were led by an enslaved tavern worker and minister, Gowan Pamphlet, and in the early 19th century, they built the First Baptist Church on land that a local businessman had offered them. The project came with enormous risks: Virginia law prevented Black people from assembling freely, out of fear that such a gathering could lead to revolt.

After the church was destroyed by a tornado, congregants built another, larger structure in 1856. They would continue to worship there for a century, until they relocated again; Colonial Williamsburg bought the second church building in 1956 and subsequently demolished it. This was consistent with how Colonial Williamsburg had approached its relationship to the Black community throughout the early-to-mid-20th century. As Colonial Williamsburg expanded, Black people were bought out, pushed out, and left out.

In September 2020, a few months after nationwide protests erupted following George Floyd’s murder, Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeology department began to excavate the original church site, in consultation with the local Black community. Below what had become a parking lot, they discovered pieces of the original church building, as well as a cemetery that held the remains of more than 60 of the congregation’s members.

I met Canaday, who is 68, at the excavation site this summer. “The history’s bubbling up out of the ground,” she said. Colonial Williamsburg is one of the largest employers in the area, and Canaday told me it had been a part of her life for as long as she can remember: “Everybody in my family worked at Colonial Williamsburg.” Her 91-year-old sister worked there for nearly 50 years. Her grandfather worked at Colonial Williamsburg in the 1940s. Each of her six children has worked there; one son started as a junior interpreter when he was 5. Today he drives a carriage bringing visitors around the grounds.

Canaday is the first person to serve as Colonial Williamsburg’s engagement manager for the African American community. But as a young person, Canaday did not feel a connection to the site. “I never saw myself in the story,” she said. “I can’t tell you how depressing that was.”

When she first applied to work there as a teenager, she told me, she was offered a job as a maid. She refused the job, seeing it as a symptom of what many in the local Black community perceived to be a flattening of their historical contributions. A local Black minister once suggested that Colonial Williamsburg was trying to bring back “slavery times.” Canaday told me that some Black people in Williamsburg still feel this way, and tell her she shouldn’t be working there.

But Canaday believes that, today, Colonial Williamsburg does a better job of telling the truth about its whole history, even if some visitors aren’t always receptive to what they hear. “It depends on where they come from and how they grew up—what their grandma and granddaddy told them. Because when you tell our story”—she brought her index finger to her chest—“you’re really shaking the foundation of other people’s stories.”

[From the August 2019 issue: Drew Gilpin Faust on race and history in Virginia]

The way people react to this foundation-shaking has contributed to the difficulty Colonial Williamsburg has had in hiring and retaining Black interpreters. “You can ask any of the Black interpreters here—every week, somebody is going to remind you of who you are,” she told me. Not long ago, Canaday was taunted by a group of teenage boys wearing MAGA hats. In what seemed like an attempt to goad her, they asked her how she felt about the hats. “It’s on your head; it’s not on mine,” she responded. When they realized they could not provoke her, the boys lost interest and moved on.

For Canaday, the provocations and insults she’s heard from visitors are reminiscent of her experiences being called the N-word while she was growing up in Williamsburg. Her mother would try to comfort her by telling her that eventually these people would all die off and things would get better. But Canaday doesn’t see it that way. “People die, but the idea doesn’t,” she said.

This notion, of history continuing to reverberate across generations, is central to understanding the fight taking place at historical sites across the country: The Trump administration’s attempt to reshape what is taught in museums and classrooms is fundamentally an attempt to obscure the relationship between the past and the present. It is not so much that proponents of “patriotic education” want to end any discussion of slavery because they don’t believe it happened, but more that they don’t want people to see how slavery continues to shape social inequality in America today.

[Clint Smith: The meaning of Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian]

Colonial Williamsburg’s commitment to evidence-based public history helps visitors see the relationship between the past and the present, and discover that the story of America is perhaps more complex than their textbooks had them believe. America’s founding history, the site shows, is the story of both the Marquis de Lafayette’s fight for American liberty and James Lafayette’s petition for his freedom. It is the story of Patrick Henry’s Governor’s Palace and of Gowan Pamphlet’s demolished church. It is the story of enslaved children being taught to read the Bible to make them more subservient, but instead using what they learned to forge a deeper connection to freedom. It is what Jefferson said, and it is what Jefferson did.

Canaday told me about a teacher who brought her students to Williamsburg on a field trip a few years earlier. After Canaday told the group about the experiences of Black people in Colonial Williamsburg, both historically and in the present, the teacher became upset, Canaday said, and began yelling at her, saying she disagreed with Canaday’s interpretation. To Canaday, she seemed like an example of someone whose ideas would never change. But two years later, the teacher wrote to Canaday and apologized, admitting that she had been wrong. This is why Canaday believes that it is important to continue pushing Williamsburg to embrace the contradictions of American history.

“We don’t always get to see what we plant,” Canaday said, nodding to a large oak to our right. “But that doesn’t mean that something doesn’t bloom.”

This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Just How Real Should Colonial Williamsburg Be?” It originally stated that Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry once lived in the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg. In fact, the residence at Colonial Williamsburg is a reconstruction of the original building.

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad

2025-08-22T10:00:00-04:00

In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”

After reading his post, I thought of the historian Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian—the first Black person to lead the institution since its founding in 1846—and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his 2016 speech at the grand opening of the museum, Bunch thanked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their support. “We are at this moment because of the backing of the United States Congress and the White House,” he said, turning to them both onstage. It’s sobering to consider how different things are today.

Bunch has been fighting efforts by the Trump administration to bring the Smithsonian into conformity with the MAGA vision of American history, and people familiar with his views say he is committed to protecting the intellectual integrity and independence of the Smithsonian. But how much longer, given Trump’s ever more antagonistic position, will Bunch be able to withstand the presidential pressure? On Truth Social, Trump said he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.” A recent letter to the Smithsonian from the White House states that the review will be completed and a final report issued by early 2026, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”

Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.

In 2021, I published a book about how we remember slavery. I have spent years reading the first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people discussing the myriad horrors they endured—the journey across the Middle Passage, the abuse, the sexual violence, the psychological terror, the family separations. It is worth taking the time, in light of the president’s recent words, to revisit some of these accounts.

[Adam Serwer: The new dark age]

In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. His book was one of the first autobiographies ever published by a formerly enslaved person, and it laid the groundwork for a new genre of literature that would transform what people around the world understood about slavery. Equiano had been kidnapped from what is now Nigeria and marched for several months to the coast of West Africa. One of the most devastating scenes in his book describes the sadism of the Middle Passage:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

The conditions were so bad, he writes, that some of the captives flung themselves overboard:

One day, when we had a smooth sea, and a moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew.

Once they arrived on American shores, men, women, and children were forced onto auction blocks where families were broken apart. Once separated, most would never see one another again.

Henry Bibb, born enslaved in Kentucky, writes in his 1849 memoir:

After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was sacrificed to the highest bidder.

When the captives arrived at the home or plantation of their enslaver, many of them were forced to work in sweltering fields with hardly any respite. Their days began early. Austin Steward, born enslaved in Virginia, writes in his 1857 book:

It was the rule for the slaves to rise and be ready for their task by sun-rise, on the blowing of a horn or conch-shell; and woe be to the unfortunate, who was not in the field at the time appointed, which was in thirty minutes from the first sounding of the horn. I have heard the poor creatures beg as for their lives, of the inhuman overseer, to desist from his cruel punishment.

On the plantation, enslaved people were denied any physical autonomy, and were subjected to torturous, and often arbitrary, violence at the hands of overseers and enslavers. As William Coleman, born in Tennessee around 1853, recalled as part of an interview for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s:

I’se seen the slaves whipped for nothing, but then if they did do something to be whipped for they were almost killed before Maser would quit working on them … One time one of the slaves was helping Mistress there in the yard and he passed too close to her as he was hurrying fast as he could, and sort of bumped into her. She never paid him no attention, but Maser saw him and he let him go on ahead and finish what he was doing then he called that poor negro to him and took him out in the pasture, tied his hands together, throwed the other end of the rope over a limb on a tree and pulled that negro’s hands up in the air to where that negro had to stand on his tiptoes, and Maser he took all that negro’s clothes off and whipped him with that rawhide whip until that negro was plum bloody all over. Then he left that poor negro tied there all the rest of the day and night.

Enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to insidious and unrelenting sexual violence at the hands of their enslavers. In his 1857 book, William Anderson, born enslaved in Virginia, describes this:

My master often went to the house, got drunk, and then came out to the field to whip, cut, slash, curse, swear, beat and knock down several, for the smallest offense, or nothing at all.

He divested a poor female slave of all wearing apparel, tied her down to stakes, and whipped her with a handsaw until he broke it over her naked body. In process of time he ravished her person and became the father of a child by her.

The constant threat of such violence took an immense psychological toll on those who were subjected to it. Harriet Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, writes in her 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things … The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe … My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.

The consequences of being caught in an attempted escape were so severe that most enslaved people never dared try. In Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, he describes watching what happened to an enslaved man who ran away and then was captured several weeks later:

Wiley was stripped, and compelled to endure one of those inhuman floggings to which the poor slave is so often subjected. It was the first and last attempt of Wiley to run away. The long scars upon his back, which he will carry with him to the grave, perpetually remind him of the dangers of such a step.

Even after slavery was formally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the pain the institution wrought on the country’s 4 million freedmen and freedwomen continued to reverberate. Throughout the late 19th century, newly emancipated Black people used newspapers to try to locate family members they had been separated from many years before. The Christian Recorder published this ad following the war in 1865:

INFORMATION WANTED

Of my mother and father, Caroline and Issac Denna; also, my sisters, Fanny, Jane and Betsy Denna, and my brothers, Robert R., Hugh Henry, and Philander Denna. We were born in Fauquier Co, Va. In 1849 they were taken from the plantation of Josiah Lidbaugh, in said county, and carried to Winchester to be sold. About the same time I left my home in Clark Co, and have not heard from them since. The different ministers of Christian churches will do a favor by announcing the above, and any information will be gladly received by GEO. HENRY DENNA, Galva, Henry Co.

For many, the search meant trying to find someone they hadn’t seen for decades. Nancy Jones published this ad in 1886, more than 30 years after she had last seen her son:

INFORMATION WANTED of my son, Allen Jones. He left me before the war, in Mississippi. He wrote me a letter in 1853 in which letter he said that he was sold to the highest bidder, a gentleman in Charleston, S.C. Nancy Jones, his mother, would like to know the whereabouts of the above named person.

Whether mother and son were ever reunited is unknown.

None of us can imagine what it is like to be subjected to the unremitting physical, psychological, and social violence of chattel slavery. But museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture bring us closer to being able to do so by sharing first-person accounts of those who lived through that terrible violence. At these museums, we see the garments enslaved people wore, the tools they used, the structures in which they lived. We see their faces; we hear their voices.

[Clint Smith: Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination’]

The NMAAHC, in particular, is unflinching in its characterization of slavery as an unequivocally evil system, one whose impact continues to be felt across our society. In 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. Today, although they make up 14 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Still, the museum also makes clear that the Black American experience is not singularly defined by slavery, but also by the art, literature, and cultural traditions that have emerged from, and in spite of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These are not mutually exclusive, and the NMAAHC understands that Americans should learn about both.

And yet the MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves. But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of? What other way is there to become the version of ourselves that we aspire to be?

The Trump administration is, in both public discourse and public policy, arguably the most racist presidential administration in modern American history. Each week seems to bring a new example of its bigotry. I am sometimes tempted, upon encountering yet another instance of this omnipresent racial antagonism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet, we must write it down, if for nothing else, then for the sake of those who will come after us. I think of Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the monstrousness of slavery even when the idea of abolition seemed preposterous to most Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about how the nation must hold on to the values of Reconstruction long after federal soldiers marched out of the former Confederacy and abandoned Black southerners. Ida B. Wells wrote about the lynchings taking place throughout the South even as fresh bodies were still swinging from the trees. Their words were essential because they remind us that some Americans did bear witness to, and stand against, these atrocities.

This is part of the reality of Black life in this country: We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.

Twenty Years After the Storm

2025-08-08T08:00:00-04:00

The scene before me appeared and disappeared and reappeared again with every breath I took, the hot air from my lungs fogging the gas mask that fit snugly over my face. My mother, father, and little sister stood in front of me wearing hazmat suits. It was October 2005, and we’d been among the first in Gentilly, our New Orleans neighborhood, to receive permission to return to our home after Hurricane Katrina. I was nervous. Gentilly had sat beneath up to eight feet of water for weeks. I didn’t know what I would see, or how I would feel.

Our neighborhood had never been this quiet before. There had always been kids riding bikes, or someone playing music from their car or their front porch or their shoulder with a bass line that made the street vibrate. There had always been the sound of a basketball colliding with concrete as boys went in search of a court and a hoop and a game. Squirrels had always scurried through trees, where birds sang. Now there were no birds, no balls, no squirrels, no bikes. Only an eerie silence.

A silver car with clouded windows had crashed into the trunk of the old oak tree in front of our home, its hood bent into a crooked crescent. Branches from that old oak—some as thick as bodies—were scattered across the street and the yard. On the boarded-up window next to our door was a spray-painted orange X, a symbol used by search-and-rescue teams that could be seen throughout New Orleans in the days and weeks after the storm. Each quadrant of the X had a different number. The top quadrant showed the time and date the house had been searched; the left one identified which team had conducted the search; the right indicated any hazards found inside; and the bottom was for the number of people, dead or alive, found there. Our bottom quadrant read “0,” but I am still haunted by the orange spray paint on homes we passed that said something else.

The search-and-rescue team had smashed the glass next to our door in order to open it. It remained ajar. As we entered the house, the smell bombarded us, indifferent to our masks. I had never encountered anything so pungent in my life; it physically knocked me back beyond the doorframe.

[Listen: Floodlines, the story of an unnatural disaster]

When I stepped inside again, I saw that the walls were covered with mold. Blue-green spores were everywhere. The floorboards were warped; some had come loose. The refrigerator door hung open, rotten food spilling out. The television in the living room was face down on the floor. My mother’s wedding dress, which had been designed and sewed by a local seamstress who had made dresses for generations of Black New Orleans women, lay ruined on the floor beneath the stairwell. A kitchen stool hung by one of its legs from the chandelier in our dining room, but the dining-room table was no longer there. The rising water had lifted it up and carried it into our living room.

As the house flooded, rising water carried the
dining-room table into the living room. (Courtesy of Clint Smith)

We found the mahogany table misshapen, but upright. Sitting on top of it was a glass-domed cake stand with part of a birthday cake still inside, a time capsule unaltered by the destruction around it. Twenty years later, the cake is the thing I remember most clearly.

I have never been much of a cake person. I don’t have a sweet tooth, and I hate chocolate. But I made an exception for the vanilla-almond cake with pineapple filling from Adrian’s, the bakery just down the street. I loved the sweetness of the frosting; the soft, slight crumb of the cake; and the candied viscosity of the filling. My parents got it for my birthday every year, and even now, the taste of it makes me feel like a child again.

On August 25, 2005, I celebrated my 17th birthday by eating a substantial slice (or two) of this cake with my family before heading out with my friends to see a movie. When my mother placed the leftover cake inside the dome, we didn’t know that it would stay there for weeks.

Evacuating was not new for us. It was practically a routine: The meteorologists would warn residents about a storm. We would pack some duffel bags with a few days’ worth of clothes, board up our windows, put gas in our car, and drive to Jackson or Baton Rouge or Houston until the storm passed. Then we would come home, pick up a few branches, remove the boards from our windows, and continue on with life as it was before. In 2004, my family had evacuated to Houston ahead of Hurricane Ivan, sitting in 20 hours of traffic for what was typically a five-to-six-hour trip. We’d stayed with my aunt and uncle until the storm passed.

The relative normalcy of hurricanes made many in New Orleans feel as if evacuating wasn’t worth it. Some would decide to stay home and ride out the storm; some didn’t have the ability or means to leave even if they wanted to. We had been told so many times that this storm would be different, only for it not to be. But this time it was.

For Smith (pictured here on his 15th birthday, in 2003), eating vanilla-almond cake from a local bakery was an annual tradition. (Courtesy of Clint Smith)

On August 28, just before 9:30 a.m., Mayor Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order for every resident of New Orleans, the first in the city’s history. By then, my family and I were already gone. My father recalls waking up at 2 a.m. the morning of August 27 with a feeling of unease. He’d turned on the TV and seen that meteorologists were predicting that Katrina would develop into a Category 5 hurricane—the highest category possible for a storm. And so we packed the bags, secured the windows, and filled the car with gas. My father told me to grab our photo albums off the shelf and put them in thick garbage bags. This, we had not done before. We did the same with pieces of art from our walls, paintings by local Black artists that my parents had collected over the decades. We left the bags in my parents’ second-floor bedroom.

Finally, we got into our car. That night, we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s home outside Houston. For the next several days, I watched nonstop coverage on CNN. I saw people begging for help from rooftops. I saw people wading through shoulder-deep sewer water to reach higher ground, pushing their children in ice chests. I saw footage of floating bodies. I saw homes just a few blocks from mine that were completely submerged. I knew then what had happened to mine.

[Read: The problem with ‘move to higher ground’]

After a few days of sitting on the couch in a catatonic state, I got a call from the soccer coach at Davidson College, in North Carolina. I was being recruited by a few different Division I schools, and Davidson’s coach asked if I’d like to make my official recruiting visit to the school now, as a distraction. I said I would, and my father and I boarded a plane.

At Davidson, I watched the soccer team’s thrilling overtime victory against a local rival, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I attended a political-science class on the history of the presidency, went to my first college party, and experienced the specific joy of getting late-night wings and quesadillas from the student union. At the end of my visit, I told my dad that I knew where I wanted to go. I committed to Davidson the same day. I realize now, looking back, that I decided on Davidson so quickly because I needed an anchor. I didn’t know where I would be going to high school the next week, but at least I knew where I would be going to college next year.

My sister and I ended up staying in Texas for the entire school year, living with my aunt and uncle after my parents returned to New Orleans in January for their jobs, bringing my younger brother with them. They lived with my grandfather in one of the few areas that had not flooded. That fall, I went to Davidson and my family moved into a new house, one that I was grateful for, but one that never felt quite like mine.

One of the walls in our old family room was covered with mirrors, and as kids, every time my brother, my sister, and I stepped into the room, it felt as if that mirror-lined wall was beckoning us to dance. So dance we did, as numerous home videos attest—bobbing gleefully in our striped hand-me-down Hanna Andersson pajamas to the sound of my dad’s records and CDs. As the trumpets from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Let’s Groove” blared from the speakers, we would start jumping like the floor was covered in lava, and we would spin like a band of small, graceless tornadoes while my father laughed behind the camcorder.

My father had been collecting records since he was in high school, in the ’70s. He had hundreds—artists such as Chaka Khan, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, Grover Washington Jr., Miles Davis, and John Coltrane—stored in the family room’s floor-level cabinets. But amid the haste and chaos of our departure from New Orleans, we hadn’t had time to move them, and when we returned in October, we found the collection destroyed.

The songs we danced to are still available, of course; these days, we can stream them anytime we want. But the albums themselves were artifacts, a tactile manifestation of all those happy memories—and they were irreplaceable.

This year, I went home to New Orleans at the end of June, as I do every summer. I bring my children, because I want them to feel a connection to the city that shaped who I am. Recently, each time I’ve arrived at my parents’ house, I’ve been struck by the fact that they have now lived there for longer than we lived in the home I grew up in. The realization defies my sense of time and language; I’ve referred to this place as “the new house” for the past 20 years.

One rainy afternoon, while my kids were out with their grandparents, I drove down my old street and stopped in front of my childhood home. A new family had eventually moved in, after the house was gutted. There were new windows, new fences, new walls. The red brick facade had been painted white. The old oak tree was still there on the front lawn, its branches extending farther over the street, its trunk having grown darker and thicker with time. The birds had returned, as had the squirrels. People walked their dogs. Two girls threw a softball back and forth.

Although most of the homes in our neighborhood had been torn down and rebuilt, the house across the street from ours looked largely the same as it had when I was a child—except for the two canoes and the kayak conspicuously tied to its roof, as if its inhabitants were preparing for the next disaster.

I then drove to Adrian’s, which had also moved after the storm. There, I was met by the smell of glazed doughnuts and fresh cinnamon rolls. White cakes gleamed from within glass display cases. Sitting on top of the glass were individual slices of cake wrapped in plastic. I walked closer and saw golden pineapple filling seeping out from between layers of sponge. I bought three pieces.

Back at my parents’ house, I opened a cabinet and took out our family photographs.

I’ve always felt thankful that the photo albums and art survived the storm. I tried to imagine what it might be like to no longer have access to these images: the birthdays, the graduations, the baptisms. The beach days, the camping trips, the lazy Sunday afternoons. My father and me flying a kite on a windy day at the lake, his hat turned backwards and his sunglasses glimmering; my mother and me on Easter morning when I was 3 years old, she in a beautiful blue dress and me in a red bow tie and brown brimmed hat; my sixth-birthday party, my face painted like a tiger, looking down at the thick slice of vanilla-almond cake on the table in front of me.

Alongside the albums sat a ziplock bag of other images—photos we took of our home when we returned to examine the damage after the storm. As I spread them out across the dining-room table, I was brought back to that day—the wretched smell, the buckled floorboards, the fungus-laden walls.

I removed the Saran Wrap covering one slice of cake and sank my fork into it, attempting to capture the sponge, the frosting, and the filling in a single bite. It was as good as I remembered it being, and I ate with such abandon that I dropped some frosting onto the photos in front of me. When I moved an album to clean it off, I noticed an image in the Katrina pile that I hadn’t seen before: an old clock that hung above the doorframe in our kitchen, its hands frozen in place. It looked as though it had spores spilling out of it.

