On Fresh Air, Clint Smith describes how public memory, monuments and school lessons obscure the realities of American slavery. Smith—poet, staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America—traces the stories that societies tell about themselves and shows how those stories shape policy, identity and everyday life.
Smith grew up in New Orleans, a majority-Black city dense with streets, schools and statues honoring Confederate figures and slaveholders. The removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in 2017 pushed him to investigate how places handle the history of slavery: what they bury, what they sanitize, and what they finally choose to acknowledge. For his book he visited sites across the United States and beyond to compare narratives—why some institutions have reworked their interpretation of the past and why others maintain romanticized versions that minimize or erase the centrality of slavery.
He argues that symbols—statues, building names, flags—are not neutral. They reflect and reinforce stories about who matters in a community. In New Orleans, Smith recalls growing up passing monuments to Confederate leaders, unaware of their roles in preserving slavery. The Lost Cause mythology, which reframed rebellion as honorable resistance rather than defense of human bondage, creeps into textbooks and civic landscapes. That selective memory makes it possible to celebrate figures and flags while remaining blind to the violence and laws those symbols protected.
Smith discusses how this plays out at familiar historical sites. Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, has shifted its presentation in recent years to foreground the lives of the enslaved people who made the plantation run—especially the Hemings family. New tours focus squarely on enslaved residents and on sexual exploitation, complicating the longstanding heroic narrative of Jefferson. Smith notes that many visitors, even those who come expecting a celebratory pilgrimage, are surprised or unsettled the first time they hear the fuller story: that Monticello was a working plantation and that Jefferson enslaved people, including children he fathered.
That kind of honest interpretation can jolt public memory. Smith was struck by the reactions of tourists who had never been told that Jefferson owned people; their astonishment highlights how incomplete popular narratives can be. Monticello’s more candid tours ask visitors to reckon with the contradictions of founding ideals and lived practices—how the author of “all men are created equal” also enslaved hundreds of people.
Smith also explores the modern consequences of selective memory. When places maintain sanitized narratives, public policy and civic life are shaped by those myths. Conversely, when museums and historic sites center enslaved people in their stories, they create opportunities for fuller understanding and for a public conversation about the lingering effects of slavery.
The book’s epilogue turns inward. Smith describes interviewing his grandparents and learning, with new specificity, that his great-great-grandfather had been enslaved. That discovery shifted his sense of historical proximity: slavery isn’t an ancient, abstract past but something that touches living family histories. He invokes moments—pushing his grandfather in a wheelchair through the National Museum of African American History and Culture—that made clear how recent and personal this history remains. The museum’s opening decades after slavery is a reminder that people who directly knew enslaved individuals are not as far removed from us as many assume.
Smith has also written two poetry collections—Counting Descent and Above Ground—that explore personal and generational legacies. In conversation about his poems he returns again to simultaneity: how joy and terror, gratitude and fear coexist. Parenthood, in particular, brings this tension into sharp relief. Several poems in Above Ground are addressed to his children and to the older generations who endured Jim Crow, displacement and war. They balance celebration of life’s small miracles—births, acts of tenderness—with an awareness of historical violence and present anxieties.
He reads the world in numbers and scenes: dates, distances, hospital floors, days of the year—small anchors that make moments concrete. Poems about fertility and the precarious births of his children reflect gratitude tempered by how narrowly the family escaped unimaginable outcomes. Other poems examine everyday racial dynamics: the outsized praise strangers heap on a Black father running errands alone with his kids, praise that often elides the labor and expectations placed on mothers.
Smith is also candid about the politics around teaching history. He recounts an episode in which a private school had planned to adopt How the Word Is Passed as a common read and to host him, only to cancel at the board level for fear of “controversial” content. He points out that the effects of book bans and curricular restrictions aren’t only the lists and headlines: institutions quietly removing books from recommended curricula or canceling visits is a pervasive form of suppression.
Across both his nonfiction and poetry, Smith’s aim is to supply language and frameworks many people lack. Growing up in communities saturated with myths about the Confederacy, he says, leaves young people without the tools to rebut stereotypes and distortions about their families and cities. By documenting places that tell more complete stories—and by centering personal testimony—he invites readers to confront the ways memory, monuments and education shape social life.
Smith’s work has been widely recognized: How the Word Is Passed became a bestseller and won prizes; his poetry has been honored with awards and critical praise. Whether writing history or verse, he asks readers to look closely at who is memorialized, who is omitted, and what it means to inherit a landscape built by both achievement and oppression. The point is not to reduce complex historical figures to single labels, he says, but to insist on truthfulness: to see American history whole, with both its ideals and the harm done in their name.