’1619,’ Episode 2: The Economy That Slavery Built

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.3 • 107.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2019

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on “The Daily,” we present Episode 2 of “1619,” a New York Times audio series hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones. You can find more information about it at nytimes.com/1619podcast. The institution of slavery turned a poor, fledgling nation into a financial powerhouse, and the cotton plantation was America’s first big business. Behind the system, and built into it, was the whip. Guests: Matthew Desmond, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Evicted,” and Jesmyn Ward, the author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” This episode includes scenes of graphic violence. Background reading:“As the large slave-labor camps grew increasingly efficient, enslaved black people became America’s first modern workers,” Matthew Desmond writes.The “1619” audio series is part of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Read more from the project here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro, today on The Daily.
0:05.3	Seven years after my dad died, I went to the place he was born for the first time.
0:10.8	My dad was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi,
0:14.8	where his family were sharecroppers in the same field that enslaved people had picked cotton
0:20.7	for generations and generations before. Every year, our family would go on family vacations and
0:26.7	we would go on family reunions, but we would never go to the place of my dad's birth.
0:32.0	It wasn't a place that he really wanted to take us to, or a place that he wanted to return.
0:42.9	It just all happened that my great aunt Charlotte, my grandmother's sister, was visiting nearby
0:48.5	at the time that I went down. And it's strange because I'm 38 years old, but I'm so relieved to have
0:55.6	this elderly woman with me because for some reason, I'm just a little afraid. It's just kind of weird
1:02.4	where I really was. I grown up with Aunt Charlotte my whole life. She's the one who taught me how to
1:11.6	make e-strolls in her kitchen. And she was this woman who wore heels until she was in her 90s,
1:19.0	who when you would go on her house, everything was always very neat. There was plastic over the furniture.
1:24.8	It was very important for her at all times to appear respectable. And I understood that so much of
1:31.2	that was because in her formative years, she was not treated with respect in the places she was born.
1:40.6	So we get in the car and I try, as I had done several times through the years, to get my great
1:47.2	aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like to live down there. And for most of the ride,
1:53.6	she was giving me the same gauzy version that she'd always given me that life for them wasn't really
2:01.2	that hard. That it was a good place to grow up. As we finally approached Greenwood, I see a big sign.
2:09.4	It's painted in brown and it says in white letters, Greenwood, cotton capital of the world.
2:15.3	And then we approach the Yazoo River. The Yazoo River is fed by the Tallahatchee River.
2:26.8	And then Charlotte said that when she was young, she was baptized in the Tallahatchee River.
	...

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