An old clock above the kitchen doorframe at Smith’s childhood home (Courtesy of Clint Smith)

When you talk with people in, or from, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina is often the way by which we demarcate time. When attempting to recall an event, a moment, or an experience, someone will ask “Was it before or after the storm?” For many of us, that demarcation also reflects our physical relationship to the city—it is a question that often means Was that before or after I was forced to leave my home? Because I was a senior in high school when Katrina made landfall and because I finished school in another state, I never lived in New Orleans again. When I came back home for the holidays, I would stay on a pullout couch in the guest room.

Sometimes I think of what that year could have been had Katrina never happened. What it would have been like to be the captain of my soccer team during my final high-school season. What it would have been like to attend homecoming and prom with friends who had known me since I was a toddler. And what it would be like now to bring my children back to the house that I grew up in.

But I still have my memories of growing up in a city unlike any other in the world—a city that some said should not have been rebuilt. Twenty years later, New Orleans is still here. I’m able to make new memories with my own children: taking them to Saints games in the Superdome, as my father took me. Playing with them on the trees in City Park, the way my mother did with me. Eating the cake I loved from Adrian’s at my parents’ dining-room table—even when their taste buds don’t match up with my nostalgia. My daughter said she wished the cake were chocolate. My son prefers ice cream.

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Going Back.”

How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing

2025-06-24T09:30:00-04:00

In the summer of 2008, I was 19 years old, halfway through college, and an aspiring poet with a notebook full of earnest stanzas of questionable quality. I loved writing. I loved literature. As I considered what sort of career might suit me, I became curious about the life of a book editor. So I made my way to New York City for an internship I had received at a major publishing house. Joining me were four other interns—two Black women and two Asian women. The idea was to open industry doors to students from backgrounds underrepresented in the field.

I felt primed for the experience, fresh from a transformative college course that introduced me to the history of Black American letters, anchored by The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Published in 1996 by W. W. Norton and edited by the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, the book traversed three centuries of writing, from the Negro spirituals of the 18th century to the poetry and prose of the late 20th century. This was the volume, many said, that had assembled and indexed a Black American literary canon for the first time. Toward the anthology’s close, I found myself spellbound by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula, and intrigued by a single line in her biography: Not long after she published her first novel, “Morrison became a senior editor at Random House.”

I’d never known that Morrison had straddled the line between writer and editor. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t envisioned that someone could do both jobs at once, especially a writer of Morrison’s caliber. And I didn’t know then how many of the writers who surrounded her in the Norton volume—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Leon Forrest, Toni Cade Bambara—as well as figures beyond the anthology, such as Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton, had relied on Morrison to usher their books into the world. I certainly did not appreciate how dynamic—and complicated—both the art and the business of those collaborations had been for her.

Now readers can discover Morrison the bold and dogged editor, thanks to a deeply researched and illuminating new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams, a scholar of African American literature and the dean of Howard University Graduate School. Decades of path-clearing and advocacy had preceded the Norton anthology, and Morrison, as the first Black woman to hold a senior editor position at the prominent publishing house, had played a major part. In a 2022 interview, Gates remarked that Random House’s hiring of Morrison, at the height of the civil-rights movement, was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.”

A pronouncement like that runs the risk of hyperbole, but Williams’s meticulous and intimate account of Morrison’s editorial tenure backs up the rhetoric. How Morrison handled the pressures of wielding her one-of-a-kind influence is fascinating—and, in retrospect, telling: As an editor, she was not just tenacious, but also always aware of how tenuous progress in the field could be. And it still can be: The recent departures of prominent Black editors and executives who helped diversify publishing’s ranks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are a stark reminder of that.

Morrison and her colleague Errol McDonald at Random House (Jill Krementz)

Morrison’s arrival at Random House in the late 1960s, a fraught and fertile moment, was well timed, though her route there wasn’t direct. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931 in the midwestern steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to parents who, like so many millions of Black Americans in that era, had fled the racial violence of the South in search of safety and economic opportunities farther north. They recognized their daughter’s brilliance early (as did teachers) and began scraping together money to make college possible. Morrison went to Howard, majoring in English, minoring in classics, and throwing herself into theater. After getting a master’s degree in American literature from Cornell University and teaching at Texas Southern University, she went back to Howard in 1957 and spent seven years in the English department. She joined a writing group, whose members loved some pages she shared about a young Black girl who wishes her eyes were blue—the seeds of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye.

Morrison also married, had a child, and divorced, before returning home to Ohio in 1964, pregnant and in search of a new start. One day not long after, three copies of the same issue of The New York Review of Books were accidentally delivered, carrying an ad for an executive-editor job at a small textbook publisher in Syracuse that had recently been acquired by Random House. Morrison’s mother said the mistake was a sign that she should apply. Morrison’s first novel was still several years off, and she needed a steady job that would allow her to focus on her writing in the evenings. She was hired and spent a few years at the publisher before it was fully absorbed by Random House, one of whose top executives had been struck by her intellect and editorial adroitness. She was soon offered a job as an editor on the trade, or general interest, side. She accepted.

Amid racial upheaval and widespread student protests, Black studies and African studies were on the rise, transforming how the history, literature, and culture of the Black diaspora were taught. “I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,” Morrison later said. “But that couldn’t last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.”

[Read: Has the DEI backlash come for publishing?]

Her galvanizing insight as an editor was that “a good writer,” as Williams puts it, “could show the foolishness of racism,” as well as the many facets of Black life, “without talking to or about white people at all.” Morrison came to appreciate the power of directly exploring the inner and outer dimensions of Black life as she edited two groundbreaking anthologies: one that brought together some of the best African fiction writers, poets, and essayists, Contemporary African Literature, and another called The Black Book, which documented Black American history and daily experience through archival documents, cultural artifacts, and photographs. A frustration with the focus she found in the work of some homegrown Black writers also shaped her thinking. As she said later,

I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers—men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by—I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?

Morrison recognized, Williams writes, that this “editorial aesthetic” of hers made her work harder. Famous for giving its editors unusual freedom, Random House was all for unearthing new writers and creating a new readership. Still, reaching a general audience remained a trade publisher’s mandate. A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, “We can’t sell books on both sides of the street”: There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn’t merge. “Well, I’ll just solve that,” Morrison decided. She was determined to “do something that everybody loves” without losing sight of her commitment to Black readers.

To pull off that feat, Morrison’s mode was to be relentlessly demanding—of herself, her authors, and her Random House colleagues. She tailored her rigorous style to the varied array of Black writers she didn’t hesitate to pitch to her bosses. But whether she was editing her high-profile nonfiction authors—Newton, the Black Panther leader, and others—or largely unknown and highly unconventional fiction writers, among them Gayl Jones, her protective impulse stands out.

Angela Davis and Toni Morrison in New York City (Jill Krementz)

As they worked on their books with Morrison, Newton as well as the activist Davis resisted the pressure to lean into the sort of personal reflections the public was curious about, and she supported them, while insisting that their thinking be clearly laid out. For Newton’s 1972 collection of writings, To Die for the People, that meant tossing weak early essays and reediting the rest, even those that had already been published. But her aim was not to present his ideas “all smoothed out,” Williams writes. Morrison emphasized that “contradictions are useful” in accurately tracing the evolution of the Black Panther Party away from a focus on armed revolution and toward the goal of creating social infrastructure within communities, offering programs such as free breakfast for students. She felt that a reflective Newton should emerge from the book’s pages. Aware of the public narrative that positioned the Panthers as unhinged, violent racial nationalists, Morrison encouraged him to describe “what he believes are errors in judgment in the Party line behavior.”

She worked more intimately with Davis, whom she sought out right after Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy (resulting from a courthouse raid in which guns that were registered to Davis were used). For a time, Davis even moved in with Morrison and her two sons, then living in Spring Valley, New York. As they progressed through what became Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), their friendship seems to have made Morrison fiercer in deflecting calls for more personal revelation (which she considered sexist code for sensational romantic-life details). She bridled at one reader’s report asking for, among other things, more signs of Davis’s “humanness” in the draft. In a memo to Random House’s editor in chief, Morrison remarked that humanness is “a word white people use when they want to alter an ‘uppity’ or ‘fearless’ ” Black person.

At the same time, she pushed Davis for more vivid storytelling, and less academic vagueness in her account of her political life, her time in prison, her trial. At one point, Morrison chided her that “humanity is a vague word in this context,” evidently referring to Davis’s discussion of incarceration:

You repeat the idea frequently throughout so it is pivotal. “Breaking will” is clear; forcing prisoners into childlike obedience is also clear; but what is erode their humanity. Their humaneness? Their natural resistance?

Morrison bore down on publicity for the book too, famous though its author already was. She secured a blurb from the well-known British leftist Jessica Mitford, who wrote about prison reform too. Still, Morrison’s commitment to Black readership was unrelenting, and Random House arranged to provide hosts of book parties for Davis in Black communities with copies at a 40 percent discount. The party conveners could sell them at regular price and keep the profit.

Morrison in 1978 (Jill Krementz)

Always on the lookout for new talent, Morrison asked friends who taught in creative-writing departments to send promising work by their students her way. In 1973, she dug into a box of manuscripts sent by the poet Michael Harper at Brown University. The writer was Gayl Jones, then in her early 20s, and Morrison was stunned by her narratively experimental prose. “This girl,” she felt, “had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise” of novel writing. Morrison, confessing that she was “green with envy,” immediately set up a meeting with Jones and soon persuaded the higher-ups at Random House to give her a book deal. She and Jones turned first to the draft of a novel titled Corregidora, which tackled the sexual exploitation of women entrapped in slavery, and its psychological and spiritual toll, in a more devastating and effective way than Morrison had ever encountered.

[From the September 2020 issue: Calvin Baker on the best American novelist whose name you may not know]

Spurred on by her fervent belief in Jones’s talent, Morrison was determined to ensure that Corregidora made an impression, well aware of how a successful debut could define a fiction writer’s career—particularly that of a Black woman fiction writer. She set exacting standards, bluntly calling Jones out when she thought she was taking shortcuts: “For example, Ursa’s song ought to be a straight narrative of childhood sexual fears,” she wrote to Jones, and went on: “May Alice and the boys—the fragments are really a cop out. You know—being too tired or impatient to write it out.” Understanding how shy Jones was, Morrison joined her for interviews and used her own literary capital (Sula had recently appeared to acclaim) to advocate for her work. “No novel about any black woman can ever be the same after this,” Morrison declared in a 1975 article in Mademoiselle.

Two years later, with the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison also saw how her stature could get in the way. “In terms of new kinds of writing, the marketplace receives only one or two Blacks,” she later lamented in an interview in Essence magazine, wishing that the books she edited and published sold as well as the ones she wrote. In 1978, after the publication of Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man, and a story collection, White Rat, Morrison’s once-close relationship with her unraveled amid mounting tensions with Jones’s partner; he had begun to represent Jones, and his behavior had become ever more erratic and aggressive.

By then, Morrison had just published a second novel by Leon Forrest, whose debut, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, had been a daunting, and thrilling, foray into novel-editing for her, back at the start of the decade. Together they had worked on an introductory section, describing the novel’s large cast of characters, not just to help readers but to orient Morrison herself as she went through the whole manuscript—and to get Random House’s editor in chief to offer Forrest a contract. With a foreword by Ralph Ellison (Morrison saw that two pages of comments he’d sent in would serve that purpose well), the novel was hailed for its risk taking and, Williams writes, for dwelling “in Blackness without reducing Blackness to an object of racism.” Though Forrest’s books lost money, Morrison’s support never wavered, and Random House, following her lead, stuck with him.

After scaling back on editing for a while, Morrison officially left Random House in 1983. She was eager to stop working on her fiction at night and “in the automobile and places like that,” she joked, and also to stop feeling “guilty that I’ve taken some time away from a full-time job.” The hard-driving editorial mission that had defined nearly two decades of Morrison’s life had never been peripheral for her—and hindsight reveals what a versatile catalyst she’d been in American literary culture. Though her departure was a boon for her own writing, it came at a cost. The number of Black authors who were published by Random House nose-dived after she left.

That probably didn’t come as a big surprise to Morrison. Seven years earlier, speaking at a conference on the past and future of Black writing in the United States, she had a message for the audience of major Black writers and critics: Don’t expect structural racism within and beyond publishing to disappear—but also don’t let that stop you. “I think that the survival of Black publishing, which to me is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on,” she said, “which is the energies of Black people—sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us. In other words, we must do our work.”

This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing.”

What It Means to Tell the Truth About America

2025-04-21T08:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Elizabeth Hays, a white woman from central North Carolina, had never been to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But earlier this month, after she read about Donald Trump’s executive order targeting the museum and others throughout the Smithsonian system, she made the nearly five-hour drive up to Washington, D.C., to visit. She was worried that if she waited any longer, she might encounter a sanitized version of the museum, or no museum at all.

She told me this in front of a display focused on contemporary manifestations of Black protest. Elisa Hill, a Black woman from Maryland, was visiting that day too. “I’m very worried about what’s going to happen here,” Hill told me, shaking her head. “Because it represents the history that we all need to know and understand. I’m just afraid that it’s going to be censored.”

I, too, had carried this concern since hearing about the executive order. I tried to contact museum officials—including Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian and the founding director of NMAAHC—but each person I reached out to was unavailable. I was not surprised by this response. Smithsonian officials no doubt fear that if they speak publicly about the executive order, then they, and the institution, might be further targeted. So instead, I made a trip to NMAAHC, hoping to talk directly with people there and take stock of what might be lost.

[Lonnie G. Bunch III: Why is America afraid of Black history?]

Every time I visit NMAAHC, the first person I think of is Ruth Odom Bonner. On September 24, 2016, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama stood alongside the 99-year-old Bonner—and three other generations of her family—to ring the bell signaling the opening of the museum to the public. Bonner’s presence that day was significant because she was the daughter of a man who was born into slavery. Not the granddaughter. Not the great-granddaughter. The woman who opened NMAAHC was the child of a man born in bondage. His name was Elijah Odom.

As a young boy, Odom and his brothers had escaped to freedom. He became a farmer, lived through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and ultimately attended and graduated from medical school, becoming the only practicing Black physician in his community of Bisco, Arkansas. Elijah Odom’s life represented the possibility that existed on the other side of slavery. In 2016, his daughter Ruth was a reminder that the history presented in the museum she helped inaugurate did not happen all that long ago.

The history inside the museum still reverberates through our country. It is impossible to understand the contemporary landscape of social, political, and economic inequality without understanding the forces and events that served as its catalysts. This is why so many have worked so hard to silence this history.

Upon my arrival at NMAAHC, I stumbled onto a tour of a new exhibit, “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” a project that places the experiences of slavery, colonialism, and freedom-making across the world in conversation with one another.

The docent leading the tour, Edward Flanagan, was a Black man who looked to be in his 80s. He wore a black long-sleeve shirt with the face of James Baldwin alongside his words: “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“The only way that slavery works is the continued public application of violence and terror,” Flanagan told the group. He laced his hands together in front of his body. “Also, race does not exist. It is a social construct made necessary by unrestrained capitalism, colonialism, and the slave trade. Those three items are going to come up again and again and again. Those are the things that have formed your world.”

Pete Kiehart / Bloomberg / Getty

This idea, that capitalism, slavery, and colonialism are the forces that have shaped our contemporary world, is central to the exhibit. And it occurred to me, listening to Flanagan, that this was the exact sort of story that Trump and many of his allies would like to excise from museums, classrooms, and every other realm of American life.

What would it mean if every American understood, as Flanagan said, that a large portion of the country’s millionaires in the mid-19th century lived along the Mississippi? Or, as he later shared, that many of our most prestigious universities established before 1865 were built using the profits of chattel slavery? These are empirical facts, not ideological ones. And as more Americans have come to understand this history, they have, appropriately, begun to question much of what they have been taught about America.

Many universities, for instance, have begun in recent years to acknowledge the ways slavery provided the capital for their infrastructure, and the fact that such infrastructure was often literally constructed by enslaved laborers. Commissions have been formed. Memorials have been erected. New courses have been offered. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that these are some of the same institutions that have been most directly targeted by Trump, who has threatened to pull federal funding from universities that engage in anything that falls under his nebulous definition of DEI. Many colleges and universities are capitulating. Some are fighting back.

[Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class?]

Perhaps the most striking part of the exhibit was the section on rebellions. Flanagan came to a map of the world with clusters of dots, most of them between the Americas and the West African coast, crossing the Atlantic like a bridge connecting the two continents. Contrary to what many believe, he explained, rebellions were a relatively common occurrence on slave ships; the dots represented those uprisings. The caption beneath the map stated that captured Africans revolted during one in 10 slave-trade voyages. “Notice the concentration along the coast of Africa,” Flanagan said. Many of these revolts, he told us, took place when the vessels were docked offshore and land was still in sight. The captives would think, “I can still see home. It’s right over there.”

Flanagan told the group the story of the Amistad, a slave ship traveling from Cuba to Long Island that became the site of an 1839 slave revolt. The captured Africans were arrested by American officials. But in 1841, the case made it to the Supreme Court, where the captives were defended by former President John Quincy Adams, and where the justices ruled in their favor, granting them their freedom and allowing them to sail back to their homeland of Sierra Leone.

Flanagan pointed to three framed images behind him—court sketches. Between the sketches was a quote from one of the rebels, a man named Sengbe, who said, “I am resolved that it is better to die than be a white man’s slave.”

A group of teenagers who had been eavesdropping on Flanagan’s presentation eventually dropped all pretense and joined the group. One young woman—with brown skin, hoop earrings, and long braids—walked up to the sketches of the kidnapped Africans, pulled out her phone, and took a picture of the sketches and the quote between them. I remembered my time as a high-school teacher and how, during discussions on slavery, so many of my Black students would ask why more enslaved people hadn’t fought back. Resistance to enslavement came in many forms, of course, oftentimes more subtle than outright rebellion. But knowing that a rebellion occurred during one-tenth of slave-trade voyages helps disabuse people, especially students, of the idea that the enslaved simply accepted the conditions that had been forced upon them—and shows that, in many cases, captured Africans resisted long before they reached the shores of the Americas.

Black resistance, Flanagan told the group, has always existed. This exhibit, and this museum more broadly, allows us to see it. It also reminds us that resistance is possible in our own time—which is exactly the sort of thing that’s led authoritarian regimes around the world to scrub examples of political resistance from classrooms, books, and the internet.

As the tour came to an end, Flanagan asked if anyone in the group had questions. A clean-shaven white man raised his hand and asked, “Sir, were you a Freedom Rider?” Flanagan smiled and nodded. “I was a Freedom Rider, yes.” The group began to murmur with surprise and admiration.

“I came here all the way from Alaska,” the man said. “May I take a picture with you?” Flanagan nodded and waved for the man to come up next to him; the man’s wife took their photograph.

After the group had dispersed, I went up to Flanagan and introduced myself. He told me that he has been volunteering as a docent at NMAAHC for the past three years but has been a fan of the museum since it opened and was a supporter even before that. “They’ve been taking my money since 2003,” he said, laughing, referencing the year George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing the creation of the museum. The process of becoming a docent, he said, was more difficult than getting either of his master’s degrees. “I had to be able to do the whole museum,” he said. The museum is also, for Flanagan, a family affair. His daughter is part of the museum’s team that coordinates educational programming.

In the 1960s, as a college student at Howard University, Flanagan traveled from Washington, D.C., to Rockville, South Carolina, challenging the enforcement of laws that prohibited integration in public transportation and facilities. He decided to become a Freedom Rider during the civil-rights movement for the same reason he decided to become a docent at NMAAHC during the Black Lives Matter movement. He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged, and said, “You gotta do something.”

I asked Flanagan what he thought about the recent executive order. He smiled. “I am told not to talk about that while I’m wearing my badge and my lanyard,” he said. Then his face became more sober. “What I will say is that as a docent, I would like to tell, as John Hope Franklin says, the unvarnished truth. And one of the things we strive to do is tell the real story.”

What Flanagan understands is that the real story of America includes the story of slavery. He looked around at all the people walking through the exhibit. The elders. The students. The families. “I love this museum,” he said. “They’ll have to beat me away with a stick.”

Chris Carmichael / The New York Times / Redux

In his March 27 executive order, President Trump directed Vice President J. D. Vance to “remove improper ideology” from NMAAHC and other Smithsonian museums. As I walked around the museum, I wondered which of these exhibits would fall under that rubric. What does it mean for something to be improper if the administration’s understanding of what is acceptable excludes anything that might make white Americans feel bad? Is the statue of Thomas Jefferson surrounded by bricks inscribed with the names of people he enslaved improper? Is a slave cabin that once sat on the grounds of a plantation in South Carolina improper? Are the shackles that were once locked around the feet of enslaved children improper? Is Harriet Tubman’s silk shawl improper? Is Nat Turner’s Bible improper? Is Emmett Till’s casket improper? Are the photographs of men and women who were lynched as white audiences looked on improper?

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is not a place that traffics in improper ideology. It is a museum that recognizes that America has been suffused with improper ideologies for most of its history: ideologies that ignore the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding. Ideologies that tell us the Civil War was simply about states’ rights. Ideologies that call Reconstruction a failure rather than a campaign that was actively destroyed. Ideologies that excise the important role of queer and female activists during the civil-rights movement. Ideologies that ignore the connections between racism and incarceration. Ideologies that tell Americans that the contemporary landscape of inequality in this country has nothing to do with history, and is simply a result of who has worked hard and who has not.

[Read: Why is Trump mad at the zoo?]

Several years ago, I visited the museum with my grandparents—my grandfather, who was born in 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, and my grandmother, who was born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida. Inside, I pushed my grandfather in his wheelchair, his cane laid across his lap, a map of the museum in his hands. My grandmother walked behind us and moved ahead of us with an effortless independence, her gait steady and unhurried. I remember watching them take in the exhibits and remark upon how proximate they felt to what was on display. When I asked my grandmother about it later, she kept repeating the words I lived it. I lived it. I lived it.

