How the Word Is Passed arrives at a moment when Republican legislators in at least 27 states are offering the country a lesson in How the Word Is Suppressed. As Smith suggests, one cannot understand the history of the United States without focusing on the centrality of slavery - and this history is essential to helping our students make sense of the world around them. Below are some discussion and writing questions, as well as a few possible activities, that can take students more deeply into Smith’s brilliant book. This is work for all of us - to create, to share, to teach. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.Īnd one of the ways this foundational history enters our memories is through the classroom. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society it created it.

It was not peripheral to our founding it was central to it. The history of slavery is the history of the United States. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.In the Epilogue to his book How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith writes: And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.Ī deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

How the word is passed clint smith