Reckoning with America’s history of slavery

August 14, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

“Every day, black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there.”

That line from Clint Smith’s poem captures what drove him to write How the Word Is Passed: the quiet, structural violence of living inside a landscape that honors your oppressors. Smith, a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, grew up in New Orleans, where over a hundred streets, schools, parks, and statues are named after Confederate figures and slaveholders. In 2017, he watched the city remove statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis from their pedestals. That spectacle became the catalyst for a book that visits eight sites across America—from Monticello to Angola Prison—to examine how the country remembers, distorts, or simply fails to teach the history of slavery.

The education that wasn’t

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introduction & Clint Smith's Background** - David Bianculli introduces the episode and poet/writer Clint Smith, whose book *How the Word is Passed* examines how America remembers and distorts the history of slavery.
2 (01:57) **Poem: Growing Up in New Orleans Amid Confederate Iconography** - Smith reads a poem about the everyday presence of Confederate statues and street names in his childhood, and the lies he was taught about the Civil War.
3 (05:29) **Catalyst for the Book: Watching Confederate Statues Fall** - Smith explains that seeing the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans in 2017 sparked his investigation into how slavery is remembered and taught.
4 (09:06) **Changing the Narrative: Monticello's Slavery Tours** - Smith discusses Monticello as a place trying to tell a more honest story, including tours that center the lives of the enslaved Hemings family.
5 (12:56) **The Sally Hemings Relationship & Jefferson's Contradictions** - Smith addresses the non-consensual nature of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings and uses Jefferson as a symbol of America's foundational contradictions.
6 (15:47) **Personal Reckoning: Interviewing His Grandparents** - Smith reads a prose poem about learning his grandfather's grandfather was enslaved, and discusses the power of that specific, personal knowledge.
7 (19:52) **Proximity to Slavery: It Wasn't That Long Ago** - Smith emphasizes that the history of slavery is not ancient history, using the example of a woman who opened the NMAAHC in 2016 who was the daughter of an enslaved person.

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Guests on this episode

Terry Gross

Show Notes

Poet and writer Clint Smith says we are taught to think of slavery as something that happened a long, long time ago. But then he learned that his grandfather's grandfather had been enslaved. “This person who was so central to my life and my own identity is someone who was only a generation or two removed from a family member who had been born into slavery," he tells Terry Gross. Smith is the author of the bestselling book How the Word Is Passed, about distortions in how the history of slavery was taught to him and other children -- and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. He's also the author of the collection of poetry called Above Ground.

Also, critic at large John Powers reviews the new TV series Lanterns.

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