My grandmother’s history exists inside this museum. Ruth Odom Bonner’s history exists inside this museum. This nation’s history exists inside this museum. Attempting to strip the institution of the stories that tell the truth about who we have been is an attempt to perpetuate a lie about who we are.

Republicans Tear Down a Black Lives Matter Mural

2025-03-14T08:00:00-04:00

The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family?

2024-10-04T11:30:00-04:00

Illustrations by Dadu Shin

Hussein Longolongo killed seven people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; he oversaw the killing of nearly 200 others.

He told me this on a warm March day in a courtyard in central Kigali, almost exactly 30 years later. I had come to Rwanda because I wanted to understand how the genocide is remembered—through the country’s official memorials as well as in the minds of victims. And I wanted to know how people like Longolongo look back on what they did.

Longolongo was born in Kigali in the mid-1970s. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he didn’t feel any personal hatred toward Tutsi. He had friends who were Tutsi; his own mother was Tutsi. But by the early 1990s, extremist Hutu propaganda had started to spread in newspapers and on the radio, radicalizing Rwandans. Longolongo’s older brother tried to get him to join a far-right Hutu political party, but Longolongo wasn’t interested in politics. He just wanted to continue his studies.

On April 6, 1994, Longolongo attended a funeral for a Tutsi man. At about 8:30 p.m., in the midst of the funeral rituals, the sky erupted in red fire and black smoke. The news traveled fast: A plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, had been shot down over Kigali. No one survived.

Responsibility for the attack has never been conclusively determined. Some have speculated that Hutu extremists shot down the plane; others have blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military group that had been fighting Hutu government forces near the Ugandan border. Whoever was behind it, the event gave Hutu militants a pretext for the massacre of Tutsi. The killing started that night.

Almost as if they had been waiting for the signal, Hutu militia members showed up in Longolongo’s neighborhood. One group arrived at his home and called for his brother. When he came to the door, they gave his brother a gun and three grenades and told him to come with them.

Within a few days, most of the neighborhood’s Hutu men had been ordered to join the effort. “The instructions were clear: ‘Rwanda was attacked by the RPF, and all the Tutsi are accomplices. And to defeat the RPF, we have to fight them, but also kill all the Tutsi in the neighborhoods,’ ” Longolongo told me. Any Hutu found hiding a Tutsi would be considered an accomplice and could be killed.

The pace of lethality was extraordinary. Although approximations of the death toll vary, many estimate that, over the course of just 100 days that spring and summer, about 800,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsi, were killed.

[From the September 2001 issue: Bystanders to genocide]

Longolongo believed that he had no choice but to join the Hutu militants. They taught him how to kill, and how to kill quickly. He was told that the Tutsi had enslaved the Hutu for more than 400 years and that if they got the chance, they would do it again. He was told that it was a patriotic act to defend his country against the “cockroaches.” He began to believe, he said, that killing the Tutsi was genuinely the right thing to do. Soon, he was placed in charge of other militia members.

For Longolongo, the fact that his mother was Tutsi and that he’d had Tutsi friends became a justification for his actions; he felt he had to make a public spectacle of his executions, to avoid suspicions that he was overly sympathetic toward the enemy. He feared that if he didn’t demonstrate his commitment to the Hutu-power cause, his family would be slaughtered. And so he kept killing. He killed his neighbors. He killed his mother’s friend. He killed the children of his sister’s godmother. All while he was hiding eight Tutsi in his mother’s house. Such contradictions were not uncommon in Rwanda.

As Longolongo told me his story, we were sitting with Serge Rwigamba, who works at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Longolongo doesn’t speak English well, so Rwigamba served as our translator. We kept our distance from others in the courtyard, unsure who might overhear what we were discussing or how they might react to it.

On April 22, 1994, Longolongo recounted, he and an armed group of men entered a chapel where dozens of Tutsi were hiding. “We killed about 70 people,” he said, his gaze fixed directly ahead. “I felt like it was my duty, my responsibility … I had no pity.” He put his fingertips to the sides of his head. “I was brainwashed.”

After Longolongo got up to leave, I turned to Rwigamba. He had been visibly uncomfortable at points during the conversation—looking down at the ground, his fingers stretching and contracting across the arms of his chair as if searching for something to hold on to. Rwigamba is a Tutsi survivor, and dozens of his relatives were murdered in the genocide.

The two men, roughly the same age, had never met before. But as Longolongo was speaking, Rwigamba told me, he’d realized that he recognized one of the scenes being described.

It was the chapel. He knew that chapel. Rwigamba himself had been hiding there when Longolongo and his men attacked. His father and brother had been killed that day. Rwigamba had barely escaped. Now he leaned back in his chair, covered his face with his hands, and took a deep breath. We sat in silence for a few moments.

Rwigamba doesn’t deny that propaganda played an enormous role in persuading Hutu to do what they did. But looking at Longolongo’s empty chair, Rwigamba lamented that he had seemed to push responsibility for his actions onto others rather than holding himself accountable. Rwigamba wants perpetrators like Longolongo to acknowledge that they made a choice. They weren’t zombies. They were people who chose to pick up weapons; they were people who chose to kill.

Thirty years have passed since 100 days of violence ravaged Rwanda. Thirty years since machetes slashed, since grenades exploded, since bodies rotted, since homes burned, since churches became slaughterhouses and the soil became swollen with blood. Rwandans are still living with the scars of those terrible days. They are still learning how to calibrate their memories of all that happened.

In my conversations with dozens of Rwandans this year, I saw how profoundly the genocide continues to shape the lives of the people who lived through it. There are people who protected their neighbors and people who brought machetes down on their neighbors’ heads. There are people who hid family in their homes and people who handed family over to the militia. There are people who killed some so they could protect others. Survivors’ recollections of those horrifying days are at once fresh and fading. Questions of whom and how to forgive—of whether to forgive at all—still weigh heavily.

[From the December 2022 issue: Clint Smith on how Germany remembers the Holocaust]

Over the past decade, I have traveled to dozens of sites throughout America and around the world to explore how crimes against humanity are memorialized. Rwanda has some of the most graphic sites of memory I have ever seen, places where the gruesome reality of what occurred is on display in sometimes shocking detail. And it is different from other sites I’ve visited in another crucial respect: In most of those places, few, if any, survivors are left. Here, hundreds of thousands of people who survived the genocide are still alive to tell the story, and Tutsi and Hutu live alongside one another as neighbors. I wanted to understand what public memory of an atrocity looks like when the perpetrator and the victim continue to walk past each other every day. I wanted to understand whether true forgiveness is even possible.

Serge Rwigamba lost dozens of relatives in the genocide. (Dadu Shin)

A few days before we met Longolongo, Rwigamba had shown me around the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened in 2004. The memorial sits on a hill that is said to hold the remains of 250,000 people, buried in columns of caskets that descend deep into the earth. Some caskets contain the remains of an entire family. The skull of a mother might be sitting alongside the rib cage of her husband, the tibia of her daughter, and the femur of her firstborn son. The graves are covered by massive rectangular blocks of concrete, ornamented in garlands of pink and red roses placed by visitors.

Rwigamba works as a guide and coordinator at the memorial, and also serves as vice president of the Kigali chapter of Ibuka, a civic organization that works to ensure that survivors of the genocide receive social, political, and economic support. Throughout my trip, he served as my translator and guide. He was 15 years old in 1994. He lost more than 50 members of his family, some of whom are buried at the memorial site. After the genocide, he recalled, his trauma felt suffocating. Every day, he woke up after another cycle of nightmares and thought about his family. He missed them intensely. “Working here was one of my ways to get close to them,” he told me.

We walked around the museum at the center of the memorial, which outlines the history that preceded the genocide and highlights photographs and stories of people who were killed. The goal is to demonstrate who they were in life, not to simply show them as corpses. But what stayed with me was the omnipresent sense of death. One room displays rows of skulls of people who were murdered.

We heard wailing, and Rwigamba went to see what was happening. When he returned, he explained that a survivor was visiting the memorial to see her father’s resting place. When she walked through the room of skulls, she broke down. Members of the museum’s staff went to comfort her. Rwigamba told me that this kind of thing happens often. As we walked back outside, the sound of the woman’s screams echoed through the halls.

Rwigamba said that in the 16 years since he started working at the memorial, he has learned more about the way Hutu extremists used propaganda before and during the genocide. It made him wonder. “I kept on thinking about what could have happened if I was born a Hutu. What would have happened to me?”

Anti-Tutsi propaganda was everywhere in the early 1990s, deepening Hutu’s suspicions of their Tutsi neighbors. In December 1990, an extremist Hutu newspaper had published the “Hutu Ten Commandments,” which called for Hutu political solidarity and stated that the Tutsi were the common enemy.

The roots of this antipathy went back a long time. Before Germany and later Belgium colonized Rwanda, those who owned and herded cows were generally considered Tutsi, and those who farmed the land Hutu. Under colonialism, however, these permeable class boundaries became fixed, racialized markers of identity, and much of the majority-Hutu population (along with the Twa, a group that made up 1 percent of the population) lived in relative poverty, under the control of an elite Tutsi political class. This inequality opened deep fissures: The anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana has written that “the violence in 1994 must be understood as part of a longer history that begins with the racial violence of modernity and European colonialism.”

As animosity toward the Tutsi grew in the mid-20th century, Belgian colonial powers started to place members of the Hutu population in charge. In the years before and after Rwanda gained independence, in 1962, Hutu government forces killed thousands of Tutsi. Hundreds of thousands more Tutsi fled the country.

Tutsi exiles intermittently attacked Rwanda’s Hutu throughout the 1960s. In the late ’80s, thousands of exiles joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, setting off a civil war. In 1992, under international pressure, President Habyarimana and the RPF negotiated a cease-fire, and the two sides began working out a peace agreement. Hutu extremists, who saw the agreement as a betrayal, doubled down on promoting anti-Tutsi lies.

Rwigamba gazed out over the memorial’s courtyard, recalling the messages that Hutu received from the government and the media in those years. “What if I would have been approached with so much pressure—from society and from my education? Hatred is an ideology and is taught at all levels of the society and all levels of community. So it was so hard for a child of my age to do something different.” Rwigamba paused. He looked like someone who had missed a turn and was trying to see if they could back up. “I don’t want to give an excuse for the people who committed the genocide,” he said, “because they have killed my family. But I could actually try to learn some sort of, you know, like, empathy, which enables you to think about the possibility of forgiveness.”

Still, Rwigamba told me, identifying with the killers in any way, even as a thought exercise, can feel shameful. Another part of him believes I don’t have to put myself in the shoes of perpetrators. I am a victim! That, he says, is “the easiest way to cope with your wounds”—but perhaps not the right one.

After the genocide, Rwigamba went to school with the daughter of one of the commanders who oversaw killings in his neighborhood; they sat in the same classroom. He knew that it wasn’t her fault, that she herself had not held the machetes. But, he wondered, did she carry the same beliefs as her father? Did she listen to his stories with admiration? Did she dream of finishing his work? For a long time, Rwigamba said, his classmate’s presence was a reminder of all that he had lost, and all that could be lost if history were to repeat itself.

Years later, however, after Rwigamba encountered his former classmate at church, he chose to put these thoughts out of his head. He told himself that she was not there to torment him, and he moved on. The scholar Susanne Buckley-Zistel refers to this phenomenon as “chosen amnesia,” describing it as a way for members of a community to coexist despite having had fundamentally different experiences during the genocide. All over Rwanda, every day, for 30 years, many people have chosen amnesia.

The facade of Sainte-Famille Church in Kigali is adorned with vermilion-colored bricks and white-tile pillars that form the shape of a cross. On the day Rwigamba and I visited, a priest dressed in white held a microphone, his voice swelling in a wave of Kinyarwanda as the congregation nodded at his sermon. We sat down in a mahogany pew at the back of the church, and Rwigamba pointed a few rows ahead of us. “I hid under that bench for two months.”

After the genocide began, Hutu militiamen showed up at Rwigamba’s home and told his family that they were going to kill them. They told them to kneel down on the ground. Everyone did as they were told, except for Rwigamba, who was so afraid, he couldn’t move. His father began praying; his mother cried. The men cocked their guns and pointed them at his family. “Then, suddenly, they stopped,” Rwigamba said. The men told them that they would let them live, for now, if the family paid them. So Rwigamba’s parents scrounged together all they could. “They left us, but with the promise of coming back and finishing us off,” Rwigamba said. No one waited around to find out if they were telling the truth.

As the days wore on, Rwigamba and his family moved from place to place, often at a moment’s notice. Eventually, they hid in the chapel that Longolongo and his crew attacked. Soon after that, Rwigamba and his sister and mother found themselves in another part of town, at Sainte-Famille Church, which housed thousands of Tutsi during the genocide.

Churches were a popular hiding place: More than 90 percent of all Rwandans were Christian, and many people hoped that the militia would not attack spaces that were sacred to both Hutu and Tutsi alike. Some Hutu who had been caught in the crossfire between Hutu forces and the RPF also sought refuge in churches. As a result, at Sainte-Famille, Rwigamba and his family sheltered side by side with the families of the people trying to kill them.

Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, a priest at Sainte-Famille, would soon become infamous. He traded his clerical robe for a flak jacket, carried a pistol, and, according to multiple witness accounts, personally handed over Tutsi to the Hutu militia. Day after day, the militia showed up with a list of names of Tutsi who were believed to be seeking refuge in the church. Rwigamba recognized many of the killers from his neighborhood—boys and young men he had gone to school with. Every day he watched people get killed, certain that he would be next. The carnage went on for more than two months. Hundreds of Tutsi were killed; many women were raped. (The United Nations estimates that up to 250,000 women were raped in the genocide; another estimate puts the number even higher.)

During a pause in the church service, Rwigamba and I slid out of our seats and stepped outside, into a light rain. About 50 yards away was a black-marble wall with rows of names inscribed on each side. Rwigamba bent down and pointed to the bold white letters of two names: Emmanuel Rwigamba and Charles Rwigamba. His elder brother and his father, who were murdered by Hutu militia members, then thrown into a mass grave nearby.

Dadu Shin

“This was littered with corpses of people who had been killed and left here,” Rwigamba said, gesturing toward Sainte-Famille’s parking lot.

He pointed to another spot, to the left of the church, where he remembers watching the Hutu militia force a man to dig his own grave before they shot him and threw him into it.

“I feel so lucky to have survived,” Rwigamba said. “When we were moving around those skulls and bones at the museum, I often felt like I could have been one of them.”

He looked back at the church entrance as people began filing out. “Maybe the people that we were seeing in the museum—maybe they were the same people that were with me here.”

at the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, I smelled the dead before I saw them.

Dozens of embalmed bodies were laid out across two rows of tables on either side of the room. I walked toward the back of the room and stopped in front of a body whose right arm dangled over the edge of the table. The woman’s head was turned to the side. Her mouth was ajar, revealing half a row of uneven teeth on the bottom. Her skin, swathed in powdered lime that had turned it a haunting white, was sunken in between her ribs. Her toes were curled and her left hand had been placed above her head, as if she were attempting to protect herself from something above. There was a rosary around her neck, the crucifix at rest near her chin. A black patch of hair was still present on the back of her head. Beneath it, a hole in her skull from where a machete had cracked it open.

The Murambi memorial sits on the site of a former technical school. In April 1994, a group of local leaders convinced the Tutsi in the area that they could find protection here; the Centre estimates that, within two weeks, 50,000 Tutsi had gathered. But it was a trap.

Soon the school and the hill it sat atop were surrounded by several hundred men. They threw grenades and shot bullets into the crowd, then attacked those who were still alive with clubs and machetes. Thousands were killed (the exact number remains contested). The victims were tossed into mass graves, but some were later exhumed and put on display as part of the memorial. Today, these mass graves are covered with grass, and the school’s two dozen classrooms serve as the centerpiece of the memorial.

Leon Muberuka, a Tutsi survivor who works as a guide here, accompanied me through each classroom. Muberuka was 11 when the genocide happened. He remembers everything: the bodies on the ground, the stench of death. He still finds it difficult to spend time in these classrooms. I did too.

When we stepped outside, Muberuka saw me rubbing my nose, attempting to expel the lingering scent of the bodies from my nostrils. “This place, in the morning, the smell is very, very, very hard,” he said. “We close the door at night, and when we open it—” He widened his eyes, held his nose, and exhaled through his mouth.

We walked to a building at the far end of the compound. As I crossed the threshold, I paused. In front of us, inside cylindrical glass tubes, I saw about 20 corpses that were better preserved than the ones I had just seen. Many of these bodies were brown rather than white. Their skin looked closer to what it might have looked like in life. I walked toward the back of the room. In a single encasement were two small children. I looked down at a placard and read the first two sentences:

The young boy died because of a massive attack to the head. The skull lies open and shows the still preserved brain.

The child, who appeared to have been about 5, wore a light-blue shirt with a pink elephant on the front. His mummified eyes were still visible, though sunken into his head. I stepped to the left and looked down at the hole in his skull. I leaned forward, and I saw the child’s brain.

I went outside to collect myself. Seeing this made the horror of the genocide more real; it left me feeling a mix of shock, despair, and rage—both deeply moved and profoundly unsettled. I thought about other memorial sites I’ve visited. After the Holocaust, Allied soldiers found thousands of bodies in barracks, gas chambers, crematoria, and train cars. What if some of those bodies had been preserved and put in a museum? What if I’d walked into Dachau and seen the bodies of Jewish people who had been murdered on display inside gas chambers? Would that not compromise the dignity of the dead? Or was putting the full, gruesome reality on display like this a way to ensure that people would continue to respect its gravity? When I traveled to Germany a few years ago, one man I interviewed, the child of Holocaust survivors, described his repugnance at the fact that, these days, people take selfies at places like Auschwitz and Dachau. Surely, given what was being shown here, no one would dare do the same?

Outside, a yellow-orange sun set behind the surrounding hills. On the three-hour drive north to Murambi, I had marveled at the beauty of these rolling hills, covered in the thick leaves of banana trees. I’d passed women in the valleys below bending over rice paddies, dipping their hands into the shallow water; men sweating as they walked bikes uphill, jugs of water strapped to the seat; children in flip-flops chasing soccer balls in front of shops where the smell of sweet potatoes hung in the air.

Seeing the bodies helped me picture the roads that wrap around these hills blocked by machete-wielding men, the land full of the dead and dying. Instead of smelling sweet potatoes when you rolled down your window, I realized, you might have smelled corpses rotting beneath the sun.

To Muberuka, the vividness is exactly the purpose of a memorial like this one, as uncomfortable as it may be. “This is our past, and everyone needs to know this,” he said.

“Sometimes people can say the genocide did not happen in Rwanda,” Muberuka added, his brow wrinkling in indignation, alluding to those who claim that the violence was not a genocide but a manifestation of long-standing, two-sided ethnic and tribal conflict. “Through this evidence, it’s real,” he said. “So that’s why, for me, it’s important to preserve this memorial and some physical evidence.”

Muberuka’s parents and sister were killed in the genocide. Or at least he thinks they were—he never found their bodies. “I don’t know where they have been buried,” he said. He paused and looked down. “I don’t know if they are buried or not.” A gust of wind whistled between us. “When you bury someone … you know he’s dead. But if you don’t know—” He looked at me, then up at the sky. “Even now, we are still waiting. Maybe we will see them.”

Rumors swirled around his community. People told Muberuka that they had seen his sister, who was a baby at the time of the genocide. What if she had been picked up by a family and brought across the border to Uganda? Maybe she was in Kenya.

I asked if he thought she might still be alive.

“I don’t think so,” he said softly. “Thirty years, it’s just …” His voice trailed off.

For decades, Muberuka had held on to hope. But it was a torturous existence. He saw this hope torture those around him as well. He knew people who—15, 20, 25 years after the genocide—would walk up to a stranger in the market and grab their face, thinking they might be a long-lost sibling, daughter, or son.

He decided that he had to let go, or he could never move forward. Here, again, was this idea of chosen amnesia. It was everywhere. Today, though he works at the memorial, Muberuka and his surviving siblings do not discuss the genocide with one another; he says it’s easier that way.

Another reading of the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre and similarly graphic sites is that they are an outgrowth of the Rwandan government’s desire to reinforce its power and control. Paul Kagame, formerly the Tutsi military leader of the RPF, became president of Rwanda in 2000, and he continues to occupy that office today. In some respects, he has been an enormously successful leader. Many of the Rwandans I spoke with praised him as a singular figure who has, through his insistence on reconciliation, managed to prevent another genocide.

But the country’s relative stability during his time in power has not been without costs. International observers have labeled Kagame an authoritarian. His tenure has been marked by allegations of human-rights abuses against political opponents, journalists, and activists. In 2015, the United States government urged Kagame to step down to allow a new generation of Rwandans to lead the country. Freedom House, a watchdog group based in the U.S., said in a 2022 report that Rwanda is “not free.” The government, it said, had been “banning and repressing any opposition group that could mount a serious challenge to its leadership.” In July of this year, Kagame was reelected to a fourth term. Rwanda’s National Electoral Commission said that he received 99.2 percent of the vote.

The political scientist Timothy Longman argues that sites like Murambi serve as a warning to Rwandans from the Kagame regime: This is what we put an end to, and this is what could happen again if we are not careful—if we are not in charge. Longman is a professor at Boston University and the author of Memory and Justice in Post-genocide Rwanda. He spent years living in the country as both a scholar and a field researcher for Human Rights Watch. He understands the impulse to create memorials that force visitors to confront what happened, he told me, and he shares the view of many Rwandans that the bodies serve as a reminder to the world of how profoundly it failed to come to Rwanda’s aid. Still, he finds the display shocking and horrific—a calculated attempt on the part of the Kagame regime to maximize visitors’ distress at the expense of the victims’ dignity. Using the bodies to provoke a reaction, he believes, compromises the site’s ability to meaningfully honor the dead.

