I read this article in late July. Not only is this piece of journalism well written but the writer tells an amazing story that I thought was impossible. Daniel Smith is the living son of a slave. It boggles my mind that Daniel Smith’s father was a slave. In Sydney Trent’s interview with Daniel Smith, he paints the black narrative like no one else can because he lived it. From hearing about life as a slave from his father, to living through southern racism, desegregation, the Civil Rights movement, to Black Lives Matter.
Thank you Sydney Trent and to The Washington Post for this stories that spans more than 150 years… Please read on.
— Debora Buerk
At 88, he is a historical rarity — the living son of a slave
By Sydney Trent
The Washington Post
July 27, 2020
The whipping post. The lynching tree. The wagon wheel. They were the stories of slavery, an inheritance of fear and dread, passed down from father to son.
The Washington Post
The boy, barely 5, would listen, awed, as his father spoke of life in Virginia, where he had been born into bondage on a plantation during the Civil War and suffered as a child laborer afterward.
Read the full article in The Washington Post
Books Worth READING
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
- Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
- A Voice from the South by Anna Julia Cooper
- A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison by Paul Jennings
Debora Ragland Buerk
The Write Stuff
Looking at life from a different POV.
The Write Stuff 