Growing up in the 1930s, Daniel R Smith would listen to stories from his father, as young boys often do. He was not supposed to hear these stories – they were meant for his older siblings, not for a child as young as five or six – but after dinner on Saturday evenings he would sneak out of bed and listen to accounts of the “whipping and crying post”, of the lynching tree and the wagon wheel.
These were brutally vivid stories of bondage, for his father had been born into slavery in Virginia during the Civil War and had toiled as a child labourer before making his way north to Connecticut, where the Smiths were among the only African Americans in their town.