“If the survivors had designed these sites, there wouldn’t be bodies,” Longman said. In his book, he writes about a conversation he had with a nun who had survived the genocide: “It is not good to leave the bodies like that,” she said. “They need to find the means to bury them.” But Longman also writes about the perspective of another nun whose sentiments echoed what I heard from Muberuka. “It has another role,” she said. “It helps to show those who said that there was no genocide what happened. It acts as a proof to the international community.”

When Longman and I spoke, I told him how moved I had been by the stories that the survivors shared with me at the various sites I’d visited, even as I was cognizant of the fact that the memorials were ultimately accountable to the state. Longman considered my point. “For the survivors at these sites, it’s their job,” he replied carefully. “They’re not telling a stock story, but on the other hand, they’re telling their story every day. I don’t think there is insincerity, but people know on some level what they are supposed to say, and in particular they know what they can’t say. It doesn’t mean it’s untrue, but as with anything in Rwanda, conversation is always constrained because you’re in an authoritarian context, and there are consequences if you say the wrong thing.”

On July 4, 1994, after nearly three months of violence, RPF forces took control of Kigali, forcing the Hutu militia out of the city. As the RPF moved through Rwanda, nearly 2 million Hutu fled to neighboring countries. In the months and years to come, the transition government faced a question: How to achieve justice for victims while also advancing the goal of reconciliation?

[From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it]

Eventually, more than 120,000 Hutu were arrested on charges of participating in the genocide. Rwandan prisons were overcrowded and teeming with disease. One of the tens of thousands of Hutu prisoners was Hussein Longolongo. In prison, he was forced to take part in a government-sanctioned reeducation program. He initially dismissed much of what he heard in the program as Tutsi propaganda. “But as time went on, I became convinced that what I did was not right,” he told me.

Longolongo also participated in more than 100 of what were known as gacaca trials. Gacaca—which roughly translates to “justice on the grass”—had historically been used in Rwandan villages and communities to settle interpersonal and intercommunal conflicts. Now the government transformed the role of the gacaca court to handle allegations of genocide.

Witnesses would present an account of an alleged crime to community-elected judges, who would assess its severity and determine the appropriate consequences. Because 85 percent of Rwandans were Hutu, the judges were overwhelmingly Hutu. “A lot of gacaca was actually about the Hutu community themselves trying to come to terms with what Hutu had done,” Phil Clark, a political scientist who has written a book about the gacaca courts, told me. “It was Hutu judges, Hutu suspects, and often Hutu witnesses doing most of the talking. And genocide survivors sometimes were a bit reluctant to get overly involved for that reason.”

The courts convened for a decade, from 2002 to 2012. There were many delays, but for years at a time, all community members were required to attend weekly trials. By 2012, more than 12,000 gacaca courts, involving 170,000 judges, had tried more than 1 million people. Nothing like this had ever been done on such a large scale anywhere else in the world.

The legacy of the trials is mixed. “The courts have helped Rwandans better understand what happened in 1994, but in many cases flawed trials have led to miscarriages of justice,” Daniel Bekele, then the Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in 2011 when the group released a report on the gacaca process. If the trials helped some survivors find a sense of closure, they reopened wounds for others. They were sometimes used to settle scores. In some cases, Tutsi survivors, wanting to exact vengeance on Hutu as a group, made false accusations. Although the public setting of the trials was intended to ensure transparency, it also made some potential witnesses unwilling to testify. And many people stayed silent even when they believed that a defendant was innocent, afraid of the backlash that might come from standing up for an accused perpetrator.

Some observers objected to the fact that only crimes against Tutsi victims were brought in front of the courts, while crimes against Hutu were overlooked. “The genocide was terrible; it was serious, and justice absolutely had to be done,” Longman told me. “But it doesn’t mean that war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the RPF should be completely ignored.”

Rwigamba told me that he did not think the process was perfect. But he saw it as the most practical and efficient way to achieve a semblance of justice on a reasonable timeline. He also appreciated that it drew on traditions and practices that were created by Rwandans rather than relying on judicial mandates imposed by outsiders. “Gacaca taught us that our traditions are rich and our values are strong,” he said.

Longolongo, for his part, found meaning in the opportunity to come face-to-face with the families of those he had helped kill—to admit to his crimes, and to apologize. I asked him if his conscience is now clear. “I feel so relieved,” he said. He told me that he became friends with many of the surviving family members of Tutsi he had killed after he showed them where the bodies of their loved ones had been discarded. “I feel like I fulfilled my mission,” he said.

This revelation took me aback. “You mean you are now friends with some of the people whose loved ones you killed?”

Longolongo nodded and smiled. “After realizing that I was genuine and telling the truth, I’ve got so many friends.”

I wondered if friends was the word that these Tutsi would use to describe the relationship. I thought of a comment made by a genocide and rape survivor in the 2011 Human Rights Watch report: “This is government-enforced reconciliation. The government forced people to ask for and give forgiveness. No one does it willingly … The government pardoned the killers, not us.”

On the way back to my hotel in Kigali one evening, I spoke with my driver, Eric (given the sensitive nature of his comments, I am using only his first name). Eric is Rwandan, but he was born in Burundi. His family, like many other Tutsi at the time, left Rwanda in 1959 to escape violence at the hands of Hutu extremists. They returned in 1995, after the genocide ended.

I had read that, after the genocide, the RPF—now the ruling political party in Rwanda—officially eradicated the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa on the grounds that they were false differences imposed on Rwandans by colonial powers, categories that had only led to conflict and bloodshed. There were no more ethnic categories, the government said, only Rwandans. I was curious how Rwandans identify today, regardless of the government’s directive, and I asked Eric about this.

“Some of them still identify. You can’t stop that. Some people still have that ideology. But also, it’s not something that is official.” He paused and began to speak again, then stopped abruptly. “It’s not allowed.” As he talked, I realized that, privately, Eric still seemed to think in terms of Tutsi and Hutu.

“I live together with someone who was in jail for 18 years. Someone who killed people. I know him,” Eric said. “He’s my neighbor.” Eric told me he doesn’t feel angry at this man—he has even hired him to do construction work on his house, and has had the man’s children do small tasks for him.

But as Eric went on, I noticed that he seemed to see this as a gesture of generosity, and a way of showing the Hutu that Tutsi are superior—that despite what the Hutu did to the Tutsi, the Tutsi were still willing to help them. That they would never do to the Hutu what the Hutu did to them, because they are more evolved.

Would you say that you’ve forgiven him? I asked.

“Yeah. I have forgiven him,” Eric said, nodding. But then he reconsidered. “You know, you can’t say that you have forgiven him 100 percent, but you have to move on,” he said. “We are not like them.”

I was struck by the texture of Eric’s voice when he said “them.” It was laced with a bitterness I had not yet encountered during my time in Rwanda. “Naturally, Tutsi and Hutu are not the same in their hearts,” he continued. “You will see. We are not the same. They have something bad in their hearts. They are naturally doing bad. That’s how they are.

“We leave them alone,” Eric said. “We give them what we’re supposed to give them. We try to live—to survive, to live with them. That’s it. That’s all. Still, we have to be careful, because we are not sure if their hearts have changed.

“Thirty years is not enough to trust them,” he continued. “We work together. We live together. But we don’t trust them.”

Albert Rutikanga was 17 when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. He heard the news on the radio and ran to tell his father. “We will be killed,” his father said.

The next day, Hutu began burning Tutsi homes in his village, Rukara. His family quickly fled to the local church, where he and I now stood. On April 8, 1994, Rutikanga told me, militia members arrived, screaming, with guns and machetes in hand. They surrounded the church. They threw grenades and shot bullets through the open windows. Waves of attacks continued for days.

Rutikanga pointed to a pew on our right. “My dad was sitting here and he was reading a Bible; that’s how he was killed.” His mother died in the attacks as well. Rutikanga was struck by shrapnel from the grenades thrown into the church. He lifted his pant leg to reveal a large cavity in the flesh of his thigh.

Soon, the RPF arrived in the village and the Hutu militia fled, leaving behind hundreds of dead Tutsi. Rutikanga didn’t step foot in the church again for 15 years.

Eventually he became a high-school teacher. He often brought his students on day trips to the genocide memorial in Kigali. They were moved by the memorial, but he came to suspect that they didn’t fully understand what had happened in 1994. There had been so many years of silence. The students’ parents, Rutikanga realized, were not having honest conversations about the genocide with one another or with their children. He decided that he would try to recruit survivors to engage in direct discussions with perpetrators.

Many survivors were initially reluctant. “They would say, ‘Are you foolish? How can you forgive those people when they killed our family?’ ” Rutikanga told them that these conversations weren’t something they should do for the perpetrators. “Forgiveness is a choice of healing yourself,” he would say. “You cannot keep the anger and bitterness inside, because it will destroy you.” Forgiveness, he said, is the choice of surviving again.

Rutikanga found it just as difficult to recruit perpetrators. “They did not trust me,” he said. In 2016, he approached Nasson Karenzi, who, at 30, had been part of the militia that attacked the church where Rutikanga and his family were hiding. Later, while in prison, Karenzi confessed to his crimes in a letter he handed to the authorities. He was eventually released.

Karenzi was skeptical at first. What if the conversations caused even deeper rifts? But he shared Rutikanga’s sense that something needed to be done to foster deeper trust and reconciliation within the community, and he agreed to talk with other former perpetrators about participating. Once they had about 20 people, perpetrators and survivors alike, Peace Education Initiative Rwanda was born.

During the group’s first meetings, facilitated by an outside mediator, everyone treaded carefully. People were wary of revealing too much, of opening old wounds when the person who was responsible for creating those wounds—or the person who had been forced to carry them—might be sitting directly across from them. But slowly, the discussions became more vulnerable.

The PeacEdu initiative brings together survivors and perpetrators for reconciliation workshops. (Dadu Shin)

People began to tell their friends and family about the organization, now called PeacEdu, and more joined. Today, 1,400 adults in the village have participated in PeacEdu workshops, and the group has reached 3,500 young Rwandans through its school-based programming.

PeacEdu’s office is a small concrete building with yellow walls and French doors that open onto a garden courtyard. There, I met with four participants in the program. The two women, Francoise Muhongayire and Clementine Uwineza, were survivors of the genocide. The two men, Karenzi and Francois Rukwaya, had participated in it.

Rukwaya had a bald head that caught the light from above; he wore a checkered green oxford shirt that seemed a size too big. The first thing he told me was that he had killed eight people in one attack, early on in the genocide. He was 27 in 1994, and was later imprisoned. He, too, wrote a confession, and was later released. (Kagame has freed thousands of prisoners en masse on several occasions.)

Muhongayire wore a green-and-gold dress, with frills that bloomed from the shoulder. She had a large Afro and spoke in long sentences that rose and fell like the hills around us. She recounted running from the militia and hiding in a swamp the day the genocide began. When she returned to search for her family, she found her parents and eight of her siblings dead. She and a group of other Tutsi hid in a house where they thought they might be safe. But the militia found them, poured gasoline on the house, and set it on fire. The home was engulfed in flames and almost everyone inside died. Muhongayire barely escaped. She still carries scars from the burns.

“I lived a miserable life after,” she said. “I had no one. I was living with so much depression. Until I saw Karenzi, who came toward my house. And when I saw him, I immediately ran away and tried to hide because that triggered me and made me think that he was coming to attack us.”

Karenzi came back again and again, each time asking for forgiveness. At one point, Muhongayire told him that she forgave him just so he would stop bothering her. But she didn’t mean it.

Not long after, Rutikanga approached her about joining his new initiative. Muhongayire wanted no part in it. These people had killed her entire family. How could she look them in the eye? Forgive them? No chance. Finally, Rutikanga persuaded her to give it a try. She could always get up and leave if it became too difficult.

Yet as she listened to Karenzi and others explain what had led them to commit violence and listened to them apologize, genuinely, for all they had done, Muhongayire could feel something changing inside her. At the time, she had a heart condition that doctors could not accurately diagnose or treat. Her heart was weak, and she felt like her body was beginning to fail. But she told me that after she was comfortable enough to share her own story in the PeacEdu sessions—to look at Karenzi and the other Hutu sitting alongside him and tell them about all they had taken away from her—she started to feel lighter and stronger. As she kept going to sessions, she said, her mental and physical health began to improve. She no longer wanted to die. She had a chance to live again.

Uwineza was 18 when the genocide began, and she was raped multiple times by Hutu soldiers. She contracted HIV from the assaults. Like Muhongayire, Uwineza was reluctant to join Rutikanga’s initiative, but when she learned that other women who had lost their families and survived sexual violence were participating, she decided to try it. Over time, alongside the other survivors, she began to experience a shift. “I was able to recover,” she said, holding her thumb and index finger together and slowly pulling them apart, “a little bit.”

Karenzi said that he’d had to learn to set aside his own guilt. It was not easy, he said, but it was the only way to demonstrate to survivors that he was not motivated by selfish reasons, that he truly wanted to help them find closure.

The results changed the realities of daily life in the village. “When I feel like I want to go to her house,” Karenzi said, nodding toward Muhongayire, “I am free to go there, and vice versa. We have built a very deep trust, and we live together as a community.” Muhongayire leaned over and said something in Karenzi’s ear while placing her hand on his shoulder. They both laughed.

Discussion groups like these are still rare in Rwanda. In other villages where Hutu and Tutsi live together, Muhongayire said, people may act politely in public, but they are not fully healed. Small interpersonal conflicts bring out deep-seated fear and prejudice. “Inside of those Hutu, they have a feeling: The Tutsi are still bad. And on the other side, the survivors also feel the same way toward the Hutu,” Karenzi said.

I asked the group if, 30 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, they could have ever conceived that they would sit together like this one day. They all looked at one another and shook their heads, smiling. “We could have never imagined it,” Muhongayire said.

Twenty miles outside Kigali, at a church in Nyamata that is now a memorial site, the clothes that were worn by thousands of victims are laid across dozens of wooden pews. The piles are so high that at first glance, I thought that they were covering bodies. But they were only clothes. A white sweater with a single pink flower on the collar, a yellow dress with blue polka dots, a small pair of jeans full of holes from shrapnel—a kaleidoscope of muted colors.

The guide at the site, a woman named Rachel, took me around the church turned memorial and told me her story. Both of her parents were killed in the genocide, as were her eight siblings. She found refuge with a family who took her across the border to what was then Zaire. After the killing ended, she returned to Rwanda, this time alone.

Rachel has no photographs of her family, because the militia set them on fire. She still remembers their faces, but they have become blurrier. Now, when she tries to recall them, she does not know what is real and what she has conjured in her imagination.

“After the genocide, I felt angry,” she said. “But nowadays, no. Because if you refuse to forgive someone, you have a kind of burden, and it is very difficult to move forward.”

I thought about a little girl’s dress I saw in the church, with red roses embroidered along its sleeves and blood stains streaking across its hem. “So forgiving is not something you did for them, as much as something you did for yourself?” I asked.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “For protection.”

This, in so many ways, is the story of Rwanda 30 years later: a story of protection. A country attempting to protect itself from another genocide, sometimes through deliberate forgetting. At the same time, memorials protecting the bones and bodies of those who were killed in an attempt to make forgetting impossible. Perpetrators, some who have tried to protect themselves from prison and some who have tried to protect themselves from the poison of guilt that threatens to corrode their conscience. Survivors protecting the memories of their loved ones, but also their own stability. The contradictions are innumerable.

As survivor after survivor told me, 30 years is not that long ago. The scars are still on the land, and still on their bodies. It is impossible to truly forget. It is a decision to forgive. It is a constant struggle to move on.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Is Forgiveness Possible?”

The Magic of Old-Growth Forests

2024-06-17T07:00:00-04:00

Photograph by Mitch Epstein

When I was a boy, I loved climbing the old oak trees in New Orleans City Park. I would hang from their branches and fling my legs into the air with unfettered delight. I would scoot my way up the trees’ twisting limbs until I was a dozen feet off the ground and could see the park with new eyes. These were the same trees my mother climbed as a young girl, and the same ones my own children climb when we travel back to my hometown to visit. Live oaks can live for centuries, and the memories made among them can span generations.

For his most recent project, Old Growth, the photographer Mitch Epstein traveled around the United States to document some of the country’s most ancient trees: big-leaf maples, eastern white pines, sequoias, redwoods, birches. Definitions vary, but Epstein considers old-growth forests to be areas that have been untouched by humans and allowed to regenerate on their own terms. Much of this land in North America has been destroyed in the centuries since European settlers arrived on the continent; Epstein wants his photographs to call attention to what remains, in order to protect it.

One site Epstein visited on his journey was Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, where he spent time with Pando: a collection of 47,000 aspen trunks connected to the same root system. Covering 106 acres and weighing about 13.2 million pounds, Pando is one of the largest living organisms on the planet. Epstein has written that it “creates an illusion of infinity.”

The trees in Old Growth have been around for at least hundreds of years, some for more than 3,000. According to a recent federal report, the biggest threat that American old-growth trees face is destruction by wildfires, which are exacerbated by climate change. Indeed, a warming planet poses risks to trees of all ages and in all settings. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed 2,000 trees in City Park. Future storms, made more intense by climate change, could soon make such destruction seem quaint. It might feel like the time has passed for us to change course, but Epstein insists that’s not the case. “How did we get here?” he asked me, “and how do we find a way to realign our relationship to the resources that we have been graced by here on Earth?”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “Interconnected.”

What Children Remember About Their Fathers

2024-06-13T15:10:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Father’s Day looks different for each family. For some, it is a moment to celebrate the dad(s) in your life and let them know how much you appreciate them. Maybe it’s with a homemade card, or pancakes, or an afternoon in which a dad is allowed to take a nap and watch replays of the 1998 NBA finals uninterrupted. But the day can also be steeped in mourning, as the loss of a father, or father figure, is felt more acutely and the memories of that person can come bubbling to the surface.

In The Atlantic’s archives, you can see these themes playing out across time. I found myself deeply moved by the connections between a March 1950 essay by Virginia Woolf about her father, Leslie Stephen, and a January 2024 essay by my colleague Ross Andersen, about his father, Erik Dybkaer Andersen.

Both essays are posthumous meditations on who their fathers were, providing insights into how these men made their way in the world through the eyes of their children. Woolf remembered how her father “would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey with trunks, horns, and tails delicately and exactly formed,” and how he would take a pencil and “draw beast after beast — an art that he practised almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys.”

Ross recalled the day his father “mounted a basketball hoop over our driveway and put a Ping-Pong table in the garage. No matter the game and no matter your age, he wanted to beat you with every atom of his being.” His father was also a talkative person, and Ross “would blush when he invited himself to join strangers’ conversations at neighboring tables by making unsolicited jokes about whatever they were discussing.”

My children are 7 and 5 years old. Reading these stories left me wondering what my children will remember about me when I am gone. Will it be that I pretend every shot I take playing soccer at our park is the last penalty of a World Cup final? Will it be my terrible moves during our Friday-night dance parties? Will it be the counter full of spilled cinnamon as I try to perfect my weekend French-toast recipe? Or will it be something quotidian and unremarkable that has glued itself to my children’s consciousness? Ross’s and Woolf’s stories are reminders that the memories my children retain are not up to me, and may also include moments I’m not proud of, but I hope they’ll always remember that I did my best.

A Reading List

Here’s a collection of stories on fatherhood through the years:

“My Father: Leslie Stephen”: In 1950, Virginia Woolf remembered her late father as a “delightful host” who gave her “unrestricted freedom” and access to his extensive library.
“My Father, the Giant”: After Ross Andersen’s father died earlier this year, he wrote that his father’s “life’s work was caring for the people he loved.”
“The Father-Son Talk I Never Expected to Have”: Garth Risk Hallberg almost never spoke about his past as an addict—until adolescence came for his son.
“Vigilance”: In 1997, Meg Cimino recalled all the ways her father tried to protect her as she grew up. “What’s a dad to do in a world of sharp corners?”
“To a Daughter, One Year Lost”: In 1941, an unnamed father published a letter to his daughter a year after her disappearance. “Surely you will not recoil from knowing just this: that simply, humanly, sorely, I miss you.”

When Soccer Was an American Afterthought

2024-02-29T11:05:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

In 1979, Penny Pinkham wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “Sportspeak,” a brief overview that provided readers—specifically those who might be novices to the landscape of professional sports in America—with the necessary context and lingo to fake their way through dinner-party conversations. Rather than writing would-be entries for Encyclopedia Britannica, however, Pinkham took a slightly more unorthodox approach.

Excerpts include:

Baseball players wear tight-fitting uniforms in stretch fabrics and they often display bulging paunches along with the bulging cheeks. They spit a lot and spend a lot of time in the clubhouse playing cards.

and

Football players are called Bill or Steve, with a sprinkling of Bubbas. Their coaches are called Chuck.

and

Most basketball players went to college at UCLA or North Carolina, except for those over 6’10” whose first and last names begin with the same letter, who are allowed to come to play directly out of high school. Many basketball players have big round beds and long fur coats.

Pinkham also commented on hockey, tennis, golf, auto racing, and the Olympics, giving each sport a few paragraphs—each, that is, except soccer. For Pinkney, soccer warranted a single sentence: “You do not need to know anything about soccer yet, although you should be able to pronounce Pelé (Peh-lay).”

Such a brief allusion to what is now the most popular sport in the world may initially leave some contemporary readers miffed (me, I am the contemporary reader). But 45 years ago, soccer in the United States was nowhere near as beloved as it is today. Interest among Americans was spreading, to be sure, but relative to the other major sports, soccer was an afterthought.

Still, Pinkham’s single sentence is revealing in that it points to the fact that even casual sports fans who may not have known much about soccer in the late 1970s would (or should) have known about Pelé.

