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Worth Noting

It's a little appalling to me that we seem to go out of our way trying to forget the bad things we've done.

I'm not saying we should constantly ruminate on it and beat ourselves up forever because we've caused pain and heartache, but we should be trying to move past whatever it was instead of just putting it out of our minds altogether. How do you learn from something you don't remember?

Here's the story of a guy whose dad was born enslaved in Virginia. He grew up hearing the first-hand recollections of a man who lived some of America's worst history, but never gave up on the promise of a more perfect union.

And something that really sticks in my brain is that we don't even know how many people there are with a background similar to Mr Smith's.

(pay wall)

Daniel Smith, one of the last children of enslaved Americans, dies at 90

He grew up hearing stories from his father, who was born into bondage during the Civil War. Decades later, he marched in Washington and Selma with fellow civil rights activists.

Growing up in the 1930s, Daniel R. Smith would listen to stories from his father, as young boys often do. He was not supposed to hear these stories — they were meant for his older siblings, not for a child as young as 5 or 6 — but after dinner on Saturday evenings he would sneak out of bed and listen to accounts of the “whipping and crying post,” of the lynching tree and the wagon wheel.

These were brutally vivid stories of bondage, for his father had been born into slavery in Virginia during the Civil War and had toiled as a child laborer before making his way north to Connecticut, where the Smiths were among the only African Americans in their town.

“I remember hearing about two slaves who were chained together at the wrist and tried to run away,” Mr. Smith recalled decades later. “They were found by some vicious dogs hiding under a tree, and hanged from it. I also remember a story about an enslaved man who was accused of lying to his owner. He was made to step out into the snow with his family and put his tongue on an icy wagon wheel until it stuck. When he tried to remove it, half his tongue came off.

“My father cried as he told us these things.”

Mr. Smith, who was 90 when he died Oct. 19 at a hospital in Washington, was one of the last remaining children of enslaved Black Americans, and a rare direct link to slavery in the United States. Born when his father was 70, he was part of a generation that dwindled and then all but disappeared, taking with them stories of bondage that were told firsthand by mothers and fathers who, after enduring brutal conditions on Southern plantations, sought to build a new, better life for their families.

Historians say it is impossible to know how many children of enslaved people are left. But while researching her book “Sugar of the Crop: My Journey to Find the Children of Slaves” (2009), author Sana Butler was able to track down about 40 who were still alive. All have since died. Mr. Smith was not featured in the book, although he later met Butler, who helped edit his forthcoming memoir, “Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America.”

His story was “a reminder that slavery was not that long ago,” Butler said. “You talk about the transatlantic slave trade, you talk about Reconstruction, and people really think that it’s history,” something that happened in the distant past and has little relevance today. “Mr. Smith,” she added, “is a reminder that it’s impossible to ‘get over it,’” to move past slavery and act as if it is no longer matters, “because it’s still [present] within these families’ lives.”

It was in part through his father — Abram “A.B.” Smith, who died in a car accident when Daniel Smith was 6 — that he developed a fierce pride and resilience that he carried into his work on civil rights, health care and education. “A lot of Black children grew up in a world where they didn’t know who they were and where they came from,” Mr. Smith told The Washington Post in 2020, “but we were A.B. Smith’s children, and that sustained us through anything.”

After a childhood in which he and his siblings were “poor as church mice,” Mr. Smith served as an Army medic during the Korean War, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, linked arms with fellow civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and ran literacy and anti-poverty programs in rural Alabama, where he once outraced a carload of white supremacists on a dark country road, not stopping until he found shelter at a service station.

Raised in a small Connecticut town, Mr. Smith went on to serve as a medic in the Korean War, march for civil rights and work to bring health care to underserved communities. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Mr. Smith later settled in the Washington area, where in the 1970s he ran a federally funded program called the Area Health Education Centers, working to improve health care in underserved communities across the country. His work took him to apartheid-era South Africa, where he met Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, upon his return, said he was propositioned by a CIA officer who wanted him to spy on the African National Congress liberation movement. (Mr. Smith turned him down.)

Decades later, Mr. Smith was standing in the crowd, moved to tears, as Barack Obama was sworn in as America’s first Black president. He was privileged, he said, to be a part of so much history — “A friend of mine calls me the Black Forrest Gump,” he told the Economist last year — and for a time, at least, he thought little about his family’s own history and his legacy as one of the last surviving children of a man who was considered property rather than a person.

“Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy,” he told The Post. “And I’ve never thought much about it.”

The fifth of six children, Daniel Robert Smith was born in Winsted, Conn., on March 11, 1932. His father was a janitor at a clock factory. His mother, Clara (Wheeler) Smith, was 23 at the time. Little information was available about her life, but Mr. Smith said she was White, with Scotch-Irish and Cherokee ancestry.

After his father’s death, she became a housekeeper and raised Mr. Smith and his siblings with help from a trio of surrogate fathers, including a White veterinarian who gave him a job at his clinic, encouraging Mr. Smith’s lifelong love of animals. He was especially drawn to dogs — Dobermans in particular — and became a member of the county dog obedience training club, taking part in American Kennel Club competitions at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he was one of only a few Black trainers, according to his memoir.

Although he had hoped to serve in the Army’s K-9 Corps, he was told it wasn’t taking Black soldiers, and instead he served as a medic, drawing on his veterinary training while working at a military hospital in Korea.

