Reckoning with America’s history of slavery

**David Bianculli** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bianculli. After the statue of Robert E. Lee near downtown New Orleans was taken down from its 60-foot pedestal in 2017, Clint Smith became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, and with teaching himself all the things he wishes someone had taught him long ago.
Smith is from New Orleans, where at least 100 streets, statues, parks, and schools are named after Confederate figures, slaveholders, and defenders of slavery. His nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, a reckoning with the history of slavery across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and was on the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2021
For the book, he visited eight places to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him, and to most children, as well as the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. Smith earned a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard. He also is a poet and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His book, Counting Descent, won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. And in 2023, he published another collection of poems called Above Ground. He's a previous National Poetry Slam Champion. We're going to listen to Smith's 2021 interview with Terry Gross. But first, he reads a poem he wrote about growing up in New Orleans.

**Clint Smith** (1:38)
Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of PGT Beauregard riding on horseback. His Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder, and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes.
As a child, I did not know who PGT Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate national flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of the city. These copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground in silence by the soil.
After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. They called it the lost cause, and it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding. They told us that Robert E. Lee was an honest man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved. That the southern flag was about heritage, and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But see, the thing about the lost cause, is that it's only lost if you're not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it's a word that also means I'm ignoring what we did to you.
I was taught the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught that the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860, over 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights, but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spell Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.
It's easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don't see the Black bodies buried behind it. It's easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake. I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over a hundred schools, roads, and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I return home, I drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains. Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee. Take a left on Jefferson Davis. Make the first right on Claiborne. Translation, go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender. Take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation. Make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.