Midway through the 1975 season, Pelé—winner of three World Cups, scorer of more than 1,200 career goals, by then known by many as the greatest player to ever set foot on a soccer field—came out of retirement to join the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL).

“At that time, I had a lot of proposals to go to play in Europe, England, Italy, Spain, Mexico, but I said no. After 18 years, I want to rest because I’m going to retire,” Pelé said in an interview with CNN in 2011. “Then appeared the proposal to go to New York because they want to make soccer big in the United States. That was the reason … then I start my mission.”

In the season prior to Pelé’s arrival, the largest attendance at a New York Cosmos home game was about 8,000 people. In his final season, in 1977, the average attendance was more than 42,000 people for home games, including three instances in which there were crowds of more than 70,000. The Cosmos won the NASL championship in 1977, and Pelé was selected as an NASL all-star in each of his three seasons.

Although the NASL eventually folded in 1984, it laid the groundwork for today’s Major League Soccer, which formed in 1993. The league has followed a similar model of bringing in global superstars such as David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney, Zlatan Ibrahimović, Gareth Bale, and Kaká. None of this would have been possible without Pelé.

The landscape of American soccer looks very different today. Earlier this week, I dropped my first-grade son off at school wearing his Paris Saint-Germain Kylian Mbappé jersey, and he ran straight to his friend, who was wearing an Inter Miami Lionel Messi jersey. Behind them, a kindergartener walked through the school entrance wearing a Manchester City Erling Haaland jersey. The global game has penetrated the consciousness of American children and adults in ways rarely before seen in our country, and it shows no sign of slowing down, especially with the World Cup being hosted in North America in 2026.

The proliferation of streaming and social media has made it possible to watch almost any game in the world at any moment. With YouTube, fans have instant access to the highlights of games from half a century ago. My son has personally committed to watching highlights of every goal scored in every World Cup as far back as YouTube will take him. Most recently, he watched the highlights of the 1958 World Cup, where a skinny, little-known 17-year-old from Brazil lit up the tournament by scoring six goals, including two in the World Cup final. His name was Pelé. Or, shall we say, “Peh-lay.”

Arlington’s Civil War Legacy Is Finally Laid to Rest

2023-12-23T07:30:00-05:00

Updated at 9:25 a.m. ET on January 8, 2024

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.

I had come to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Monday in anticipation of the statue’s removal. Following a review from the Department of Defense’s Naming Commission, the memorial had been scheduled to come down this week, but as I arrived, I received an alert on my phone that a federal judge had just issued a temporary restraining order at the request of a group named Defend Arlington. The group argued that the decision to take down the monument had been too hurried, that it would damage the surrounding tombstones, and that the DOD had failed to comply with federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. What would happen next was unclear.

The limbo of the situation was evident in the bodies of the workers. Many of them stood in conversation or sat on the ground, leaning back against the fence. I walked over to a group of them chatting around a large stack of wooden planks. I asked when they thought the statue would be coming down. They turned to one another, exchanging skeptical glances, before one of them looked at me and said, “To be determined.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of April 2023, nearly 500 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed, or relocated since Dylann Roof massacred nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. The Confederate memorial here, in one of the nation’s largest cemeteries, surrounded by the graves of some 400,000 people, is perhaps the most significant to face the possibility of removal.

[Read: A memorial at the barn]

The statue was paid for and erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of southern white women who were the wives, widows, and descendants of Confederate soldiers. The organization was responsible for erecting hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was built by the sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former soldier in the Confederate army, and unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, which was the day after the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The statue’s most dominant image is of a woman—symbolizing the South itself—who wears an olive wreath atop her head. The monument also features depictions of two Black people that reify the subservient positions they occupied under slavery and the Confederacy. Arlington National Cemetery acknowledges:

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre–Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865–1870) had granted to African Americans.

For decades, southern politicians claimed that the statue was simply a part of a larger project of reconciliation, a way for political leaders to solidify national unity at a time when the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh. In some ways, they were right. It was intended as a symbol of reconciliation and unity. But for whom? Certainly not for Black Americans, who, in the decade leading up to the erection of this statue, had been terrorized by more than 700 lynchings across the country.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not conceal what they meant by reconciliation. To them, reconciliation meant demanding that Reconstruction—which is to say, any efforts oriented toward pursuing Black social, political, or economic equality—was acknowledged to have been a mistake. The best way to achieve national unity, they thought, was to allow southern white people to govern themselves, with no repercussions from the federal government for the routine torture, destruction, and murder of Black people. As the Confederate veteran and former secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert wrote on behalf of the UDC when the statue was unveiled in 1914:

In 1867, the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving in the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

According to Samantha Baskind, an art-history professor at Cleveland State University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Ezekiel, the United Daughters of the Confederacy didn’t want just anyone to construct this statue; they specifically wanted him. Ezekiel, the first Jewish student ever to attend the Virginia Military Institute, was a veteran of the famous Battle of New Market. In the battle, 257 institute cadets, some as young as 15 years old, were ordered to help close the Confederate line. They did so, and against the odds, forced Union troops to retreat. So many soldiers lost their boots in the mud caused by days of rain that the battlefield became known as the “Field of Lost Shoes,” and the victory would take on an outsize, mythologized importance in Confederate memory. “Ezekiel is a famous sculptor, a famous southerner, a famous veteran—who could be better in their mind?” Baskind told me.

Whether or not Ezekiel intended it, the particular images he used have come to be understood as Confederate propaganda. The image of the Black servant following his white master into battle, for example, has been used by groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans to perpetuate the myth that Black men served as soldiers for the South during the war. This idea, as the historian Kevin M. Levin writes in his book Searching for Black Confederates, was used to buttress the claim that the Civil War had been fought not over slavery but over states’ rights. If Black people served in the Confederate army, the logic goes, then the war could not have been about their enslavement.

[Tom Nichols: The mysterious return of a Soviet statue in Russia]

“There is no question that Ezekiel used iconography that is unacceptable,” Baskind told me. And in doing so, she believes, he took what could have been a true opportunity to create a meaningful site of national reconciliation and ruined it. “He’s the one who really has doomed the monument in the 21st century,” she said. “It was supposed to be the premier symbol of sectional reunion, but it has white-supremacist origins in its iconography.”

In 2017, following the murder by a white nationalist of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of Ezekiel’s descendants wrote a letter demanding that the Arlington statue come down. “Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws. It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion,” they wrote. “As proud as our family may be of Moses’s artistic prowess, we—some twenty Ezekiels—say remove that statue.”

The statue stayed up—but in 2020 a plaque was placed nearby, explaining to visitors that the memorial contained “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Then, in 2021, Congress created the Naming Commission to devise a framework to effect the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials at military facilities—and as a military cemetery, Arlington was included. After the decision was made to take down the statue, more than 40 Republican congressional representatives sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, urging him to intervene. Nevertheless, the Pentagon said that the statue needed to be removed by January 1, 2024.

Making sense of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial is impossible without understanding the larger history of the land it sits upon. Although many people today think of Arlington National Cemetery as a place to commemorate the lives of fallen American soldiers, that was not its original purpose. Before the land became the national cemetery, it was the plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Prior to the Civil War, about 200 enslaved people lived and worked there.

Lee had come to own the plantation through his wife, Mary Custis, whose father, George Washington Parke Custis, had built the mansion that sat at the edge of the plantation to memorialize his adoptive grandfather, President George Washington. The marriage of Mary Custis and Robert E. Lee brought together two of the most powerful families in the South. But in 1861, as the Civil War began, Lee and his family fled from their Arlington plantation, which was soon seized by Union soldiers. The estate served as an important strategic outpost for the Union army throughout the war. Three years into the conflict, in 1864, the first military burial took place, and the land began to evolve into the cemetery it is today. One of the cemetery’s goals, from the beginning, was to establish justice for the Union cause, which, as I looked up at the statue, makes the presence of a memorial glorifying the Lost Cause all the more perplexing.

I made my way from the Confederate Memorial to the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Arlington House, the white mansion that sits on a hill and has a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., that I had never encountered. Why this place had become so valuable to the Union during the Civil War was clear: Officers would have been able to see any army approaching the city from miles away.

Behind the home were former slave quarters, spaces that had been transformed into exhibits documenting the lives and stories of those who had been enslaved there. I began to wonder what the families who had once lived in those quarters would think about the Confederate Memorial—its presence, and now its removal.

I called Stephen Hammond, a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey who is a descendant of the Syphax family, one of several families that were enslaved on the plantation. He is a family genealogist and docent at Arlington House, where he tries to ensure that his family’s story and the stories of other Black people who once lived there are preserved.

[From the December 2023 issue: The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated]

“I’m conflicted,” Hammond told me, when I asked about the memorial’s removal. “I think it’s important to be able to tell the entire history of a space,” he said, before pausing. “And yet, there are aspects of that memorial that are very offensive to me, and I feel like they don’t represent what our country is about.”

Although the Confederate Memorial did provide an opportunity for historians, docents, and visitors to discuss the wider history of the cemetery, Hammond told me, he does not subscribe to the idea that the statue’s purpose was unity. “On the news this week, I’ve heard people saying we shouldn’t tear it down, because it’s a ‘reconciliation monument,’” he said. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

When Hammond walks through the cemetery, he attempts to hold all of its complexities together—the cognitive dissonance of its being the final resting place of the enslavers and the enslaved, a place that tells the story of those who fought for the Union and those who fought to destroy it. Although doing so is not always easy, he told me, he tries to extend empathy and grace to all, in the same way he hopes visitors will extend them to his own ancestors.

“I honor those that have died in that space,” Hammond said of the memorial, “but I also recognize that not more than two or three football fields away, my family members were enslaved, and were forced to labor and serve other people for exactly the reasons that the war was fought.”

“I don’t want history to be lost by the removal of something that creates a gap,” he went on. “But at the same time, what was filling that gap is not reflective of what history really was.”

This is why, for Hammond, the issue of who is commemorated at the cemetery, and how, goes beyond the Confederate Memorial. He is currently leading an effort to remove Robert E. Lee’s name from the Arlington House site. In a 2022 op-ed for The Washington Post, Hammond and Lee Crittenberger Hart, a descendant of Lee, wrote, “Our families realize that the name ‘The Robert E. Lee Memorial’ focuses solely on one side of those who lived at Arlington House and excludes and diminishes the lives and histories of those who were enslaved.”

[Clint Smith: Donald Trump vs. American history]

Earlier this year, Representative Don Beyer and Senator Tim Kaine, both Democrats of Virginia, introduced legislation that would change the name to the Arlington House National Historic Site. Hammond is hopeful that the law will pass. In the meantime, he continues with his personal effort to inform visitors about the full history of Arlington House, giving an account of those whose stories went unacknowledged for so long.

“People get off of the trolley,” he said, referring to the small hop-on-hop-off bus tours that bring people around the cemetery, “and they walk over to see that beautiful view, and they have no idea what that space really is.”

On Tuesday, Judge Rossie Alston, the federal judge who’d earlier issued the stay, visited the site and, saying he “saw no desecration of any graves,” cleared the way for the memorial’s removal. Judge Alston—who is Black and was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump—commented that the memorial contains a depiction of a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?”

In something of a full-circle moment, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who had argued against removing the memorial, announced that the statue would be relocated to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, where Ezekiel and his fellow cadets fought the battle that made them Confederate legends.

On Thursday, I traveled back to Arlington to see the remainder of the memorial taken down before it was packed up and transported to its new home. The crane was now swinging its neck inside the fence. After the workers secured the final section, one of them signaled to the operator, and the bronze was lifted from the memorial’s stone base, floating above our heads like an asteroid caught in a new orbit. Some of the workers pulled out their phone to record the moment.

Before I left, I took one last look at the stone base upon which the statue had stood for more than a century. The space was not conspicuous in its emptiness. I took a photo and turned around to make my way back toward the main road.

The memorial is gone. But the question of how we remember who we’ve been isn’t going anywhere.

This article originally misspelled the name of Robert E. Lee's wife, Mary Custis.

Donald Trump vs. American History

2023-12-06T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Lee este artículo en español.

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes. Lee’s face was once part of a larger statue of the Confederate general that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was at the center of protests and counterprotests during the infamous “Unite the Right” rally there in 2017. The city had taken the statue down in 2021 and given it to a local Black-history museum. Once melted, the statue’s bronze would be repurposed into a new work of public art.

As I contemplated Lee’s metal face glowing like a small sun in the dark universe of the workshop, I thought of the statement issued by former President Donald Trump when the statue had come down. “Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump had written, reaffirming his past praise for the Confederate leader. Trump was implicitly telling his base: They came for Lee, and next they will come for you. It’s not hard to see why the metalworkers who melted down the statue of Lee did so at an undisclosed location; they reportedly feared for their safety.

The claim that Lee was a brilliant strategist is a bit of Lost Cause mythology that historians have largely debunked. Still, it’s worth pausing to consider why Trump has made a point, on several occasions, of commending a man who led an army that fought a war predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of chattel slavery. Lee himself was a slave owner who tortured those he enslaved; one man said Lee was “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, [he] then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine.” Lee also argued that slavery benefited African Americans, deeming it “necessary for their instruction as a race.”

[From the June 2021 issue: Clint Smith on why Confederate lies live on]

Trump is not a student of history, military or otherwise. But he knows very well what defending Lee signals to his supporters, many of whom see the general as a paragon of white, male, southern Christianity. Nostalgia for a past in which white Christian men possessed the nation’s political power has always been at the core of Trump’s appeal; his most enduring slogan, “Make America great again,” is an unsubtle pledge to restore just such an order.

Trump rode that pledge to power in 2016. Now running for a second term, he has promised yet more: to impose his harmful, erroneous historical claims on school curricula and to instill a culture of fear in classrooms across the country that dare to deviate from his preferred historical narrative.

Although educational policy is formed most directly at the state level, the Department of Education has $79 billion of discretionary funding that it can use as both carrot and stick, to encourage states and school districts to teach—or stop them from teaching—certain topics in certain ways. Trump’s 2024 education-policy plan promises to cut federal funding to any school or program that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content” in its curriculum. Already, in Texas, Florida, and other Republican-controlled states, educators are being ostracized for attempting to teach parts of American history that don’t cast straight, white, Christian Americans as the primary protagonists. Teachers are being punished for engaging with the history of policies that segregated, violated the rights of, or oppressed those whose identities fell outside that group. Trump would encourage such sanctions on a national scale.

What Trump and the MAGA movement want is a country where children are falsely taught that the United States has always been a beacon of righteousness. Despite our nation’s many virtues, the truth of its past is harrowing and complicated. Slavery, Jim Crow, Indigenous displacement and slaughter, anti-immigrant laws, the suppression of women’s rights, and the history of violence against the LGBTQ community—these things sully the MAGA version of the American story.

In September 2020, Trump held a “White House Conference on American History,” at which he announced that he was establishing the 1776 Commission to create standards for “patriotic education.” (The commission’s name was a direct reference to, and rebuke of, “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times series that outlined the centrality of slavery in America’s origins.) “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” Trump said in a speech that day. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” Trump embraces, uncritically, the idea of American exceptionalism. But the “truth about our country” has not always been magnificent for all Americans—particularly those who, for generations, were denied access to social, economic, and political advancement.

A central part of Trump’s project is to depict the presentation of empirical evidence as an attempt at ideological indoctrination. The claim that this country has prevented millions from achieving upward mobility should not be a controversial one; it reflects actual policies such as convict leasing, school segregation, and housing covenants. To Trump and his allies, however, anyone making such a claim has fallen prey to a “radical movement” that sees America as an inherently and irredeemably evil country. A professor stating that the Confederacy seceded from the Union because of slavery and racism is a member of the “woke mob,” never mind the fact that the seceding states said this directly in their declarations of secession. (Mississippi in 1861: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.”) An elementary-school teacher highlighting the importance of LGBTQ figures in the history of American activism is reprimanded for being part of an effort to force sexuality onto students, never mind the fact that Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Marsha P. Johnson played an indisputable role in shaping political life.

Trump would prefer to simplify that which is complex and celebrate that which is abhorrent. He would prefer to ignore everything that doesn’t align with a narrative that suggests, as he did when announcing the 1776 Commission, that “to grow up in America is to live in a land where anything is possible, where anyone can rise, and where any dream can come true.” The notion that Americans must acknowledge multiple realities at once—that George Washington was both a Revolutionary War hero and an enslaver who hired slave catchers to recapture his runaway property, for example—is anathema to this worldview.

The 1776 Commission released its report on January 18, 2021, two weeks after Trump inspired thousands of people to attack the U.S. Capitol, and two days before Joe Biden was inaugurated. Upon taking office, Biden terminated the commission. Trump has shown a clear commitment to continuing its work.

[Adam Harris: ‘An existential threat to American higher education’]

In a second term, Trump would have even more reason to promote the rewriting of the American past. January 6, 2021, was one of the darkest days in our country’s history. Already, the MAGA movement has attempted to make it into a contemporary Lost Cause, framing the insurrectionists as patriotic heroes on a righteous mission to protest a rigged election. In this telling, the people who have been charged for the violence and destruction they inflicted are innocent “political prisoners.” This, too, is dangerously fictitious.

The most patriotic education is one that demands that we sit with the totality and complexity and moral inconsistencies of the American project. Trumpism seeks to censor attempts to tell this sort of story. Trump says that he will double down on this effort if reelected. History has taught us that we should believe him.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Suppress American History.”

The Man Who Became Uncle Tom

2023-09-08T07:00:00-04:00

“Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,” Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”

Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom.

Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Who was Josiah Henson? Born in 1789, according to his autobiography, he was enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky and served as an overseer before escaping to Canada in 1830. By 1862, when Lincoln checked out the Key, Henson had helped found a 200-acre settlement in Ontario, known as Dawn, which provided a refuge for hundreds of free Black people who had fled bondage in America. He had also made numerous return trips to the American South to help guide enslaved people to freedom. In total, Henson said, he freed 118 people; by comparison, Harriet Tubman is believed to have freed about 70.

I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?

One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.

But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.

Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Published when Baldwin was just 24 years old, the essay helped establish the young writer as one of America’s fiercest social critics. Baldwin writes that Stowe’s book was gratuitous, overly sentimental, and two-dimensional, “not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong.” He concludes: “This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”

In many ways, the book did serve as a pamphlet; abolitionists saw it as a means for laying bare the horrors of slavery to white northerners. (Supporters of slavery saw it as a threat. One minister in Maryland was arrested and imprisoned for owning a copy, along with other abolitionist literature.) Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have been, aside from the Bible, the best-selling book of the 19th century. Originally serialized in a newspaper, The National Era, over the course of 44 weeks, the complete book was published in March 1852. It sold an estimated 300,000 copies in the U.S., and more than 2 million worldwide, in its first year.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed, as Baldwin suggests, filled with stereotypes. “In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong,” Stowe writes. “Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate.” When describing the songs enslaved people sang together, Stowe explains that “the negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature.”

The scholar Jim O’Loughlin, who has written extensively about the literary and cultural implications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to Stowe’s posture as one of “romantic racialism.” Even when the writer is ostensibly celebrating or sympathizing with Black characters, O’Loughlin told me, she posits an essentialist view of them.

Worse, Stowe’s Black characters venerate whiteness and disparage themselves. “Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em,” Aunt Chloe, an enslaved woman, says to her white mistress. “And look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor?” As Baldwin puts it: “Here, black equates with evil and white with grace.”

Still, when I read it recently, sections of the book took me by surprise. My understanding of Uncle Tom, I came to see, had been informed less by the character in the book than by the distortions of the character that followed in the succeeding decades, when he came to be known as a lackey and a traitor. The Tom of the novel, while not as fully realized as some of Stowe’s white characters, was kind, thoughtful, and brave—a tragic hero who sacrifices his own life rather than give up information about where two enslaved Black women are hiding. This was not the Tom I thought I knew.

[Harriet Beecher Stowe: Women, unite against slavery]

I was also fascinated by some of the exchanges between the white characters on the morality of slavery, as exemplified by a conversation between Miss Ophelia and her cousin Augustine St. Clare. Miss Ophelia, a white woman from the North who has come to stay with the slave-owning St. Clare and his family down South, doesn’t understand how her cousin—who she believes to be a kind, good-hearted man—can participate in such an egregious institution.

“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth.

“I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare.

“Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?”

“Are you such a sweet innocent as to suppose nobody in this world ever does what they don’t think is right? Don’t you, or didn’t you ever, do anything that you did not think quite right?”

“If I do, I repent of it, I hope,” said Miss Ophelia, rattling her needles with energy.

“So do I,” said St. Clare, peeling his orange; “I’m repenting of it all the time.”

The exchange is perhaps the most human and morally complex in the novel. It serves as a reminder to contemporary readers that slavery was not perpetuated simply by malevolent caricatures of evil, but also by ordinary people who suspected that slavery was wrong yet were unwilling to surrender the social and economic benefits it brought to their life.

In his 1849 autobiography and in subsequent editions of the book, Josiah Henson similarly contended with the fact that he’d been both a victim and an instrument of the institution’s brutality. As a teenager, he’d craved his master’s approval. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month,” Henson reflected. “My pride and ambition had made me master of every kind of farmwork.” (All of the quotes I am using are drawn from the 1881 edition of the book, generally considered the most complete version.) He soon became an overseer, attempting to cultivate both the trust of his enslaver and the respect of his fellow enslaved workers.

In 1825, when Henson was 35 and married with two children, his enslaver, Isaac Riley, came into his cabin with a request. Riley was in serious financial trouble; he told Henson that a court was threatening to liquidate his assets, including his enslaved workers. “They’ve got judgment against me,” Riley said, “and in less than two weeks every nigger I’ve got will be put up and sold.”

Rather than sell his property, Riley decided to hide it from the authorities, and enlisted Henson to help him. He told Henson he needed him to take 21 enslaved people from his plantation in Maryland to his brother’s plantation in Kentucky: a 700-mile journey.