By 1955 he was back home in Winsted, where flooding killed nearly 100 people throughout Connecticut in the aftermath of Hurricane Diane. The death toll would have been higher were it not for Mr. Smith, who rescued a truck driver from the floodwaters, an act of heroism that was documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Hersey, who was covering the storm for the New Yorker.

About two years later, Mr. Smith found himself in another life-or-death scenario while working at a YMCA camp near Winsted. During a trip to a reservoir where he had once gone swimming, he tried to help a young woman who had disappeared into the deep water and was pulled out by another swimmer. Mr. Smith found that she still had a pulse and began performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then a uniformed police officer began ordering him to stop, insisting that the woman was already dead.

It was immediately clear, Mr. Smith recalled, that the officer was wrong. She still had a pulse. Yet she was White; he was Black. “This remains the most racist incident I have ever experienced in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “To this day, telling this story brings tears to my eyes. To think that someone would rather have anyone die rather than have her white lips touch my Black mouth. Incomprehensible.”

Mr. Smith graduated in 1960 from Springfield College in Massachusetts and was a psychiatric social worker before being accepted to veterinary school at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

By 1963 he had turned from medicine to civil rights, deciding he could contribute more to people than animals. He led an antipoverty program in Lowndes County, just outside Montgomery. The church office he worked in was burned to the ground, and a local judge who helped him get phone service and electricity faced retribution from local residents, who poisoned 21 of his cows, according to an account by journalist Martin Dobrow.

Weeks before King was assassinated in 1968, Mr. Smith moved to the Washington area, where he worked for federal agencies including the Health Resources and Services Administration and raised two children with his first wife, the former Sandra Hawkins. Together they bought a home in Bethesda, Md., that had a racially restrictive covenant — which was no longer being enforced — barring Black or Jewish ownership.

After he retired in 1994, Mr. Smith volunteered at Washington National Cathedral, where he escorted presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while serving as head usher. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 2006 he married Loretta Neumann at the cathedral.

Mr. Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, in 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Mr. Smith, who lived in the Takoma section of the District, was preceded in death by his five siblings. His death was confirmed by his wife, who said he had cancer and congestive heart failure. She survives him, in addition to two children from his first marriage, April Smith Motaung of Columbia, Md., and Daniel “Rob” Smith Jr. of New York; and a granddaughter.

Neumann said that she and Mr. Smith were finalizing his memoir while he was in the hospital and that she planned to self-publish it in the next two weeks through the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose.

Mr. Smith told interviewers he thought the country had made great progress since he was a boy, although he had grown increasingly worried about the future during the Trump administration, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He noted that his father, at least, would have maintained a positive outlook, despite all he had experienced as a child.

“We could never talk negatively about America in front of my father,” Mr. Smith told the Economist. “He did not have much but he really, really loved America. Isn’t that funny?”

On Slavery & War

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Slavery and war are tightly connected – but we had no idea just how much until we crunched the data

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

The 2nd

Do Black people have full Second Amendment rights?

That's the question historian Carol Anderson set out to answer after Minnesota police killed Philando Castile, a Black man with a license to carry a gun, during a 2016 traffic stop.

"Here was a Black man who was pulled over by the police, and the police officer asked to see his identification. Philando Castile, using the NRA guidelines, alerts to the officer that he has a licensed weapon with him," she says. "[And] the police officer began shooting."

It's about the Daddy State, and the rights of slave owners to own slaves.

Like that one lady said, "Count yourselves lucky we just want equality and not revenge."

Shero

People will be free. Live free or die.

A revolution of enslaved plantation laborers in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) begun in August 1791 forced France to legally abolish slavery in its colonies less than three years later. By 1802, however, Napoléon’s forces sought to resurrect the sugar-based economies of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and other French holdings in the Caribbean by re-enslaving freedpeople who had been living as French citizens for eight years. Africans and their descendants fiercely resisted French forces—successfully in Saint-Domingue, unsuccessfully in Guadeloupe. Though little is known of her early life, Solitude is celebrated as a heroine in Guadeloupe for her role in that struggle for lasting freedom in 1802.

Solitude had joined the maroon settlement of La Goyave in the mid-1790s, and during an attack by French General Desfouneaux, she became the leader of a small group that escaped to the hills of Guadeloupe, eluding capture. On May 5, 1802, French ships arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre carrying troops ready to enforce Napoléon’s decree to reinstate slavery on the islands. Battles erupted as Africans and their descendants fought to preserve their freedom.

Solitude, now pregnant, mobilized her followers to join the forces of Louis Delgrès against the French military. They struggled until they were surrounded and outnumbered by the French troops at Danglemont Plantation. Delgrès and approximately five hundred troops allowed the French soldiers to advance into their territory before igniting stores of gunpowder. The strategic suicide plan resulted in the death of approximately four hundred French soldiers. Though most of the maroons died, Solitude survived and was captured and detained in Basse-Terre prison.

The French military brought Solitude and the other survivors before a military tribunal, which sentenced them all to death. Solitude was temporarily pardoned until she gave birth to her child, who became the legal property of her owner. One day after delivering her baby, on November 28, 1802, Solitude was executed. She was thirty years old.

After her death, Solitude disappeared from the annuals of history until the 1960s, though by that time her contemporaries, such as Delgrès, were recognized. Today, Solitude’s name adorns squares, avenues, a library, and a museum room in Guadeloupe. Solitude’s bravery and courage is remembered in songs, poems, and the musical Solitude la Marronne.