“Oppression doesn’t disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.”

If those words were not strong enough, I do not know what words would be. Clint Smith III examined the role that the Founding Fathers played in oppressing black people in his new poem “History Reconsidered” which he performed at All Def Poetry.

His poem was a letter to the five United States presidents who owned slaves including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson.

“When you wrote to Congress that black people should count as three-fifths of a person, how long did you have to look at your slaves to figure out the math?” Smith poses to Madison. “Was it easy to chop them up? Did you think they’d be happy being more than just half human?”

Throughout the piece, his words are piercing – the words stab through the nation’s altered history that still haunts black Americans today. He offers his audience a reminder that these presidents’ accomplishments were praised without mentioning slaves that these victories were built upon.

Near the end of the poem, he drives home his point perfectly.

“When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don’t forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life. I had been taught how perfect this country was, but no one ever told me about the pages torn out of my textbooks. How black and brown bodies have been bludgeoned for three centuries and find no place in the curriculum. Oppression doesn’t disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.”

You have to see the video below.

(Photo Credit: Portfolio/Clint Smith)

Author

  • Travis Henry is a senior at Rutgers University studying Communication, with a concentration in Strategic Public Relations and Public Communication, and French. Currently, he is looking at the relationship between consumer brands and African-American youth and how the Black-white racial segregation has manifested online. When he is not doing research at school or writing at work, he finds himself “curating the human experience” via his magazine DWNTWN and editing his school’s magazine Voice. He sees himself in the future finding a career that hybrids music, activism, media, and writing.