Henson had never been outside the Washington, D.C., area, and the notion of the trip was daunting. But the alternative was devastating in its own right. He remembered watching his mother being separated from five of her six children at an auction when he was a boy. He could still recall the indelible image of his father being tortured for a transgression against a white overseer. His father’s ear had been severed from his head before he was ultimately sold down South. For Henson, the prospect of being separated from his own wife and children, or being even partly responsible for other family separations, was too painful to consider. He told Riley that he would go to Kentucky.

Henson’s mother stayed behind. This was perhaps a way of discouraging Henson from trying to escape after leaving the plantation—even if he was not caught, his mother could be punished in his stead, a common tactic among enslavers.

On a cold night in February, Henson led the group away from the plantation, with a travel pass provided by Riley in hand. Children rode in a horse-drawn wagon. Adults walked. When they reached the Ohio River, Henson sold the horse and wagon for a boat, and he and his charges began making their way down the river.

In Cincinnati, they encountered a group of free Black people who told them they should stay in Ohio instead of continuing on to Kentucky. Ohio was a free state; Henson and his traveling companions could make a new life—a free life. “They told us we were fools to think of going on and surrendering ourselves up to a new owner,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “that now we could be our own masters, and put ourselves out of all reach of pursuit.” The possibility was tantalizing. But as much as he desired freedom, he had never imagined that escape would be the means by which he gained it.

Henson was a preacher on the Riley plantation, and his hesitancy stemmed in part from his religious conviction. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” Henson said. Believing that God wanted him to be a man of his word, Henson told the other enslaved people in his party to get back on the boat—he had made a promise to bring them to Kentucky.

In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe, a devout Christian herself, wrote about how this decision was part of what had inspired her to draw on Henson’s story for her novel:

Those casuists among us who lately seem to think and teach that it is right for us to violate the plain commands of God, whenever some great national good can be secured by it, would do well to contemplate the inflexible principle of this poor slave, who, without being able to read a letter of the Bible, was yet enabled to perform this most sublime act of self-renunciation in obedience to its commands.

Henson was so committed to what he understood as the will of the lord that he sacrificed his own freedom—in a sense, his own life—to follow it. How many people, Stowe contemplates, would have done the same in his position?

I take issue with Stowe’s assertion; I find it impossible to disentangle what motivated Henson’s decision from its outcome. I cannot admire his devotion to God without confronting how his understanding of God’s will had been manipulated by enslavers. I cannot admire the fidelity behind his choice without confronting its insidious implications.

As I read the scene in Henson’s autobiography, I thought about the way in which Black people were routinely conscripted to enact the violence of slavery upon one another even as they experienced it themselves. To be enslaved, Henson understood, was to be constantly presented with a series of impossible choices, never knowing whether you’d made the right one. (Had he remained in Ohio, would his mother, still living on Riley’s Maryland plantation, have suffered the consequences?) Henson later described his regret over this fateful decision:

Often since that day has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish, at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery, so many of my fellow-beings. I have wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness.

Isaac Riley kept falling further into debt, and eventually sent an agent to Kentucky to sell all of his enslaved property on his brother Amos’s plantation—except for Henson and his family. Henson watched as the people he had led from Maryland to Kentucky were sold. He watched them cry. He watched them beg. He watched them get hauled away. He knew that this would not have happened but for his decision to leave Ohio. This was the price of the piety that Stowe so admired.

Two years later, accompanying Amos Riley’s 21-year-old son on a trip to New Orleans, Henson stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He saw many of the people from Maryland whom Riley had sold. “It was the saddest visit I ever made,” he later said.

Four years in an unhealthy climate and under a hard master had done the ordinary work of twenty. Their cheeks were literally caved in with starvation and disease. They described their daily life, which was to toil half-naked in malarious marshes, under a burning, maddening sun, exposed to poison of mosquitoes and black gnats, and they said they looked forward to death as their only deliverance. Some of them fairly cried at seeing me there, and at the thought of the fate which they felt awaited me. Their worst fears of being sold down South had been more than realised. I went away sick at heart, and to this day the remembrance of that wretched group haunts me.

I met Lauren Bokor, an archaeologist and museum educator, in her office at the top of the house where Isaac Riley once lived. The house is now part of the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, which opened in North Bethesda, Maryland, in 2021—one of several signs of renewed public attention for Henson. In recent years, his story has been told in books and in a documentary directed by Jared Brock, who wrote The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War (2018).

Bokor showed me a map of the land that had once belonged to Riley. I looked out the window at the homes lining Old Georgetown Road and asked Bokor if their inhabitants knew that they were living on a former plantation.

“No, I really don’t think so,” she said. Bokor, who is white, grew up and attended high school nearby in Montgomery County in the 2000s. She read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in class but, like many of her colleagues, had never heard of Henson before she applied to work here. (Bokor has since left the museum.)

Joyce Greene, a Black woman who became a docent at the museum after she retired, told me she lives up the street. Greene considers herself a deeply engaged student of Black history, but she told me that before her first visit to the museum, she also had never heard of Henson. “I had friends of mine that didn’t even believe that Maryland was a slave state,” Greene told me.

In Riley’s former living room, I told Mark Thorne, the site manager for the museum, that I was having trouble overcoming the emotional hurdle of Henson’s choice to bring his group to Kentucky from Ohio. Thorne, who is Black, said some Black visitors have a hard time forgiving Henson, even if they know that he never forgave himself.

But Thorne believes that Henson’s experience watching his friends get sold, separated, and sent to plantations farther south served as the motivation for his later work helping enslaved people escape to Canada.

“I think that is what gave him the drive. That’s what made him be like, ‘I’ve got to make this right,’ ” Thorne told me. “If he hadn’t done that, would he have been so determined to do good?”

Henson had been unsure, before he set out on that trip to New Orleans, about its purpose, but he soon realized that he was going to be sold. He was furious, and decided to kill the young Riley in his sleep. But just as he was about to bring down the axe, the same Christian conviction that had prevented him from staying in free Ohio prevented him from striking the deadly blow. (This was another moment that Stowe describes as being deeply moving to her.) Instead, in an unexpected turn of events, Henson saved Riley’s son’s life.

Some days after Henson had nearly killed him, Riley’s son became gravely ill with malaria. Henson nursed him back to health. “If I had sold him I should have died,” the young Riley said. To thank Henson, he decided not to sell him.

When Henson returned to Kentucky and was reunited with his family, he vowed not to leave the question of whether he’d be separated from them again to the health or economic circumstances of the Rileys. He was going to escape, and he was going to bring his family with him.

On a moonless Saturday night in September 1830, Henson and his family left the Riley plantation. Sundays were rest days, and on that Monday and Tuesday, he was supposed to work on a farm many miles away; he hoped that they might gain a head start before anyone noticed his absence. For an enslaved person, running away carried enormous risk—most fugitives were caught and returned or died in the process. Running away with a child made a successful journey to freedom all the more improbable. Running away with four children would have seemed like a suicide mission. But Henson was determined. His wife, Charlotte, made him a knapsack that he could use to carry their two youngest children on his back.

For two weeks, the family traveled through insufferable cold, with meager rations, always by night to avoid detection. They were aided by people who were sympathetic to the cause of abolition. After more than a month of travel, Henson came upon a schooner at the edge of Lake Erie. He told a worker on the schooner who he was and what he was doing, and asked for help getting his family across the water to Canada. The ship’s captain, a Scottish man, agreed to bring them to Buffalo, New York, where they could take a ferry across the border.

In Buffalo, the captain arranged and paid for the ferry. Henson was overcome with emotion and thanked the man for his kindness. Before the ferry pushed off from the shore, Henson promised the captain, “I’ll use my freedom well.”

Upon arriving in Canada, Henson fell to the ground, grabbed handfuls of sand, and kissed them as the grains dribbled through his fingers. The 600-plus-mile journey had taken a month and a half. Henson was 41 years old. His family was with him. He was finally free.

Matt Williams

He soon found work on a farm and made a home for his family in a shanty that had previously been occupied by pigs. He used a shovel to get rid of the thick membrane of manure that lined the floors. Over time, as he saved money, he was able to purchase some pigs of his own, a horse, and a cow.

He took seriously the vow he had made to the captain before he crossed into Canada. “After I had tasted the blessings of freedom,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “my mind reverted to those whom I knew were groaning in captivity, and I at once proceeded to take measures to free as many as I could.” After establishing himself in Canada, Henson traveled back to the American South to help others make their way to freedom.

On one trip to Kentucky, in order to prevent white people from thinking that he was a fugitive, he pretended to be mentally ill:

To this end I procured some dried leaves, put them into a cloth and bound it all round my face, reaching nearly to my eyes, and pretended to be so seriously affected in my head and teeth as not to be able to speak … To all their numerous inquiries I merely shook my head, mumbled out indistinct answers, and acted so that they could not get anything out of me; and, by this artifice, I succeeded in avoiding any unpleasant consequences.

The return trip was even more treacherous. At one point, a young boy in the caravan became violently ill. The other members of the group began to take turns carrying him on their back, but his condition worsened. The boy asked to be left in a secluded place to die alone; he didn’t want to hold back the group. It was another impossible choice: care for the boy and risk the entire group being caught, or abandon him? Reluctantly, they left him behind, only for the boy’s brother to soon lament the decision and run back to his sibling. A stroke of luck spared the travelers from further deliberation: They met a Quaker man whose family offered to care for the boy until he recovered, while the rest went on.

The group eventually reached the Canadian shoreline. Henson watched as they crossed the border and experienced a deep sense of pride. “They danced and wept for joy, and kissed the earth on which they first stepped, no longer the SLAVE—but the FREE.”

I wondered whether Henson felt that he had paid his moral debt. Could he ever? Did the 118 people he said he saved from slavery justify the 18 who were sold after his failure to let them stay in Ohio?

At the museum in Maryland, Mark Thorne told me that he believes spending too much time considering what Henson should or shouldn’t have done misses the point. By asking whether his decisions were right or wrong, we focus more on individual actions than on the larger system of barbarity in which those decisions had to be made. As one of Thorne’s colleagues at the museum puts it, “He was trying to be an honorable man in a dishonorable system.”

Or as Henson put it: “Before God I tried to do my best, and the error of judgment lies at the door of the degrading system under which I had been nurtured.”

When Henson was about 50 years old, his son, who had begun a bit of schooling, started teaching his father how to read. The confidence that this skill gave Henson inspired him to imagine a new set of possibilities, both for himself and for those around him. Starting around 1833, Henson worked with a group of other Black refugees to search for land they could call their own. He was chosen to select the location for the group, and soon he came across an area east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River—a township named Dawn. Here, a group of people who had once been tasked with sustaining the land for others might be able to sustain some for themselves.

Henson worked hard to raise money for Dawn. “I have made many journeys into New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine,” he later reflected, “in all of which States I have found or made many friends to the cause.” On a trip to Boston in the 1840s, he met and befriended a politician named Samuel Atkins Eliot. Eliot was moved by Henson’s life story, which he soon decided to write down and read back to Henson for his approval. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself was published in 1849.

The slave narrative was by then an established genre in American literature. These books played an essential role in bringing the experiences and interior lives of formerly enslaved people—almost all of whom had escaped to freedom—to the attention of a wide audience. Because most enslaved people were legally or socially prevented from learning how to read and write, some authors dictated their stories to white abolitionists. Others, like Frederick Douglass, wrote their own stories. The first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself was published in 1845 and became the most famous of the American slave narratives.

[From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it]

In her book, Sharp Flashes of Lightning Come From Black Clouds: The Life of Josiah Henson, Jamie Ferguson Kuhns, a historian who has worked closely with the Josiah Henson Museum in Maryland, writes that Henson’s autobiography sold decently in its first few years. But after the 1853 publication of Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henson’s name became widely known, and sales of his own book exploded. It became one of the three most popular slave narratives in the world, alongside Douglass’s and Olaudah Equiano’s, which was first published in England in 1789.

Scholars have debated when, exactly, Stowe first encountered Henson’s story, when she met Henson, and whether she may have distorted these facts to support the veracity of her book. (Scholars have also noted other figures and slave narratives she likely drew upon for inspiration when creating the character of Uncle Tom. In his book Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds cites “Stowe’s insistence that no individual source yielded any character.” Reynolds names several other possible sources for Tom, including a freedman named Thomas Magruder, who lived in a cabin in Indianapolis known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) According to Henson, Stowe invited him to meet her at her home in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1849. Stowe, he said, was “deeply interested in the story of my life and misfortunes, and had me narrate its details to her.” But the scholar Marion Starling, in her 1981 book, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History, suggests that Stowe’s explicit linking of Henson to Uncle Tom was “an afterthought and a publicity stunt.” In this version of events, Stowe did not meet Henson until 1853, a year after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. Only by 1858, Starling argues, did Stowe begin emphasizing the importance of Henson’s story as a way of providing further legitimacy to her own. That year, Stowe wrote a preface to a new edition of Henson’s autobiography.

[Read: Atlantic articles by Harriet Beecher Stowe]

Stowe’s novel was so popular that it spawned a cottage industry: There were Uncle Tom toys, games, handkerchiefs, even coffee mugs. As Jim O’Loughlin has written, “It was perhaps the most influential cultural text in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America not despite its varied incarnations, but because of them.” But it also sparked a backlash. Before the Civil War, at least 29 “anti-Tom” novels were published, according to Reynolds, many portraying life for enslaved people in the South as better than it was for free Black people in the North.

Anti-Tom minstrel shows also became popular; these performances riffed on the novel’s characters and plot in order to defend slavery. (Stowe could do nothing to stop these performances; federal copyright law did not give authors the right to control adaptations of their work until 1870.) In Stowe’s novel, Tom is a strong, Christian martyr. By contrast, some of the anti-Tom novels and plays present him as weak and docile, in need of, and grateful for, the protection of a white master. Many more people saw Uncle Tom plays than ever read the book. The proliferation of anti-Tom works meant that, over time, the idea of “Uncle Tom” shifted in the public consciousness.

Henson himself was, understandably, ambivalent about the association. “I have been called ‘Uncle Tom,’ and I feel proud of that title,” he reflected in his autobiography. “If my humble words in any way inspired that gifted lady to write such a plaintive story that the whole community has been touched with pity for the sufferings of the poor slave, I have not lived in vain.” In 1876, Henson went on a speaking tour of Great Britain. To draw in audiences, his talks—arranged by John Lobb, a white Englishman who edited the edition of his book published that year—were marketed as an opportunity to see the “original” Uncle Tom. According to Lobb, Henson, then in his late 80s, spoke to more than half a million people during his time in Britain. He even met Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle in early 1877.

But Henson, it seems, may have also grown weary of being tied to the character of Uncle Tom, and perhaps of being overshadowed by him. In a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, Henson made a point of proclaiming that he was his own man—not the character from Stowe’s books or any of that character’s countless popular depictions and distortions. “Now allow me to say that my name is not Tom, and never was Tom,” he said, “and that I do not want to have any other name inserted in the newspapers for me than my own. My name is Josiah Henson, always was, and always will be.”

In the early 20th century, “Uncle Tom” became an epithet used to describe Black people who supported white efforts at segregation. During the civil-rights movement, it was employed as a term of derision among activists—Malcolm X used it frequently in his speeches. As Kuhns notes, he directed it with particular venom toward Martin Luther King Jr. “Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound, or resisting the Ku Klux Klan, by teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th-century or modern Uncle Tom,” Malcolm said—not a hero, but a traitor.

Dresden, Ontario, in early spring was layered with intermittent patches of snow that had fallen in the days before, and the sky was covered in a blanket of silver clouds signaling that another snowstorm was imminent. I had come to visit the site of Henson’s Dawn settlement, a community that covered 200 acres and became a refuge for hundreds of free Black people. Henson’s home still stands here, as does a museum dedicated to his life. Until recently, it was known as Uncle Tom’s Historic Site.

Local members of the Black community had tried to change the museum’s name since the 1990s, but their efforts always fell short. “There were members of the community that were concerned that we’re going to lose that name recognition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So the decision was made to keep it as it was,” Steven Cook, the curator of the museum, told me. Cook is a fifth-generation descendant of refugees who escaped to Canada from Kentucky.

Finally, in 2022, the museum decided to rename the site the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History. Some community members complained that the change amounted to rewriting history. “It soon became apparent to us that they believed that Uncle Tom was an actual person that lived on this road,” Cook said, shaking his head. “So we had that battle against us, to educate the public as to why the fictitious character had taken over Josiah Henson’s real story.”

[From the September 1896 issue: The story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin]

Cook brought me into a room called the Underground Railroad Freedom Gallery. To our right were two glass cases holding some of the tools of torture and control used on Amos Riley’s plantation in Kentucky.

There was a bullwhip with tight, tan coils, its leather tip tied in a knot at the end to intensify the violence of the lash when it struck the backs of the enslaved. There was a speculum oris, whose long black prongs were used to hold open the mouths of enslaved people who refused to eat. There was a thumbscrew, used to crush the fingers of someone who, for example, failed to provide information about the whereabouts of a runaway. There was a billy club, shackles connected to a ball and chain, and a pair of handcuffs so small that they could only have been used on children.

In an adjacent case was an item that I had read about but had never seen in person—an iron collar that would be placed around the neck of an enslaved person to either prevent them from running away or punish them for having already done so. It looked so heavy, so menacing, gleaming under the museum lights.

I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the presence of these tools, imagining how they had been used to punish and torture. But Cook has a different way of thinking about them. “When I’m in this section,” he said, “I always talk about This is why our people resisted. ” Enslavers “had to create these devices and keep adapting them, because we kept escaping. We kept trying and resisting.”

I looked at the iron collar and imagined it wrapped around the neck of an enslaved woman. Maybe she had been trying to escape with her child and was caught in the woods by dogs and men on horses. I thought of how unwieldy the collar would be, how she wouldn’t have been able to bend down and hug her child. I thought about Josiah Henson, and how a collar like this might have been worn by some of the people around him on the Riley plantation. As an overseer, Henson himself had been responsible for ensuring that the other enslaved workers did all that they were supposed to do.

“I often wonder, in that position, did he have to dole out punishment?” Cook said.

Had Henson ever placed someone’s finger in a thumbscrew? Had he ever whipped someone? Had he ever shackled someone to a ball and chain? Had he ever been the one to turn the key that locked an iron collar around a neck? Henson never mentioned an instance like this in his autobiography, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Some historians have estimated that as many as two-thirds of overseers were Black. Even Uncle Tom, at the end of Stowe’s novel, is beaten to death by two Black slave drivers.

The job of every overseer, Black or white, was the same: Control. Production. Punishment. Perhaps this is a reason Henson is excluded from the pantheon of well-known fugitives from slavery; it is difficult to tell a wholly inspiring story about someone who might have, even reluctantly, inflicted the torture themselves.

Cook and I made our way outside, where the temperature had begun to drop as the sun started its slow descent behind the trees. I examined the remnants of the community that Henson had built, and thought about what a loss it is that he has not been part of our collective understanding of the history of slavery. Not every enslaved person was Frederick Douglass. Not every enslaved person was Harriet Tubman. And even those two individuals, as celebrated as they are, were not the morally unadulterated characters that we sometimes make them out to be. Which is to say, they were human. So was Josiah Henson. There is value in reading a slave narrative in which the central protagonist makes morally dubious decisions, regrets them, struggles with them. For the 250 years that the institution existed, generations of people were forced to make a series of impossible decisions within it.

We walked to the far end of the site, where a wooden cabin stood: Josiah Henson’s home. It was here that, on August 1, 1854, he sat with Douglass, who had come to visit the settlement for Canada’s Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the country 20 years prior.

[From the January 1867 issue: Frederick Douglass’s “Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage”]

I looked around and imagined the moment. These two men had, each in his own way, become giants of the antislavery movement. Henson, then in his 60s, was almost 30 years older than Douglass. By this time he had seven children and at least 10 grandchildren. I wondered if they spoke about how unlikely such a meeting would have felt to them all those decades ago, when they were both boys born into bondage in Maryland. I wondered if they traded stories of meeting the sorts of people—presidents, queens, archbishops—who once seemed to exist in a different world. I wondered if they spoke about their books, having both written memoirs that shaped the consciousness of a nation. I wondered if they commiserated over those they had lost. I wondered if they laughed together, remembering something their children or grandchildren had done that had filled their bellies with delight. I wondered if they felt a sense of peace. I hoped so.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Became Uncle Tom.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Two Players Who Tell the Story of U.S. Women’s Soccer

2023-07-25T12:29:24-04:00

In 2019, I stood in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by hundreds of other people adorned in red, blue, and white. It was the semifinals of the Women’s World Cup, and the United States was playing against England. The U.S. women were looking to go on to the final, but this would be no easy feat.

The game moved back and forth: The U.S. scored in the first 10 minutes of the match, and the English scored about 10 minutes later. Then, 31 minutes in, the U.S. captain, Alex Morgan, cut across an English defender and headed in the game-winning goal. She celebrated by pretending to sip a cup of tea. The Atlanta bar went wild, perhaps just as much for the trolling celebration as for the goal. A friend of mine, who spends far more of his time watching the NFL and NBA than women’s soccer, turned to me and said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had watching sports in my life!”

The U.S. would go on to defeat the Netherlands in the final to win its fourth World Cup. But the 2019 tournament was also a special turning point for women’s soccer in America. It’s clear, looking back, that the emotional investment of so many American fans was tied not only to the team’s accomplishments on the field, but also to the national and sporting politics of the moment. For many, Megan Rapinoe, the star of that World Cup who continuously spoke out against homophobia, racism, and sexism, became a symbolic counterweight to the Trump administration. Watching the top women’s soccer player in the world (Rapinoe would officially win the Best FIFA Women’s Player award a few months later) adorned in the colors and crest of the United States provided many fans with a sense of pride in their country after years of political tumult. The success of the women’s team also coincided with their legal fight to be paid equally to the men’s team. Throughout the tournament, many people got the sense that cheering for the national team also meant rooting for the effort to close the gap between men and women in other areas of American life.

