46 United States The Economist December 4th 2021
Son ofa slave
M
ost americansdon’t know much about slavery. In a recent
survey, only half could name it as the main cause of the civil
war. Yet for Daniel Smith, the “whipping and crying post”, the
hanging tree and other horrors of the antebellum South are not ill
taught, dusty history, but vivid family stories.
The 89yearold retired bureaucrat heard them from his father
Abram, who was born a slave in Virginia in 1863, two years before
the war ended. “On Saturday evenings after dinner he and my el
der siblings would gather and he would tell them what his parents
had told him about slavery,” recalls Mr Smith, an only slightly
stooped octogenarian, at his house in Washington, dc. “I used to
sneak out of bed and sit listening on the floor. I remember hearing
about two slaves who were chained together at the wrist and tried
to run away. They were found by some vicious dogs hiding under a
tree, and hanged from it. I also remember a story about an en
slaved 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.”
It is chilling to hear him—a direct link to the history America is
in many ways still struggling to escape. Sana Butler, who wrote a
book on the children of slaves, identified only around 40 still alive
in 1999, all of whom have since died. She did not track down Mr
Smith, who was known in Washington as a wellconnected civil
rights activist but rarely mentioned his family history. “It was
something under the surface that we were not proud of,” he says.
As his father’s only surviving child, after the death of his brother
Abe earlier this year, he may well be the last living offspring of an
American slave.
His memories underline how recent many of the rawest and
most formative events of the American story are, especially for
those on the receiving end of them. Slavery and the last Native
American landgrabs are only two lifetimes away; no wonder the
politics surrounding them, on all sides, are so intense. And the ef
fect is particularly powerful in Mr Smith’s case because of how
many momentous events in black history he has witnessed. Lex
ington got in touch to discuss his father, only to learn that Mr
Smith had marched with Martin Luther King in Washington andSelma,feudedwith the Black Panthers, been chased by Ku Klux
Klaninspired night riders through rural Alabama, been asked by
the ciato spy on the ancin South Africa—and was in the crowd,
tears pouring down his cheeks, to witness the inauguration of a
black president. “A friend of mine calls me the black Forrest
Gump,” he deadpans.
In fact his brushes with history chiefly reflect his talents and
drive, which are characteristic of his black American generation.
His father, a janitor aged 70 at the time of Mr Smith’s birth, was
killed by a hitandrun driver when Daniel was six. Abram’s death
left his wife and six children almost destitute. Yet he had bred in
them a fierce determination to rise. “We always said in our family,
if you want to beat white people you’ve got to outwork them,
you’ve got to outsmart them, you’ve got to stay up longer at night.”
Mr Smith graduated from high school in the mainly white town
of Winsted, Connecticut, while working long mornings and eve
nings in a veterinary surgery to earn money. After a stint with the
army in Korea, he went to college under the giBill, became a social
worker, then enrolled in veterinary school in Alabama. Three of
his five siblings also went to college. “The success of the genera
tion raised by former slaves changed my whole perspective on this
country’s history,” says Ms Butler. “Considering what they faced,
and what they achieved, they are America’s greatest generation.”
In New England Mr Smith’s race was an everyday hurdle, but ul
timately not a dealbreaker. He knew he could never make the first
move on a white girl: “I don’t want to have to cut you down from
that tree,” his mother would tell him. Yet he could rise: “America
has always given me the right to work.” Alabama, where he arrived
at the tail end of Jim Crow, was a different story. Southern blacks
marvelled at his car and confidence among whites, including
white women. It irritates him still; “Women are women, black,
white, Indian or Chinese,” he says.
He was drawn into the civilrights struggle, then roiling the
state, and runins with Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic Panther
who wanted to put money Mr Smith collected for antipoverty
programmes to more radical use. He preferred King’s moderation.
But he has more time for Malcolm X’s radicalism now: “We needed
both, King and the Panthers, the pull and the push,” he says.Where slavery was, liberty can be
That reconsideration seems to reflect his downbeat view of race
relations since the 1960s. Socially, he acknowledges, there has
been huge progress. Many of his nieces and nephews are married
to whites; his second wife is white (though it was a while before he
would dare hold her hand in public, she notes). But institutionally
he looks back on a history of failed promises.
He believes racist policing puts black children in greater peril
today than he ever faced. He also notes that the “shining light” of
Barack Obama’s election provoked a militant white reaction, in
the form of Donald Trump, which is not weakening. The insurrec
tion that the former president provoked and his party has refused
to investigate, during which a Confederate flag was paraded
through the Capitol, “was so revolting for our constitution”, he
says. “There’s a big question about where we go from now.” And
then Mr Smith, though visibly troubled, pulls himself up.
“Incidentally, we could never talk negatively about America in
front of my father,” he says, speaking of a poor man, born a slave,
who wore a wellbrushed suit and fob watchtochurch on Sunday
and drove his children to succeed. “He didnothave much but he
really, really loved America. Isn’t that funny?”nLexington
Lessons in racial history from Daniel Smith, perhaps the last direct link to slavery