Author and poet Clint Smith discussed the historical representation of slavery in his nonfiction work, "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America," and his poetry collection, "Above Ground," in interviews with NPR’s Fresh Air. Smith, who earned a Ph.D. in education from Harvard and is a staff writer at The Atlantic, focused his research on how different American sites tell the history of the institution of slavery.
The project was initiated after the 2017 removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans. Smith, a New Orleans native, reported that the city contains over 100 schools, roads, and buildings named after Confederate figures and slaveholders. He noted that as a student, he was taught that the Civil War was primarily about economics and states' rights rather than slavery, a narrative he later sought to investigate through visits to eight different historical sites.
One site Smith examined was Monticello, the home and plantation of Thomas Jefferson. He reported that the museum has shifted its curation to include tours focused on the Hemings family, an enslaved family at the plantation. Smith noted that some visitors are surprised to learn that Jefferson was a slave owner who held over 600 people in bondage throughout his lifetime, including four of his own children. Smith described Jefferson as a "microcosm of America," representing the contradiction between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of chattel slavery.
Smith also detailed the personal proximity of this history through his own family. During his research, he discovered that his grandfather’s grandfather had been enslaved in Mississippi. He noted that his grandfather was born in 1930 and his grandmother in 1939, both living through the era of Jim Crow in the American South. Smith stated that these familial connections served to illustrate that the history of slavery is more recent than often portrayed in educational settings.
For a typical reader, this shifts the understanding of historical distance. A person might notice how their own local geography—such as Robert E. Lee Boulevard or Jefferson Davis Highway—reflects specific historical choices made in the wake of the Civil War. By translating the timeline into family generations, Smith suggests that the impact of slavery is not a distant era but one connected to living memory through the children and grandchildren of those who experienced it directly. This affects how history is taught in schools and how museums, such as Monticello, present national figures to the public.
The broader implications involve ongoing national policy debates regarding the removal of monuments and the content of social studies curricula. As these narratives are revised, they set precedents for how federal and state institutions address the legacy of slavery in public spaces. The next steps in this process include continued academic research and the potential renaming of further public buildings and roads, as well as ongoing updates to museum tours and educational materials at historic sites across the United States.