[Read: The Women’s World Cup is about more than soccer]

If the 2019 women’s team represented a soccer culture in flux, this year’s squad speaks to something else: how the women’s game in the United States has never been more stable than it is today.

Rapinoe, now 38 and playing in her fourth World Cup, has announced that this will be her last tournament and that she will retire from professional soccer at the end of her domestic season. Rapinoe is the squad’s oldest player, and her journey has been long. After she left the University of Portland, she decided to go professional in 2009. She became the second overall pick of the inaugural Women’s Professional Soccer league at a time when the average salary of a professional women’s player in the U.S. was roughly $25,000. Just a year later, her team folded, and only two years after that, the entire league suspended operations. Rapinoe then played in Australia and France, and even in an amateur league, before joining the newly formed National Women’s Soccer League in the U.S. in 2013. She has played for OL Reign (formerly the Seattle Reign FC) ever since.

Now consider Rapinoe’s teammate, Alyssa Thompson. She is 18 years old, currently in her first season in the NWSL, and, as of Friday’s 3–0 win against Vietnam, the second-youngest player ever to represent the country in a World Cup.

The gap between the experience of the youngest and oldest members of the team tells the story of women’s soccer in the United States. The NWSL is now in its 11th season. The league and the players have their first-ever collective-bargaining agreement, which includes an increase in player salaries, free housing, health insurance, 401(k)s, and formal parental leave. (The new agreement also put in place new protocols for player safety, something that took on an additional, urgent importance following a 2022 report that found that emotional abuse and sexual misconduct were a systemic issue in the league.) More than 1 million fans attended NWSL matches last season. And this season, the average attendance on the opening night beat the league’s previous attendance record by nearly 50 percent.

Thompson’s team, Angel City FC, based in Los Angeles, represents an unprecedented level of success and optimism for women’s professional soccer. The team is owned by a conglomerate of high-profile celebrities including Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Eva Longoria, and Serena Williams, as well as former soccer greats such as Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Shannon Boxx. Their games have been attended by Hollywood stars and have an average home attendance of nearly 20,000 people a game this season, which is higher than the average of more than a dozen Major League Soccer men’s teams. HBO produced a three-part documentary about the team this past May. As of last year, the team reportedly has a valuation of $100 million, twice as much as any other team in the league.

Though she is just in her first professional season, Thompson is quickly becoming the face of the franchise. Michael Holzer has been the private coach of Thompson and her sister Gisele (a year younger and a member of the U.S. Women’s Youth National Team) for the past two and a half years. He told me that Thompson was born with a natural gift for soccer but has also competed against boys and older women since she was about 13 years old. Of both sisters, he said, “I would often put them with adult college players or adult pro players to really test and challenge them.” Holzer also said that many of his sessions with the sisters would begin at 5:30 a.m., before school started, and that the two have pushed each other to a higher level. “They’re so disciplined. That’s what separates them, beyond their talent,” he said. He added something else that differentiates Thompson: “She is also incredibly fast.” (Even that might be an understatement. Thompson ran the 100-meter dash her junior year of high school in 11.69 seconds, one of the fastest times in the state, despite making track practice only periodically because of soccer.)

Thompson hadn’t originally intended to go pro this early. She had committed to Stanford, a longtime powerhouse in women’s soccer that has served as an incubator for future national-team players. But Holzer said that plans changed for Thompson following her national-team debut last year. In October 2022, when she was still in her senior year of high school, she made her first appearance for the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), subbing in for the player she had long admired, Rapinoe. “I think that experience showed her and her family that she’s ready,” Holzer told me. Angel City thought she was ready too, and spent nearly half a million dollars to ensure their selection of Thompson as the first overall pick in the 2023 NWSL draft this January.

Thompson has already shown why Angel City made such a big bet on her. Eleven minutes into her NWSL debut this past March, she received a pass from her teammate on the left side of the field, dropped her shoulder, let the ball run across the front of her body, and fired a shot from about 20 yards out into the top right-hand corner of the net. She became the second-youngest player in the league to score in a debut, and the fourth youngest to score any NWSL goal. She was still two months away from her high-school graduation. A couple of months later, she became the first teenager to make a USWNT roster since 1995.

Still, it is difficult to overstate the amount of groundwork that has been laid for players like Thompson by the athletes who came before them. When Thompson was growing up, many women who played professional soccer had to take on other jobs, most teams struggled to have even a few thousand people show up to games, and little protected the players from exploitation and abuse. The NWSL is still growing, and more can be done to support its athletes, but the landscape of U.S. women’s soccer today is radically different from Rapinoe’s early days. Thompson is acutely aware of this. “I feel like I was born at the right time, because the women’s game is growing so much right now,” she said in a Players’ Tribune interview alongside her Angel City teammate Christen Press, a veteran of the USWNT and winner of two World Cups. Referring to Press, she said, “All the players like you and past national-team players made it to where it is now, and it’s honestly amazing, because this would not be an option” before. In particular, she talked about her amazement at substituting for Rapinoe in her debut: “I could not stop thinking about going in, like, I can’t believe I’m here.”

Thompson isn’t the only one here—a whole new generation of young women are at this year’s World Cup. There’s 21-year-old Trinity Rodman, who has reportedly signed the most lucrative contract in NWSL history, and there’s 22-year-old Sophia Smith, the reigning U.S. Women’s Player of the Year, who scored twice in the opening game against Vietnam. These women, and others, represent the present and future of the U.S. national team. It is a legacy they intend to protect.

Radio Atlantic: How Germany Remembers the Holocaust

2023-03-30T06:00:00-04:00

Two years ago I published a book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. The book explores how different historical sites across the United States—including monuments, memorials, and museums—reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. After the book came out, one of the main questions I got from readers asked where public memory was being engaged with more proactively and thoughtfully than what we so often see here in America. I would frequently invoke Germany, citing the work it had done to memorialize the Holocaust. But there came a point where I realized that I was citing the memorials in Germany without having spent any time with the memorials in Germany.

So I traveled to Germany to examine its landscape of memory for myself. I visited the homes from which Jewish families were taken, the train stations from which they were deported, the concentration camps where they were held, the crematoria where bodies were burned.

I had conversations with Jewish Germans as well as Americans living in Germany, in an effort to understand how we might place the way America memorializes slavery in conversation with the way Germany memorializes the Holocaust.

What I learned is that the story of German memorialization is complex, multifaceted, and still evolving. Just like the story of America’s.

-Clint Smith

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Caitlin Dickerson: So what did you expect to find in Germany? I mean, were you essentially going to pick up lessons for the U.S.? Were you starting to become a little bit skeptical of Germany as this ideal for reckoning and atonement? I mean, what did you have in mind as you set out on this trip?

Clint Smith: I think in part, I went to Germany to put it in conversation with the process of memorialization here in the United States.

Dickerson: I’m Caitlin Dickerson. Today on Radio Atlantic, staff writer Clint Smith on the Holocaust, America’s legacy of slavery, and what it means to memorialize tragedy.

Smith: So it wasn’t necessarily to compare and contrast as much as it was an attempt to say, okay, “What’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in the United States? In what ways are these processes in conversation with one another?” America in so many places fails to properly memorialize and remember and account for its relationship to the history of slavery; what’s a place that does this well?

Dickerson: So where in Germany did you go to try to figure this out?

Smith: I went to a range of different places, including the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is this idyllic mansion outside of Berlin where the leaders of the Nazi party got together to outline and plan the contours of the Final Solution.

Clint: I’m here standing outside of the House of the Wannsee Conference. Already by the time they met here, people had been killed in mass murders—but this is where they would plan out how they would kill millions more. There’s a profound sort of juxtaposition between the scenery and the idyllic nature of it, and the terrible thing that was planned inside of it. Behind it is this lake with sailboats that are slowly passing by. The water sort of lapping against the shore. Can hear birds and wind chimes. It’s a strange thing. It’s a very strange thing.

Smith: If you could say your name and your position...

Deborah Hartmann: Okay. So my name is Deborah Hartmann.

Smith: And one of the people that I spoke to when I went to the House of the Wannsee Conference was Deborah Hartmann, who is the director of that museum. And one of the things we talked about in particular that I found really fascinating was the need to focus on not only the victims of the Holocaust, but also the perpetrators.

Hartmann: I think we have to learn something about the perspective of the perpetrators and not only about the perpetrators but also about the bystanders, and all those who were in a way involved. And this could be the neighbor who was not a member of the Nazi party, but who was just hanging around and had a nice view out of the window seeing neighbors being deported.

Smith: Which was so many people.

Hartmann: Yeah, of course.

Smith: It’s interesting, because I think part of what this place does, in some ways, is humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators.

Hartmann: Yes. And it is important, I think—because, of course, they were human beings as well. And, you know, in the afternoon, people who participated in the mass shootings wrote nice letters to their families at home.

Smith: They killed people in the morning, and wrote letters to their family and their children in the afternoon.

Hartmann: Exactly. And this is maybe what’s so difficult for us to understand. And to live with it.

Dickerson: She’s challenging, in a few different ways, the oversimplification of narratives around the Holocaust. And also: Humanizing the perpetrators is worth doing, because actually, human beings perpetrated this. It wasn’t fantastical characters of evil, but actual human beings.

Smith: Yeah; I think one of the things that she takes very seriously in her work is ensuring that we are not falling into the trap of reducing the people who are part of this history into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Hartmann: And you know, then you suddenly see that the history is much more ambivalent, and it’s much more complicated. And today, I think that the Germans actually are very proud of what they have achieved in terms of confrontation, like with the past and coming to terms. But I think it becomes difficult when they feel—I don’t know, the term in English—maybe relieved. You understand what I mean?

Smith: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Hartmann: Because then it can turn into a very problematic direction.

Smith: This idea that “We’ve already done it.”

Hartmann: I mean, here you can see: Okay, this is still very challenging, I think, for Germans. Even in the fourth generation today. How can it be okay that my family was somehow involved in those atrocities?

Deidre Berger: I mean, there wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war.

Smith: Deidre Berger is an American woman who’s lived in Germany for many years. And both in America and in Germany, she has been deeply involved in Jewish organizations and Jewish advocacy groups, to ensure that Jewish people and Jewish history are accounted for. And the two of us got together on a chilly day in October at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin.

Berger: And we had the Nuremberg trials in the late ’40s. There were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the early/mid-1960s. And still, most perpetrators were never accused or tried or charged. And there was the attitude of “Let’s leave it behind us.”

This—this went right into the heart of families, and it tore families apart. And so they’d rather not talk about it. When I came to Germany in the mid-1980s, there was not much of a confrontation within families. So it took a very long time. A lot of the international climate was such that I think more of an understanding evolved, at least in the German political elite, of the importance of confronting the Holocaust, and also on the grassroots level.

So the 1960s is when the grassroots movement started in Germany to try and understand better what had happened in my town, what happened to the Jews. And there were quite a lot of good-minded Germans who pursued projects, who invited former members of their community who were Jewish, back to their towns. And out of this movement grew the idea that there needed to be a national monument. So it was a complicated conglomeration of interests that led to the establishment of this monument. I don’t know that there was one government who said, “You have to do this,” but it was an understanding in Germany that this was important to have a national symbol of recognition of German guilt for what had happened.

Dickerson: Clint, what does this monument—this symbol of recognition that she’s describing—actually look like?

Smith: So, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a 200,000-square-foot memorial at the heart of downtown Berlin. And when I say at the heart of downtown Berlin, I really mean it. It’s almost as if a massive memorial to slavery was placed in front of the White House. That’s sort of the first thing you notice. And it’s made up of more than 2,000 stone columns that are of different heights. And as you walk through the stone columns, it’s almost maze-like. And the ground beneath the columns rises and falls like waves, and so at different points within the space, you know, you have different amounts of light. So sometimes as your body moves down, it’ll get darker and darker.

And I think it’s a place that is meant to be haunting and overwhelming. But what’s also true is that it is a place that has become such an enmeshed part of the landscape. People are driving to work, people are walking their dogs, people are running. There are people who have obviously come there to engage with the space. And so I would see people who were crying and holding hands, sort of gently touching the stones as if it could sort of transport them back to this moment. There were also small children who were playing hide-and-seek—and so different people engage with the space in fundamentally different ways. And I think in some ways, that’s inevitable. But it’s also something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

There are many people who’ve commented that the very name is too passive—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That it doesn’t talk about who did the murdering. There are those who say it’s too abstract. There are no names on the columns, but there are also those who believe that its size and its scale and its scope is unlike anything that any other country has ever done.

Smith: Do you remember when you first came here—when you first saw it and experienced it?

Berger: Yeah, when it was opened in 2005. I find it…very cold. And I’m not sure that I need this much concrete detail with all these stones to grasp the dimensions of this crime. But different people have different reactions. I think in the Jewish community, my reaction was fairly widespread. But on the other hand, I mean—I think there was a certain acceptance and degree of relief, almost, that there was a Holocaust monument that was finally erected in the heart of Berlin, very close to the German Parliament.

Smith: Oh, the German Parliament.

Berger: And that’s just on the other side, basically. And that was meaningful.

Smith: There’s nothing that Japan has built to account for Japanese imperialism of this scale. There’s nothing that the United States has built to account for a history of Indigenous genocide or chattel slavery. You know—this sort of thing at this size doesn’t exist anywhere [else]. And so different people fall on different ends of the spectrum about whether they think it is a space that is a net positive or not, whether it’s a place that does more good or more harm. And that was one of the things that I learned a lot from my conversation with Deidre Berger and others.

Berger: I’m not complaining, I think it is quite remarkable. Let’s keep in mind that in the center of a major city, a country acknowledges its guilt at genocide.

Dickerson: Berger talks about this desire already in the 1940s among some to move on and to forget. I’m interested in that impulse. I remember interviewing David Romo. He’s a historian of the U.S.-Mexico border and actually found that it was the U.S. Border Patrol that began using Zyklon B in its own gas chambers. That helped to inspire German scientists, who then brought them to Germany, turned up the potency of—of the solution and—and used it to kill Jewish people. He talked about amnesia and about forgetting as a response to shame—on both the sides of the perpetrators, but also the victims. It sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about just how dangerous that can be.

Smith: Yeah;, I think that we have seen the direct implications of that. I mean, here in the United States, there was a very intentional, proactive attempt to distort and push aside the story of chattel slavery and what the Civil War was fought over. The idea perpetuated by the widows and the sisters and the mothers—who lost their husbands, brothers, who lost their sons, their nephews—that grief animated a desire to tell a very different story of who these men were and what they had died for. Because they didn’t want to remember their loved ones as someone who died perpetuating evil. They wanted to remember them with love. They began to talk about how slavery wasn’t central to the Civil War. How even if slavery had been central to the Civil War, it wasn’t even that bad; it was a benign or even a civilizing institution. And even if someone wasn’t actively perpetuating and disseminating misrepresentations about the Civil War and slavery, what there was was silence about it. And it’s interesting, because in Germany, there was its own version of silence after the end of the war—and it took generations before these monuments would be built. And this silence was eradicated.

Dickerson: Clint, you saw a lot of memorials while you were in Germany. Which ones stuck out to you most?

Smith: I remember the first time I saw the Stolpersteine, which are the brass stones that are placed in front of the former residences, or places of worship or places of work, of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.

It was started by a guy named Gunter Demnig in 1996, whose own father was a Nazi soldier. And in many ways, this art project that he began seems to be a part of his own contrition.

And so these brass stones, these 10-by-10-centimeter stones, are placed in front of these homes—and they have the birthday, the death date, the deportation date of the people who were taken from these homes. This is the largest decentralized memorial in the world. And you’ll be walking down the streets of Berlin, and there will be two stumbling stones. And then you walk a little further down, and in front of another home there will be four. And in front of another home there will be seven. In front of another home, there will be 12.

Smith: Where are you from originally in the States?

Jennifer Neal: Uh, short answer: We moved a lot.

Smith: Got it.

Neal: But I tell everybody I’m from Chicago, because that’s the last American city I lived in before I left.

Smith: I met up with Jennifer Neal, who is an author and a journalist who lives in Berlin, calls Chicago home, and is a Black woman who is thinking about how Germany memorializes its past and is comparing it to how the United States is remembering its own past. And one of the things we talked about was the Stolpersteine and how prevalent they are, and in so many ways how effective they are.

Neal: I love that memorial, because it doesn’t give anybody an excuse to forget. And if you are one of those people who lives in the building that was formerly occupied by that victim, you see that every single day. And I think it’s one of the most brilliant memorials anywhere.

Smith: Hmm. Do you think that we could do something like that in the States? You know, I can’t help but wonder what a version of that tied to slavery would look like.

Neal: I mean, I’d be extremely curious to see what that looked like. I think in general, the United States hasn’t done jack shit enough to atone for slavery. I mean, where to begin? I think that’s the real question. I would love to see something along the lines of the Stolpersteine done in the United States, but I wouldn’t want it to stop there. I would want to see memorials like that all over the South and the North as well, to commemorate how slaves escaped from the South and went and moved to the North. I would love to see memorials like that to commemorate the victims who were forcibly sterilized in the United States.

I would love to see memorials to the victims of white flight and the housing crisis in Chicago. I would love to see memorials to the Great Migration. I would love to see memorials of all sorts like that. Will that happen? That’s where the question mark is.

Smith: It’s almost like if we did it, it would be the entire street—you know, because it’s 250 years. I mean, in front of Monticello. Like, what would that do to somebody when they entered that place?

Neal: Well, yeah; that’s a really powerful idea, because I know that a lot of the plantations have been rebranded as, like, venues for weddings and parties. And there are still so many people who don’t seem to understand or know why the U.S. Civil War was fought to begin with. And these plantations don’t really seem to be advertising what happened there. I think it’s also part of the problem.

Smith: But not everybody’s a huge fan of the stumbling stones or how ubiquitous they are. And Deidre Berger has her own complicated feelings about them.

Berger: Why should we be stepping on the memories of the victims? If anyone it should be perpetrators, although I’m not one for revenge or vindication, I don’t think we should step on people, whatever kind of person they were. There should be plaques on the wall. Why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying Here’s where a Jewish family lived. And that’s the truth. And that’s not what people talk about. There’s a lot of reverence sometimes for this project that I’ve encountered, and people who work on it—sort of “I’ve done my penance now.” There’s enormous projections with this project on dead Jews.

Would it work in the States? I just don’t know. I’m not sure that it would, because there’s not a feeling of penance in the same way—of responsibility, unfortunately. And the time span [since the Civil War] is much further. I mean why shouldn’t we? But it’s the reality.

Dickerson: So, Clint, you went to Germany to better understand how it remembers the Holocaust and to put these two very different sets of circumstances in conversation with one another. In the United States, because of the very specific way in which slaves had been extracted from their homes and then were further separated from family, people pretty much know, right—as much as you and I do—that we’re the descendants of enslaved people. And the story often ends there.

You don’t have people who can walk around and tell their relatives’ very specific story from the beginning. I wonder if that plays a role. And can you talk about some of the other differences between the ways that they remember this past?

Smith: Yeah. You know, the most obvious is that there are still people who are alive today who survived the Holocaust. Another big difference is that in Germany there just aren’t many Jewish people left. Less than 200,000 Jewish people in Germany—which is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. And that’s very different than in the United States, where there are 40 million Black people.

Dickerson: Right. And I wonder, you know, did you come away thinking that anything like what’s happened in Germany could happen in the United States? And what would that take?

Smith: I think in the United States, it’s a question of scale, right? I mean, there are people in different parts of the United States who are building memorials and museums that are meant to directly account for this history. You know, I think about the Witness Stone Project in Connecticut, that was started by a group of middle-school and high-school educators who, along with their students—having been inspired by the Stolpersteine in Germany—would put down similar stones in places where enslaved people lived. And they’ve been doing that project for several years. It is happening.

And I think what is true is what I think is true in Germany: that the most meaningful monuments don’t necessarily have to be state sanctioned. I think so often, the most important memorials and museums and monuments are the ones that are created in local communities. And it is ordinary people who will be the ones to help this country see its history with clear eyes and honesty, even when this country tries to look the other way.

Dickerson: I mean will you continue to invoke Germany in your talks, and will you continue to think of it as a type of model for remembering the past?

Smith: I will continue to invoke Germany, though with a level of nuance and an additional acknowledgment of its complexity than perhaps I did before. And my hope is to continue thinking about this question. I’ve kind of become obsessed with how people remember the past.

Dickerson: I even wonder if this nuance makes it feel more accessible to Americans. You know, it’s not the case that all of German society rallied around these memorials, that everybody agreed that it was the right way to go. There’s something that makes it feel more accessible as a source of inspiration, knowing that it was fraught work. It still is today. And yet, you know, it’s been done again and again.

Smith: Yeah, it makes it feel less distant; it makes it feel less unachievable. You know, we’re in a moment right now where reckoning looks different than it has at any other point in my lifetime. Which isn’t to say it has been linear or perfect, or without backlash. But even amid the backlash, I think [it] still reflects an opportunity and a moment that is ripe for these sorts of memorials and monuments to come about.

Dickerson: Thanks so much, Clint. I really appreciate this conversation.

Smith: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having it with me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez and Theo Balcomb, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. Thanks to producer Ethan Brooks and our engineer, Rob Smierciak. I’m Caitlin Dickerson.

