Part of what Monticello is doing, too, is trying to sort of complicate notions of the history that we've been taught in saying that we cannot understand what Sally Hemings' relationship to Jefferson was as something that was fully consensual because he owned her. And in order to understand it as a plantation, we have to understand the people who lived on that plantation and made it what it was outside of the context of the single man. What Monticello has recognized is that they have to center the lives of the enslaved people who lived there and not just center the story of Monticello on Jefferson, because it's much larger than Jefferson. But Smith notes that his grandfather's grandfather was enslaved - and that 'this history that we are told was so long ago wasn't, in fact, that long ago at all.'Īll Tech Considered An App Tells Painful Stories Of Slaves At Monticello's Mulberry Row 'We are taught that the history of slavery is something that happened almost like when there were dinosaurs,' he says. Lee near downtown New Orleans was taken down from its 60-foot pedestal, Smith began to think more deeply about how slavery is remembered and reckoned with in America - and about all the things he wishes someone had taught him long ago.

In May 2017, after the statue of Robert E. Instead, his class took field trips to plantations - 'places that were the sites of torture and intergenerational chattel bondage,' he says, 'but no one said the word 'slavery.'' In elementary and middle school, Smith never learned about the legacy of slavery. He took Jefferson Davis Highway when he went to the grocery store. To get to school, he traveled down Robert E. Growing up in New Orleans, Atlantic writer Clint Smith was surrounded by reminders of the Confederacy.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent.

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