Letters to Five of the Presidents Who Owned Slaves While They Were in Office by Clint Smith III

As I scrolled down my twitter feed the other day I stumbled upon the amazing spoken word of Clint Smith III titled Letters to Five of the Presidents Who Owned Slaves While They Were in Office. The piece particularly piqued my interest because I found it to be powerful as a student who went through elementary education where presidents Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, and Jackson were all painted as great patriotic men. Men who stood for the progress of other men in the country, but I guess as the poem describes this didn’t stand for all men and as Trouillot would say we don’t hear this other narrative because it is silenced (Trouillot y Pruden).

(PBS NewsHour)

The piece opens with the inaugural address being directed toward the first president of the country we are all proud to be citizens of George Washington and uses a timeline format to address all 5 presidential “heroes”. He calls out Washington for leading an army of troops who were not solely white, but containing African Americans who he then sent from the “battlefield to the cotton field (0:28)”. He continues his letters addressing each president in order of the times they served stating untold facts about their service to black bodies. I thoroughly enjoy the timeline approach aspect of the poem because Smith contests the idea of these presidential “heroes” being part of the founding fathers of our country.

Smith also uses the black body as a way to further develop his poem in each address to each president. For me Smith’s use of the image of the black body created the most impact especially in regards to the black body being an “equal” in American society. The most powerful address in my eyes was the address to Thomas Jefferson the writer of the declaration of independence: “When you wrote the declaration of independence did you ever intend for black people to have freedom over their bodies (0:55).” Not only does Smith give us this verse but he continues this imagery of the black body and the worth that these presidents placed upon them. Next, he talks about James Madison’s calculated value on the black body only being worth 3/5^ths of a regular citizen. I loved the unpacking of this image of Madison the father of the Bill of Rights figuring out the appropriate value for a black body. Smith continues in his address to Monroe where he poses the question “Did black bodies feel like rented tools (1:13)?” The depiction of black bodies continues in the beginning of his closing address to the presidents where he asks “how many brown bodies do you have to bulldoze before you can call it progress (1:35).” Smith’s use of black bodies helps remind us that we need to reevaluate what we write about these presidents in history books. The hammering of the continuous destruction of black bodies by these presidents simply contradict the idea that they can be “heroes” to an America that encompasses all bodies.

The silencing of this narrative truly stunts our ability to form complete biographies about the men that we bestow great honor upon. Smith forces us to reevaluate the way we read and write history in textbooks because it doesn’t encompass our country’s full story.

PBS NewsHour. Why we shouldn’t forget that U.S. presidents owned slaves. N.p. Film.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolp, y John Pruden. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. MP3 – Unabridged CD edition. Tantor Audio, 2015. Print.