DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: 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 a hundred 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 No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller 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.
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CLINT SMITH: (Reading) 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 P.G.T. 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 P.G.T. 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 this city - these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced 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, the 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 2 miles on Robert E. Lee. Take a left on Jefferson Davis. Make the first right on Claiborne. Translation - go straight for 2 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.
What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith. Now, let's hear his 2021 interview with Terry Gross when his book "How The Word Is Passed" was released. It's now out in paperback. You may hear a difference in the quality of the audio. It was recorded during the pandemic, when guests couldn't come to the studio.
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SMITH: So much of what animated this book and served as a catalyst for wanting to write this book was watching the statues - these Confederate statues in my hometown of New Orleans - come down in May of 2017, and so statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, among other symbols of white supremacy coming down after having been erected and located in different parts of the city for over a century, many of them.
And I started thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority-Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were enslaved people. Like, what did it mean that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard - to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway - plantations on field trips as an elementary and middle school student? I was going to places that were the sites of torture and intergenerational chattel bondage, but no one said the word slavery.
And so I started thinking about, like, how that came to be because, you know, symbols aren't just symbols. They are reflective of stories that we tell, and those stories embed themselves into the narratives that a society carries. And those narratives shape public policy, and public policy obviously shapes the material conditions of people's lives.
And so the implications of this were vast. And so I started thinking about that in New Orleans. And then I kind of started thinking about, well, what did this look like across the country and across the ocean? Like, what are the different places that are attempting to or failing to tell a story about the history of slavery? And how does that shape our country's collective memory of this institution that we are told happened a long time ago but, in fact, wasn't that long ago at all?
TERRY GROSS: What were you taught in school about the Confederate generals and the owners of enslaved people whose names and statues were all over New Orleans where you grew up?
SMITH: I was taught very little, to be honest. And to the extent that I was taught anything, I was taught that, you know, Robert E. Lee was an honorable man who fought for the state and the people that he loved. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights and that it was reflective of a failure to compromise when, in fact, you know, all that had been happening in the decades prior to the Civil War were attempts to compromise. And what was compromised was the freedom of enslaved people.
And so part of what made me want to write this book was that, like, I remember growing up in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages - some implicit, some explicit - about why New Orleans was the way that it was, right? I was - you know, we're inundated with messages that New Orleans was the murder capital of the nation, that we incarcerated more people per capita than China and Iran and Russia, that there was a sort of culture of violence, a culture of pathology that was so deeply embedded in the city. And implicit within that is the Black people within the city because this was for - especially at that time, for a long time - a majority-Black city.
And so I was inundated with these messages as a child and as a young person, and I felt like I didn't have the language or the toolkit or the framework with which to push back against it. What happens is you almost experience sort of psychological and emotional paralysis where you, like, know that the things that this country is telling you about your community and about people who look like you is wrong. But you don't necessarily have the language or the history with which to explain it.
GROSS: So it's very hard to change the narrative of history, even when the narrative you're trying to change is proven to be wrong or distorted. But some places really are trying to change the narrative. And you visited one of those places - Jefferson's home and plantation, Monticello. And it seems that the narrative there is changing - that the tours given to people now are saying very different things about the history there than the tours that used to be given. Give us an example of that.
SMITH: Yeah. So Monticello, I think, is a really fascinating example of a place that evolves and changes over time and responds to new information and shapes their - the curation of their museum experience in that way.
And so one example of a new project that they've begun is something that started a few years ago, which is a tour that focuses on the Hemingses of Monticello, the Hemings family. And the Hemings family was an enslaved family, an enslaved Black family on Monticello's plantation who - which included Sally Hemings, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles. So her father was a white man, and her mother was a mixed-race Black woman. And so she was actually a quarter Black, but was still enslaved on that plantation because of the sort of notions of the one-drop rule and that one drop of African blood would make you Black, which, you know, gets into a larger thing of race as a social construction.
But regardless, the Hemingses were enslaved on this plantation and were really central to what the plantation was and how it operated. And part of what Monticello has recognized is that they have to center the lives of the enslaved people who lived there and not just center the story of Monticello on Jefferson because it's much larger than Jefferson. And in order to understand it as a plantation, we have to understand the people who lived on that plantation and made it what it was outside of the context of this single man.
GROSS: I thought it was really interesting that some of the tourists are basically prepared - or you might even say warned - by the tour guides that some of what you're going to hear today might be difficult. Because a lot of the people who come to visit Monticello are just expecting a heroic story about Jefferson and not realizing that some of the story they're going to get is about Jefferson as a slave owner, somebody who bought and sold people and who had a sexual relationship with one of the people who he owned. So did that surprise you - that there were almost, like, you know, like warnings before the tour?
SMITH: It did. So the tour you're referencing is the Slavery at Monticello Tour. And one of the things that was most interesting about it is that, to your point, a lot of people come to this place having no conception of Jefferson as someone who owned enslaved people. And so I spoke to these two women after my tour, Donna (ph) and Grace (ph). And I had been watching them during the tour given by this man David Thorson, who's a tour guide at Monticello. And he talked about slavery and Jefferson and Jefferson's relationship to slavery in ways that were more direct than any teacher I had ever had.
And it was clearly deeply impacting these women. And their mouths were agape, and they were clearly sort of unnerved and unsettled. And I went up to them afterwards and spoke to them, and they were just like, I had no idea Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea that Monticello was a plantation. And mind you, these are people who bought plane tickets, who bought hotel rooms, who rented cars to come to this place almost as a pilgrimage to see the home of the third president of the United States, one of our Founding Fathers, but had no conception of him as someone who enslaved human beings.
GROSS: Yeah. And getting back to Sally Hemings for a second, she was 16, and Jefferson was in his mid-40s when he started his sexual relationship with her. So he's having sex with somebody who he owns, and she's 16.
SMITH: Right. Part of what Monticello is doing, too, is trying to sort of complicate notions of the history that we've been taught and saying that, you know, we cannot understand what Sally Hemings' relationship to Jefferson was as something that was fully consensual because he owned her. And that is - should serve as an entry point to us thinking about the way that Black women throughout the history of slavery, were treated - the way that their bodies, in so many ways, were not their own and the ways that they were subjected to rape and to assault and to just an onslaught of subjugation to their bodies in ways that I don't think this country has fully accounted for.
GROSS: So when you think about the Declaration of Independence - and Thomas Jefferson was one of the drafters of the Declaration - what do you have to reconcile in your mind?
SMITH: I mean, Jefferson, I think, generally is such a fascinating historical figure for me 'cause I think he's sort of a microcosm of America. He's a microcosm of the dissonance and the disconnect and the contradictions of this country, in the sense that America is this place that has provided unimaginable, unparalleled opportunities for millions of people across generations to build wealth and create opportunities for upward mobility and has done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been subjugated and oppressed across generations. And the story of America is both of those things, and we have to hold both of those things at once to recognize the totality and complexity of this country.
And I think Jefferson, similarly, you know, is the man who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He is someone who wrote i
