About the Book
Over the past few years, Americans have been reckoning with our collective history: Journalists, historians and activists have helped spur national conversations that revisit public monuments and challenge us to tell a more complete story about the United States that does not gloss over its legacies of slavery, displacement and discrimination.
Clint Smith, a renowned poet and journalist who is currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, recently wrote "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown & Company, 2021), a nonfiction work that takes the reader on a journey across the United States and the world, using places like prisons, cemeteries and former plantations — including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello — as case studies in a broader project to unearth histories that have sometimes been deliberately hidden in plain sight.