Smith, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a poet, has written a powerful and important book.

By titling it ‘A Reckoning’ he is frank and up front about it not being a thorough history or a deep sociological analysis, but rather one man’s attempt to understand and come to terms with the almost unfathomable facts of African American enslavement, Jim Crow laws and segregation, and institutional racism that continue to haunt all of us in this country today.

He approached his reckoning by visiting sites around the U.S. and one in Senegal to explore the historical milieu and facts surrounding those locations and to speak directly with individuals who are currently working or visiting those sites.  This plan allowed him to get both objective as well as subjective reactions in order to get a sense of what those sites mean in our time.  The book begins with a visit to Monticello where Smith dives into the paradox of Jefferson, the great embodiment of equality and liberty who not only owned slaves but separated families selling a wife to one buyer and her children to another in order to settle his debts.  Smith visits a Confederate burial ground where he talks with a Confederate army re-enactor who continues to honor the Confederate flag, Jefferson Davis, and the Lost Cause, and he also visits Angola Prison in Louisiana where Black prisoners, often convicted of minimal crimes like vagrancy (i.e. less than $15 on their person or no proof of having a job) were ‘leased’ to mines where they often died due to overwork and starvation in the modern version of enslavement. The most surprising chapter, however, was the one about New York City in which he traces the benefits of investing in slavery (e.g. the use of slaves as loan collateral) that formed the basis for Citi, J.P. Morgan and other financial institutions of today and where in the late 18th C. half the population of New York City were enslaved people. So much for the tidy story of a good North and a bad South.

The Epilogue features material from his conversations with his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother who lived through segregation and the terrorism of lynching in the Jim Crow South.  Reading the recollections of these intelligent and brave people, not much older than me, filled me with sorrow.   As Smith states in that Epilogue: “The history of slavery is the history of the United States.  It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it.  It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it.  This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must be, too, in our memories.”

Still unsettled from the last six days that we spent in Alabama visiting memorials and museums where we learned in depth about the history of slavery (e.g. the Equal Justice Initiative, whose signage includes the phrase ‘From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration’) and the incredible bravery and persistence of the Freedom Riders in 1961 and the marchers from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, it’s difficult to write more about this book.  Read it; read other books that tell this story; visit the South; think about Black Lives Matter, reparations, affirmative action, and the resurgence of White Nationalism in the Republican Party—-and then do something about it.  I’m working hard to figure out what that should be for myself.  Stay tuned.