LIVING HISTORY
At 88, Dan Smith, the son of a slave, has run for his life from racists, but still lives in hope
The whipping post. The lynching tree. They were the stories of slavery, an inheritance of dread, passed down from father to son.
The boy, barely five, would listen as his father spoke of life as a slave during the U.S. Civil War and as a child labourer afterward.
As unlikely as it might seem, that boy, Daniel Smith, is still alive at 88, a member of an almost vanished demographic: The child of someone once considered a piece of property instead of a human being.
Long after moving north as a young man in his 20s, Smith’s father, Abram Smith, married a woman decades younger and fathered six children. Dan, the fifth, was born in 1932 when Abram was 70. Only one sibling, Abe, 92, is still alive.
It’s not possible to know how many living people are the children of slaves, but we shouldn’t be surprised they still exist because the generations since slavery can be counted on one hand, said Hilary Green, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama.
The American tendency toward selective memory applies doubly so to slavery, Green said. “How do you remember this violent period in history, the owning of people? It does not fit our narrative that we tell about ourselves.”
After his father died in 1938, Dan Smith witnessed the injustice of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, the elections of the first Black president and then Donald Trump, and the rise of Black Lives Matter.
He watched the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, horrified, and wonders where this new unrest will lead.
Smith was a medic in the Korean War and a hometown hero who rescued a man from a flood. He’s been chased on a dark road by white supremacists in Alabama. Smith was there when a young firebrand named John Lewis roused the crowd at the March on Washington, and he linked arms with activists in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Just weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Smith moved to the Washington area. Smith and his first wife, who was Black, raised their two children in Bethesda, Md., while he pursued his career as a federal worker promoting health and education and fighting poverty.
He retired in 1994 and in 2006 wed his second wife, Loretta Neumann, who is white.
What does it mean to Smith to be the living son of a slave in the 21st century?
A courtly man wearing a perfectly pressed collared shirt and khakis, Smith shared his life story from the wide front porch of his home in Washington.
The 157 years since his father’s birth had once seemed like “a solid gap,” but now the time strikes him as distressingly brief.
With Trump as president, the years feel to Smith like an accordion — the decades folding, folding — back toward slavery “almost to the point where it could happen again.”
Smith can see how his father was shaped by slavery and racism and was able to push ahead despite it.
Abram Smith did not rise far from his beginnings, working as a janitor, and yet he was invested deeply in the promise of opportunity for all.
“I remember my father and mother saying ‘It’s a free country. You can do anything you want, you can be anything you want,’ and they believed it,” Smith said.
Abram Smith settled in the early 1920s in the small, very white city of Winsted, Conn., where he lived with his second wife, Clara Wheeler, decades his junior.
“A lot of Black children grew up in a world where they didn’t know who they were and where they came from,” Dan Smith said, “but we were A.B. Smith’s children, and that sustained us through anything.”
A.B. Smith’s children were the hardest workers, had the best manners and were the brightest. When they asked why they were superior, their parents replied: “Because you are the children of A.B. Smith.”
They were forbidden to play with some poor Black children, although his father cleaned a factory for a few dollars a day. “We were poor as church mice, but we were better because my father said we were better,” Dan Smith said.
He sees his parents as followers of the “twice as good” philosophy — the belief that Black people must perform twice as well as whites just to be considered equal. And beneath the sunny message of how extraordinary the Smith children were lay Abram Smith’s stories of slavery.
There was the whipping post in the middle of the plantation where slaves were tied up and beaten.
There was the lynching tree. Two slaves had run away together, and rumours held that they’d been hanged there. Later, when Dan Smith wanted to date white girls, his mother warned: “I don’t want to have to cut you down.”
There was the wagon wheel. The slave owner accused a man on the plantation of an unspecified offence, and the man denied it. “The owner said, ‘You’re lying to me,’ and had the man and his whole family line up in the winter in front of a wooden wagon wheel,” Smith recounted. He ordered the man to kneel and lick the wheel’s metal rim. His tongue froze there until the desperate man pulled part of it away.
Smith and his siblings listened quietly, aware any questions about their father’s past could be met with a strike to the face.
Years later, he thinks his father was loath to relive the trauma and ashamed of his roots as a slave. (It’s unclear whether his work on the plantation ended with the war. Many newly freed slaves, with nowhere to go, remained where they were, mistreated, Green said.)
After high school, Dan Smith set out into the world with a belief in America and his own exceptionalism instilled in him by his father.
In 1955, he was in Winsted after Hurricane Diane when the Mad River breached its banks.
Eighty-seven people died in the flood, but one was saved when Smith stripped down to his shorts and rescued a truck driver named Joe Horte. Smith is not the bragging sort, and his bravery might have gone unheralded if author John Hersey didn’t mention him in The New Yorker under the sub-headline “Negro Youth a Hero.”
It was a subsequent act of heroism, though, that showed Smith exactly what it meant to be Black in America — so far from his father’s ideal. At this point, he looked up and paused, saying quietly: “I hope I don’t get too emotional.”
In about 1957, he was working for Camp Jewell, a YMCA camp in nearby Colebrook, Conn., when he brought his group of teenagers back from a week at a lake to show them a reservoir where he used to swim. Upon their arrival, he spotted a commotion — a young woman had fallen into the quarry. Smith rushed down to help.
The woman had been hoisted onto dry land, and he bent over to check her pulse: still beating. He had leaned over to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when a police officer yelled down: “Hey, you, you, YOU. She’s already dead. She’s already dead.”
At first, he didn’t know what the cop meant — Smith knew she was alive — but suddenly it dawned, and he backed away. “He didn’t want me to put my lips on her, and she died,” he said, still angry and “sick” about what happened.
That year, he realized that his parents had been sold a bill of goods about America as the land of the free: “We were all brainwashed ... Everyone in America fell for it.”
The truth was underscored when his older brother, Abe, signed a contract to buy his mother a house. He told Clara Smith, whose eyes filled with tears, that it was the white house up on the corner.
Clara looked at her son and lit in. “You know that house is too good for me,” she said. “It’s better than the house of the white woman I work for.”
By that time, the civil rights movement had begun. In August 1955, Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi, and in December, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, the Montgomery bus boycott was launched, led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr.
Smith graduated from Springfield College in 1960 and worked as a social worker for three years. He and a white colleague in 1963 drove down from Massachusetts to be part of the March on Washington.
Smith had been admitted into the veterinary program at the Tuskegee Institute but felt inspired to join the movement.
He was heading up an anti-poverty program in Alabama when the church office where he worked was burned to the ground. Not long after, Smith noticed he was being tailed on a dark country road. As he whizzed ahead, he heard his white pursuers yell a racial slur.
He thinks about what might have happened had he not sped into a lit service station. It was on his mind as he drove himself this summer to take in the protests over Floyd’s killing as Neumann waved a sign outside reading “Black and White Lives Together.”
He felt inspired by what he was witnessing. Streams of people of all races moved toward Black Lives Matter Plaza, led by the youth of a brand new era. And for a fleeting moment, Smith felt time unfold.
A lot of Black children grew up in a world where they didn’t know who they were ... but we were A.B. Smith’s children and that sustained us.