NEWS

Learning history is one thing. Reckoning with it is another.

“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, too, be in our memories.”

Clint Smith wrote these words in the epilogue of his 2021 book “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” Smith visited nine places where slavery is deeply ingrained. In this bestselling book which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, he explores monuments and landmarks which either confront or ignore their history and entrenched connections to slavery.

Smith emphasizes that we cannot-- and should not-- try to escape the stories baked into our history. In holidays, neighborhoods, monuments, and buildings, we are surrounded by our complicated history.

Smith, a poet and staff writer for The Atlantic with a PhD from Harvard, is also a Davidson graduate.

Two weeks ago, Smith was at Davidson for the dedication of a remarkable sculpture, “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited.”

The sculpture is the work of Hank Willis Thomas, one of the most active and acclaimed artists of our time. His work includes not just sculpture but photography, installation art, and mixed media. Many of his large-scale sculptures honor historical figures and themes of social justice and are in iconic locations like the Boston Common and the Brooklyn Bridge.

On Davidson’s brick-laden campus, the sculpture explodes in a grassy open area between the earliest dormitories and debate halls. That same brickwork holds the fingerprints of enslaved laborers.

A plaque reads that the “site stands as a symbol of Davidson College’s ongoing commitment to the quest for truth, research and public education, and acknowledgment of all who are part of our history.”

It is nearly impossible to describe the sculpture in words. A massive pair of bronze hands rise up from the ground in the heart of the original campus, reaching for the sky. Textured, worn, hardworking, strong, wrinkled: these hands are familiar.

If you put your own hand on an enormous thumbnail, you’ll realize you could fit twenty more hands on it. Your hand feels small, inconsequential, and you feel the magnitude of what so many enslaved and exploited people gave to Davidson and to our collective history.

At the dedication, Smith read a poem commissioned for the dedication, lyrically cataloging what these hands and others might have done. “With these hands, they cleared the land. They cut the brick. They swung the ax.They chopped the wood. With these hands, they held their love. They hugged their child. They clapped in church. They prayed for freedom.”

And he reminds us that these enslaved and exploited people worked their hands and minds and spirits for Davidson, but did not have the freedom to be full members of the Davidson community: “With these hands, they constructed buildings they were not allowed to enter. They cooked food they were not allowed to eat. They washed clothes they were not allowed to wear.”

Davidson alum and chair of the board of trustees Anthony Foxx invoked the college’s motto: “Let Learning Be Cherished Where Liberty Has Arisen,” and its purpose which includes cultivating humane instincts and recognizing the dignity and worth of every person. For generations, Foxx emphasized, the principles upon which the college was founded were compromised. Learning, he said, could not be cherished in the presence of human bondage and segregation.

“With These Hands” cannot change our complicated history, and there is so much more work to come. But it can shine a light to help us reckon with it. Through that reckoning, there might just be understanding, growth, and a way forward. Smith, while hopeful about what the sculpture brings to the community, warns that the sculpture is not a “finish line” but rather a “practice” and a “way of life,” naming, confronting, engaging, and trying to become the people and communities we aspire to be. “We cannot run from this part of our story,” says Smith, “we must wake up and face it every day.”