The Gun

2023-03-29T10:05:10-04:00

the gun heard the first shot the gun thought it was a bursting pipe the
gun heard the second shot and the third and the fourth the gun real-
ized this was not a pipe the gun’s teacher told everyone to get on the
ground the gun’s teacher went to lock the door the gun saw glass
break and the teacher slump and bleed and fall silent the gun
texted its parents and said i love you i’m so sorry for any trouble i’ve
caused all these years you mean so much to me i’m so sorry the gun
thought it would never leave the classroom the gun moved to a closet
filled with several other shaking guns the gun texted its best friends in
the group chat to see if they were okay the gun waited on a response
the gun received one the gun did not receive another the gun waited
for an hour the gun heard the door kicked open the gun was still in
the closet and didn’t know who had entered the room the gun thought
this was the end the gun thought of prom and graduation and college
and children and all the things the gun would never have the gun heard
more bullets the gun heard he’s down! the gun climbed out of the closet
the gun put its hands on its head the gun walked outside the gun
saw the cameras the gun hugged its sobbing mother and cried into her
arms the gun heard thoughts and prayers the gun heard Second Amend-
ment the gun heard lone wolf the gun texted its friend again the gun
waited for a message the message never came

Nomenclature

2023-03-05T08:00:00-05:00

After Safia Elhillo

Your mother’s mother came from Igboland
though she did not teach your mother her language.
We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand
because gravity is still there
even when we cannot see it in our hands.

I ask your mother’s mother to teach me
some of the words in hopes of tracing
the shadow of someone else’s tongue.

The same word in Igbo, she tells me, may have four different
meanings depending on how your mouth bends around
each syllable. In writing, you cannot observe the difference.

The Igbo word n’anya means “sight”
The Igbo word n’anya means “love”

Your grandmother said,
I cannot remember the sight of my village
orYour grandmother said,
I cannot remember the love of my village

Your grandmother’s heart is forgetting
or Your grandmother’s heart is broken

Your grandmother said,
We escaped the war and hid from every person in sight
orYour grandmother said,
We escaped the war and hid from every person in love

Your grandmother was running from danger
or Your grandmother was running from vulnerability

Your grandmother said,
My greatest joy is the sight of my grandchild
or Your grandmother said,
My greatest joy is the love of my grandchild

Your grandmother wants you present
or Your grandmother wants you home

Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset

2023-02-02T12:22:59-05:00

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.

The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.

I first stumbled upon Willows when Googling examples of sunsets with my 5- and 3-year-old children so that we might be better equipped to draw our own.

Sunsets are a recurring theme in van Gogh’s work. He was drawn to them. He was moved by them. In a letter to his brother Theo on July 5, 1888, he wrote:

Yesterday at sunset I was on a stony heath where some very small and twisted oaks grow; in the background, a ruin on the hill, and wheat in the valley. It was romantic, you can’t escape it … The sun was pouring bright yellow rays on the bushes and the ground, a perfect shower of gold. And all the lines were lovely, the whole thing nobly beautiful.

I’ve been thinking about van Gogh’s painting this week as Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old man who died in early January after being beaten by five Memphis police officers, was laid to rest. In interviews, Nichols’s relatives have attempted to ensure that he is remembered as a man beyond the gruesome video of his beating. One piece of information from these interviews stood out to me: Tyre Nichols also loved sunsets.

“That day, when he left around 3 o’clock, he was on his way to Shelby Farms, because my son—every night—wanted to go and look at the sunset,” Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, said about her son and his trips to the Shelby Farms skate park. “That was his passion. Going to Shelby Farms to watch the sunset and take pictures.”

[David A. Graham: Inhumanity in Memphis]

Yesterday, I saw a photo of Nichols that seemed to capture his love of those daily moments. He is wearing a pair of black sunglasses, a dark tank top, and a necklace. Behind him, the sun is setting beyond some trees, showering the left side of his face in a brilliant cascade of yellow light. He is standing next to a car, with both the driver’s-seat and back-seat doors open, as if they are inviting the sun to come sit down and take a ride. It is a selfie, the sort of photo that Nichols looks to have taken quickly, in order to, like van Gogh, capture a moment—a feeling, an image—that he wanted to hold on to. Perhaps Nichols was on his way to the skate park. Perhaps he was on his way to pick up his 4-year-old son. Perhaps he was teaching his son how to skateboard. Perhaps they were going to watch the sunset at the skate park together.

I don’t know if Nichols was familiar with van Gogh’s work, but I know that the two of them shared a sense of wonder in observance of this daily miracle. This phenomenon that is at once so common, and yet so worthy of our attention.

I haven’t always stopped to watch sunsets. I often fall victim to the plague of feeling too busy: Deadlines to make. Soccer practices to bring the kids to. Dinner to cook. Emails to check. But Nichols’s photo, and his mother’s words about his love, have reminded me of how important it is to sit still with these moments. To more fully incorporate into my life the ritualistic forms of praise to the world around us that Nichols did into his.

Understanding this fact about Nichols also gives us a different sense of what has been lost. It is not only that these Memphis police officers stripped a family of a son, a father, a friend. They stripped away Nichols’s ability to watch more sunsets, to sit in observance of these reminders of how precious and miraculous life is.

Nichols deserved to live a long life. He deserved more time with his family. He deserved more sunsets.

The Joy of Morocco

2022-12-16T18:16:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

There is a video from the World Cup that I can’t stop watching.

It’s not of Christian Pulisic’s self-sacrificial goal against Iran that sent the United States into the round of 16, or Lionel Messi dancing past a Croatian defender before providing the assist that sealed Argentina’s place in the final. It’s not even of France’s Kylian Mbappé tormenting world-class defenders in ways we have seen only a few times in the history of the game.

The video I can’t stop watching is of the Moroccan midfielder Sofiane Boufal dancing on the field with his mother after Morocco defeated Portugal to become the first African team, and the first Arab team, to ever make it to a World Cup semifinal. The moment lasts for only about 30 seconds but perfectly captures the joy that Morocco has brought to the tournament and the regions, cultures, and diaspora that its players represent.

There is something about the way the 29-year-old Boufal grabs his mother’s hands—at once gentle and exhilarated—the way he might have when he was a child; something about the way he begins hopping around in circles while music from the stadium speakers blares and his mother laughs, shuffling her feet in an attempt to keep up; something about the way he bends his body down so that he meets her at eye level, and smiles the way a son does when he knows he’s made his mother proud. Something about how, after they stop dancing, Boufal wraps his arm around his mother and kisses her on the forehead, while she kisses his hand. It is such a pure and simple expression of joy—a mother and son, holding each other close, both of them fully present and in awe of each other and the experience they get to share.

It is hard to overstate the significance of Morocco’s achievement. During the last World Cup, no African team made it out of the tournament’s group stage, and no African team in history has ever advanced as far—and Morocco had what it took to have gone even further. For large parts of its semifinal game against France, Morocco was the better, more dangerous team. Throughout the competition, Morocco played with passion, with heart, and with creativity, and defeated some of the top teams in the world in the process. It was a pleasure to watch them.

As Mbappé said to his dear friend, the Moroccan defender Achraf Hakimi, with whom he plays at Paris Saint-Germain, “Everybody is proud of what you did—you made history.”

The Absurd Talent of Kylian Mbappé

2022-12-10T12:39:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

There is no player in the world right now like Kylian Mbappé.

In the 2018 World Cup four years ago, Mbappé burst onto the international stage as a 19-year-old, scoring four times in the tournament, including a breathtaking goal in the final. France won the World Cup, and Mbappé, still a teenager, had already achieved what has eluded some of the greatest players of all time.

Four years later, Mbappé is the top talent on an immensely talented French team looking to defend its World Cup title. But having watched him play over the past two weeks, I’ve realized that Mbappé is not just another elite player, or even world-class player; he is becoming one of the best to have ever played the game.

To some, this might sound like hyperbole, given that we’re talking about a 23-year-old. You might be rolling your eyes as you read this. You might be saying to yourself, Calm down, Clint; turn off the TV and go take a walk. I admit, when I first typed this, I had to delete it and rewrite it a few times just to be sure that I meant it. But it’s true. We are watching a player whose talent is on par with the greatest to have ever stepped on the field.

Of course, he is still young. Of course, there is more for him to achieve and prove. Of course, the measure of a player’s career is usually determined, in part, by its longevity and not just by a few years of brilliance (especially in this era of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, athletes who have played at an elite level for 20 years). But if we are talking simply about some of the best players to have ever touched the pitch, this World Cup, Mbappé has further proved that his name should be on that list.

If you watch Mbappé play, you know that so much of his quality as a player lies beyond the realm of that which can be measured empirically. He is almost always the fastest player on the field, a fact that animates the micro-decisions every player on the opposition team makes any time France gets the ball. It’s how his movement off the ball is akin to a dragonfly, leaving defenders running forwards, backwards, and often spinning around in confusion. It is how opposing coaches will draft up entire game plans meant to stop him, forcing their teams to play in ways that they are not accustomed to and diminish their own strengths. It is how, when the ball comes to him, he draws in multiple defenders—as they know no single person could handle him alone—to open up space for his other teammates, much like the NBA superstar Steph Curry, whose most valuable quality, I would argue, is not necessarily his majestic jump shot but how the prospect of the aforementioned jump shot opens space for his teammates when he gets the ball.

But if we were to look at empirics—specifically in the context of the World Cup—one remarkable data point is that Mbappé has already scored five goals in four games for the French team, bringing his World Cup total to nine goals over the span of two tournaments. As the Italian journalist Fabrizio Romano has pointed out, he has more goals than Diego Maradona, Ronaldo, Luis Suárez, Zinedine Zidane, Neymar, Thierry Henry, and countless other legends of the game. He has one less goal than Lionel Messi, but Messi is playing in his fifth World Cup; again, Mbappé is playing in his second.

I just have to pause for a second to say that this is absurd.

In France’s most recent round-of-16 game, against Poland, Mbappé’s skills were on full display. So much so that the FIFA YouTube channel made a video featuring highlights of the game simply entitled “The Mbappe Show.”

Mbappé provided an assist to Olivier Giroud on France’s first goal of the game, a goal that made Giroud the all-time leading scorer in French history, passing my all-time favorite player, Thierry Henry, with 52 goals. The irony of Mbappé providing Giroud with the assist to break the record is that—if he remains healthy—Mbappé will almost certainly break that record. Giroud has scored his 52 goals in 117 competitive appearances; Mbappé has already scored 33 goals with potentially another decade or more to play.

But it was Mbappé’s first goal of the match (he scored twice, because of course he did) that was emblematic of the multiple dimensions of his game, and the sheer fear he instills in opponents.

In the 74th minute, the French winger Ousmane Dembélé cut across the pitch from the right-hand side. He passed it through a group of Polish defenders to an open Mbappé, who collected the ball at the top of the box. What happened next was probably bizarre to the casual viewer. As Mbappé got the ball, the two Polish defenders in front of him seemed to approach him in slow motion, then stood almost still in front of him, like a pair of deer standing in the middle of the highway watching an oncoming Ferrari. It was strange to see defenders give Mbappé so much space, but they had clearly backed so far away from him because they knew that if they got too close, Mbappé would simply blow past them. So they stayed back, and Mbappé made them pay. Mbappé took three small touches, collected himself as if he had enough time to pack a carry-on bag for his flight back to Paris, then sent a shot from 16 yards out exploding into the back of the net.

Not since the original Ronaldo—the Brazilian striker who, in the 1996–97 season, scored 47 goals in 49 games—have I seen a player whose combination of speed, technical ability, and fearlessness are similar to what we’re seeing from Mbappé now.

Messi, Mbappé’s teammate at Paris Saint-Germain, is, to my mind, the very best player in the history of the game. Watching him play in this—likely his final—World Cup has been an extraordinary joy, in part because he has proved that he is still an unmatched talent, even at the age of 35. However, as dynamic as Messi can still be, at this stage of his career, what he instills in opposing players is more akin to reverence than sheer fear. After Argentina defeated Australia in the round of 16, a group of Australian players waited outside Argentina’s locker room so that they could take pictures with him.

The only player in the world at the moment who might instill as much fear in his opponents as Mbappé is Erling Haaland, the 22-year-old Norwegian wunderkind who plays for the English powerhouse Manchester City. But even Haaland, whose national team did not qualify for the World Cup, is not as dynamic a player as Mbappé, who is able to create opportunities for himself seemingly out of nothing.

France will play England in the quarterfinals of the World Cup this afternoon, when Mbappé has the opportunity to build on a legacy that, in many ways, is still in its early days. It’s remarkable to think that we are witnessing a player who is already the best in the world, who likely is not at the height of his talents. Sometimes, fans and commentators can get so caught up in questions of where a player will end up at the end of their career, that we fail to fully appreciate what is in front of us. Even if Mbappé never played another game, he is already a wonder.

What We Ask of Black American Athletes

2022-11-29T11:49:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

In a press conference yesterday, Tyler Adams, the 23-year-old captain of the U.S. men’s national soccer team, was chastised by an Iranian journalist for mispronouncing the name of his country (Adams pronounced it eye-ran as opposed to ee-rahn) before following up to ask whether, as a Black American, Adams felt uneasy representing a country that has a history of discrimination against Black people. Adams was characteristically thoughtful and measured in his response. “My apologies on the mispronunciation of your country,” he began. He continued:

That being said, there’s discrimination everywhere you go. One thing that I’ve learned—especially from living abroad in the past years and having to fit into different cultures and kind of assimilate into different cultures—is that in the U.S., we’re continuing to make progress every single day.

Growing up for me, I grew up in a white family with obviously an African American heritage and background, as well. So I had a little bit of different cultures, and I was very, very easily able to assimilate in different cultures. Not everyone has that, that ease and the ability to do that, and obviously it takes longer for some to understand. Through education, I think it’s super important—like you just educated me now on the pronunciation of your country. It’s a process. I think, as long as you see progress, that’s the most important thing.

Adams, who has a white mother and a Black biological father but was raised in a white family, has an experience that’s distinct from that of most Black Americans. As a result, his answer to the Iranian journalist’s question might have a different shape than the answer of another Black American—or even another of his Black teammates with a different upbringing—might have been. That doesn’t make his experience any less legitimate; Blackness is and always has been heterogeneous.

The Black players on this U.S. team reflect that diversity: Tim Weah was born in Brooklyn to a Jamaican mother and a father who is currently the president of Liberia; Yunus Musah was born in New York to Ghanaian parents and grew up in Italy and England; Kellyn Acosta was born and raised in Texas, and his paternal grandmother is Japanese; Sean Johnson was born in Georgia to Jamaican parents; Sergiño Dest was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and a Surinamese American father; Jedi Robinson was born and raised in England but has an American father from White Plains, New York; Shaq Moore was born in Georgia and moved to Spain when he was 18; Weston McKennie was raised in Texas but had a father in the Air Force and spent some of his earliest years in Germany; Cameron Carter-Vickers grew up in England the son of a man from Louisiana who played professional basketball, and his mother is from Essex; Haji Wright was born in Los Angeles to parents of Liberian and Ghanaian descent; DeAndre Yedlin was born in Seattle and raised by a Jewish mother.

There are 11 Black players on the U.S. roster for this World Cup (a number that would have seemed unfathomable to me as a Black kid growing up playing the game), and their backgrounds reflect the plurality (and growing internationalism) of Black American life. Still, the question the Iranian journalist asked of Adams could have been asked of many of his teammates. It is one that is not unfamiliar to Black Americans of all stripes, who have wrestled with what it means to represent a country that for so long has—explicitly and more subtly—treated Black Americans as second-class citizens.

In hearing Adams, I immediately thought of one of the first Black American athletes who had to publicly wrestle with the relationship between their Black identity and their American identity. In 1936, the track star Jesse Owens—the son of sharecroppers and the grandson of people born into slavery—went on to become the first American track-and-field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympic Games. These victories came at a moment when the Nazi Party was ascendant in Germany; Hitler had come to power in 1933 and had laid an ideological foundation on claims of Aryan superiority. Owens’s performance at the Olympic Games in Germany demolished such absurd claims and undermined the phrenological junk science that Nazis were using to ground their burgeoning political project.

Reports soon followed that Hitler snubbed Owens after his win; some in the U.S. press latched on to these stories, though it was later revealed that Owens and Hitler “exchanged waves” in the stadium. Decades later, Owens went on to say that white Americans should be less concerned by how he was treated in Germany and pay more attention to the way he was treated at home in America:

When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference?

Shortly upon his return from the Games, in a speech delivered to a Black crowd in Kansas City, Missouri, Owens proclaimed: “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

Owens was correct. Roosevelt did snub him. Following the 1936 Olympics, only white American athletes were invited to the White House. Roosevelt did not want to upset Southern Democrats, whose support he needed in order to maintain his fragile New Deal coalition, and inviting Black athletes to the White House was a nonstarter. Not until 2016, when President Barack Obama invited the 1936 Black athletes and their families to the White House, were those athletes officially recognized by a U.S. president for their accomplishments.

After Owens, there was Muhammad Ali—then known as Cassius Clay—who won a gold medal for the United States as an 18-year-old at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. After he won the medal, the young boxing champion was ecstatic: “I didn’t take that medal off for 48 hours,” he said.

But only seven years later, when Ali was drafted—and refused—to serve in the Vietnam War, he spoke plainly as to why. “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over,” Ali said in a press conference a week before his scheduled induction ceremony. “If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow.”

In 1968, the track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith stood on the podium in Mexico City and lifted their fists—covered in black gloves—into the air. Smith later said, “If I win, I am American, not a Black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are Black and we are proud of being Black. Black America will understand what we did tonight.”

To be sure, Tyler Adams is in a different position than some of the aforementioned athletes, whose successes were, largely, the products of individual athletic pursuits rather than team-oriented accomplishments. Adams is the captain of a team with players from a range of racial backgrounds. When he speaks in these press conferences, he is representing not just himself, but the entire group.

Born in 1999, Adams has also grown up in a different America than that of Owens, Ali, Carlos, and Smith. As he said during the press conference, there has been progress. This, of course, does not mean that rampant racism does not continue to exist. Black Americans experience both interpersonal and structural racism every day. Adams knows this. But he also knows that acknowledging progress doesn’t erase a recognition that there is still a need for more of it.

Adams’s response offers not only insight into how well he is able to respond to complex questions of geopolitical significance at a press conference the day before the biggest game of his life, but also an opportunity to consider the long history of Black players being asked about—and asking themselves—what it means to be a Black athlete representing America. Those answers will continue to evolve and vary depending on who is being asked the questions and the context in which they are being asked. But what I know to be true is that these questions won’t stop being asked anytime soon.

A Kid’s-Eye View of the U.S. vs. ‘Whales’

2022-11-22T16:39:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

Typically, when the opening games of the World Cup commence, it is the beginning of summer—a time when I find myself relishing the long hours of sunlight, enjoying enormous platters of barbecue, and wondering how many Popsicles is too many Popsicles for a grown man to eat in a single day. This World Cup, as we know, is different. For the first time in its history, it is not beginning in June; it’s beginning in November. This change is in place because, in the host country of Qatar, holding the World Cup in the summer would be far too hot.

This decision has had far-reaching implications for the players, whose club seasons have been bifurcated in ways they’ve never experienced; for club teams whose seasons have come to a dramatic pause and must figure out what to do for six weeks with their players who are not participating in the World Cup (the vast majority of players in the world). It has also had perhaps unexpected effects on fans, who are watching games in different settings than we are typically accustomed to.

For example, I’m currently back home in New Orleans for the Thanksgiving holiday, and instead of watching games on a summer patio somewhere around Washington, D.C., where I live, I am watching them in my parents’ home surrounded by family, while my two young children have their coloring books, crayons, and apple slices spread across the floor in front of the television.

My son, the older of the two, has recently begun to develop an affinity for soccer and is full of questions. Why does the goalie wear a different color shirt? What does offsides mean? How can someone play for Arsenal and the U.S.A. at the same time?

As we sat down and prepared to watch the U.S. men’s team play Wales in their first World Cup game in more than eight years, my son, who’s 5, looked at the television with a confused face.

“Where is the Wales team?” he turned around and asked.

“They’re right there,” I said, pointing to the men in red belting out their national anthem.

“Those are just regular people,” he said, shaking his head.

It was in that moment that I realized there had been a misunderstanding:

My son was disappointed to realize that the US team was playing a country called Wales and not a large group of whales in what I guess he imagined to be a large soccer-seaworld extravaganza.
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) November 21, 2022

He felt further aggrieved when he realized that the team was not even nicknamed “the whales,” finding it bizarre and nonsensical that they had a picture of a dragon on their crest and not a whale.

Sharing his sentiment on Twitter invited all sorts of people to share their own homophonous misunderstandings as children.

The novelist Brandon Taylor wrote: “Cut to me as a child in primary school, thinking that Diana was the Princess of Whales and had the power to communicate with sea creatures.”

Cut to me as a child in primary school, thinking that Diana was the Princess of Whales and had the power to communicate with sea creatures.
— Brandon (@blgtylr) November 21, 2022

The former Jeopardy champion Buzzy Cohen shared his own childhood misunderstanding of a trip to Miami:

When I was a kid visiting family in Miami my family would point to a stadium and say “That’s where the dolphins play football” and you can just imagine what my lil brain imagined. https://t.co/5yrmlkRJWR
— Buzzy Cohen (@buzztronics) November 22, 2022

Others shared how their understanding of guerrilla warfare was innocently misguided:

In a macabre moment, 7 year old me felt similar disappointment in 1972 that the guerrillas holding hostages at the Olympics were not in fact gorillas. I also did not understand the gravity of the situation.
— Son of None (@Tybird99) November 21, 2022

There were dozens of examples like this. They brought a smile to my face.

I mention these as well because this sort of moment would not be possible if the tournament were being held during its traditional time of year. It would have been held this past summer, and my son would have been in his pre-K summer camp. Instead, here we are in my parents’ home a few days from Thanksgiving, my son asking questions every 30 seconds to make sense of this game his father loves, his younger sister laid across my lap with a fruit pouch in her mouth as I type this with one hand.

The World Cup should have never been held in Qatar, to be sure, but if one is to look for an upside, the timing of the tournament does provide a unique opportunity to share moments that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Listen to Clint Smith discuss the complicated feelings he has for soccer on a special episode of Radio Atlantic:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts