How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Clint Smith is a Black American writer, poet, and scholar. Smith’s personal, educational, and professional backgrounds figure heavily into the approach and content to How the Word is Passed. First, his personal investment in reckoning with slavery stems from a sense of his lineage and roots. As he reveals in the Epilogue, his grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved, and his grandmother’s grandfather was born only a few years after Emancipation. Smith’s descent from enslaved people, his personal ties to people who knew and loved enslaved people, and his grandparents’ acute experience of the impacts of white supremacy and slavery’s aftermath reveal that his personal investment in reckoning with slavery is born out of his connection to its not-so-distant past. Furthermore, having been born and raised in New Orleans, Smith notes in the Prologue that he has been surrounded by the remnants of slavery all of his life. Even without the personal family ties, reckoning with slavery would still be a necessary task because of the way that slavery is embedded in the land on which he walks. This suggests that reckoning with slavery is a task for all Americans, not just those descended from enslaved people. 

Smith’s educational and professional background is also central to how he understands the reckoning.