![]() How the Word is Passed enters the scene as one of many books recently published about America’s history of slavery, untold histories, and monuments/memorials. A poet and Atlantic staff writer, Smith’s first major foray into nonfiction writing takes on the troubling and troubled history of American slavery and anti-Blackness that still percolates at sites of public memory across the nation. How the Word is Passed takes readers on a cross-country journey to sites that, just below the surface, harbor hidden histories of slavery. Clint Smith’s revelatory book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, has contributed to my obsessive compulsion to learn the stories withheld from me by the state, trusted educators, and family members. Reckoning with the disparities between what I was taught and what was obscured is fast becoming an intellectual and writerly preoccupation of mine. This singular vision of history did not just inform how I came to understand abstract historical lessons, it informed how I understood the place I call home and the people who share that home with me. This history, I would later come to learn, left a lot out. ![]() ![]() In the small Texas town I grew up in, we were taught one version of American and Texan history. ![]()
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