When a towering Robert E. Lee statue was removed from New Orleans in 2017, writer and poet Clint Smith—born and raised in that city—found himself driven to investigate how the history of slavery is told, hidden, and reshaped across the United States. His nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, grew out of that curiosity. Smith traveled to locations that embody different American conversations about slavery to understand how narratives and symbols influence public memory and policy.
Growing up in New Orleans, Smith says, he moved through a landscape saturated with tributes to the Confederacy: streets, schools, parks and statues celebrating generals and leaders who fought to defend slavery. As a child he passed monuments to P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee without knowing their full meanings. The Lost Cause mythology—reframing treason as noble heritage—had seeped into textbooks and civic life, obscuring the central role of human bondage in Southern economy and politics. Smith remembers being taught versions of the Civil War that emphasized states’ rights or economic disagreements, but spared young students the clarity that secession documents and many leaders’ statements left no doubt slavery was the war’s core.
Symbols matter, he argues, because they reflect stories a society tells about itself. Those stories shape policy and the conditions under which people live. In New Orleans, a majority-Black city, the ubiquity of honors to enslavers sent a daily message to Black children entering buildings or walking streets named for people who had once sought to keep them enslaved.
Smith’s book looks beyond his hometown. One of his key stops was Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In recent years Monticello has changed how it presents the plantation, developing tours that center the lives of the Hemings family and other enslaved people who sustained the estate. Guides now prepare visitors for difficult truths—people often arrive expecting a heroic founding-fathers narrative and leave startled to learn Monticello was a working plantation and Jefferson a slave owner who fathered children with an enslaved woman. Monticello’s curatorial shift illustrates how institutions can alter collective understanding when they choose to foreground the enslaved rather than only the enslaver.
Jefferson, Smith says, captures America’s contradictions: the author of lofty statements about equality who simultaneously profited from and rationalized slavery. Presenting a fuller portrait of figures like Jefferson helps a public reckon with the country’s complexities instead of leaving heroic myths unchallenged.
Smith also brings the inquiry close to home. In the epilogue of his book he recounts conversations with his grandparents—people who lived through Jim Crow—and describes the surprising intimacy of discovering how near in time and relation the era of chattel slavery really is. Learning the specifics of his own family’s past shifted his sense of proximity to slavery; it isn’t a remote tableau from another age but a living past whose consequences shape present realities. He points out that people who can remember, or who were raised by people who remembered, the direct aftermath of slavery were still alive in the twenty-first century—an important corrective to the idea that slavery is a distant historical problem.
Smith also addresses efforts to suppress uncomfortable histories. He describes an incident in which a private school canceled a planned campus reading and author visit after administrators objected to what they called “controversial” material—illustrating a contemporary form of book banning that removes opportunities for students to confront difficult truths.
Alongside his nonfiction work, Smith is an acclaimed poet. His collection Above Ground explores the same themes—memory, inheritance, intimacy, and the long shadow of slavery—through a personal lens: family, fatherhood, loss, and joy. He writes about the simultaneity of experience—the way profound love and deep fear coexist—and uses precise details and numbers to anchor memory like time-stamped photographs.
In poems he reads and discusses, Smith demonstrates this approach. One sequence riffs on how catastrophes and miracles can happen at once: wildfires and floods, a glacier melting as a child takes first steps; conflicts ending and new violence beginning. Another poem, written for his children, meditates on contingency and survival—how family histories shaped by war, escape, and luck converge in the births of the next generation. He is candid about the anxiety that accompanied his own path to parenthood: fertility challenges, risky pregnancies, and the gratitude that followed when his children were born prematurely but survived.
Smith also examines the everyday politics of race and parenting. In “Gold Stars,” he describes the odd public adulation he receives when out alone with his children—strangers praising him for tasks assumed to be routine for mothers. He sees that praise as both a welcome acknowledgment and a reminder of unequal expectations: fathers, and particularly Black fathers, are often publicly celebrated for simply being present in ways that mothers are not.
Across both genres—history and poetry—Smith is concerned with how we pass knowledge to younger generations. He argues for telling fuller, more complicated stories about the past so children can understand the roots of contemporary inequalities and contradictions rather than inheriting sanitized myths. He also insists on the necessity of intimate conversation: asking elders about their lives, learning family histories in concrete terms, and using those narratives to contest public amnesia.
What emerges from Smith’s work is a twofold lesson: the factual one—slavery’s imprint on American institutions, symbols and wealth remains wide and recent—and the emotional one—how memory is carried in families and places, and how acknowledging the truth can change public imagination. Whether standing before a toppled monument, listening to a guided tour at a plantation, or reading a poem aloud to his children, he seeks a clearer, more honest story of the nation and a way to make that story teachable, accountable, and human.