A Reckoning with the History of Slavery in the U.S.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Our next guest is an award-winning poet and author whose work examines America’s complex relationship with race. In his latest book, “How the Word is Passed,” Clint Smith tours the country, examining how America’s best- known monuments reflect the state of its racial reckoning. And he’s been speaking with Walter Isaacson. The conversation started with Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Clint Smith, welcome to the show.

CLINT SMITH, STAFF WRITER, “THE ATLANTIC”: Thanks so much for having me.

ISAACSON: As I was reading your book, the title became more and more meaningful to me. I’ve seen many layers of it. Explain to me how you chose that title and what is it supposed to convey?

SMITH: Yes. So, the title, “How the Word is Passed,” is actually taken from the quote of a descendent of an enslaved family at Monticello. And so, Monticello has this getting word oral history project in which they recognize that in order to tell the story of Monticello, they can’t just tell the story of Jefferson but they also have to tell the story of the enslaved families who lived at Monticello, who created memories at Monticello, who built legacies and communities at Monticello. And so, part of the way that they do this, because there’s not a lot of written documents, given that most of the enslaved population was illiterate is they do it through oral histories. And so, they collect the oral histories of the descendants of people who were enslaved at the plantation. And in doing so, one of the descendants of one of the enslaved families said, this is how the word is passed down. And I remember reading that and being so struck by it. This is how the word is passed down. And I think it connected with and communicated so much of the idea of what I was trying to get across in this book, which is to say that the way that this history is shared with all of us, the way the story of America is passed down in so many of these historical sites is often one that is outside the context of textbooks, outside the context of traditional classrooms, but it’s from the descendants, it is from the public historians, it is from the tour guides, it is from docents. And we are gaining these stories and they’re giving us the information and the context with which to understand the world around us.

ISAACSON: And so, you traveled to many places from Goree Island of Senegal, Monticello, you know, to battlefields and other places to see how the word is passed down. Monticello is a particularly interesting one because it keeps changing in a way. And describe what it was like to be with the people at Monticello as they’re wrestling with how to pass the word down.

SMITH: Yes. Monticello is the first chapter of the book and it’s where I wanted to begin the book because in so many ways, I think of Jefferson as sort of a microcosm for the story of America in the sense that America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their ancestors could simply never imagine, but it is also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. And both of those things are the story of America. It’s not one over here and one over there, it’s both of them entangled in one another. And I think Jefferson, as I said, sort of personifies that. He is someone who wrote in one document that all men created equal and wrote in another document, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments, body and mind. He is someone who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the western world and also, someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime in (INAUDIBLE) of his own children. And so, when I go Monticello, part of what I’m trying to understand is how do — how does this institution tell a story about Jefferson that recognizes him as a statesman, as a philosopher, as a man of ideas, as a scientist, but also as an enslaver and recognize that all of these things are intimately interwoven with one another. And I’ve been curious how Monticello goes about telling that story. And as you alluded to, the way they tell that story today is different than how they told it 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

ISAACSON: They used to have descendants of slaves greeting you dressed in slave livery, right?

SMITH: Yes. I remember learning that and being so unsettled by it, we’ll say is a generous way to put that. I mean, it — they — it was almost a sort of gone with the wind iteration of what sort of plantation curation looks like. And now, they are being much more proactive in recognizing that. In order to tell the story of Jefferson, we have to tell the story of slavery. And so, they have a specific tour focused on slavery at Monticello and it was led by a guy named David Forson (ph). And in 45 minutes, he gave this master class of the sort of cognitive dissonance of Jefferson’s intellectual project in ways that I had never encountered. And I always remember these women that met on that tour, women named Donna and Grace. And they were watching him. And as they — as he was talking, their mouths sort of hung agape and you could see their faces wilting, and they were clearly having a very emotional reaction to what they were hearing. And I went up to them and I asked, you know, how are you experiencing or how did you experience so much of what David said. And Donna, I’ll always remember was like, man, you really took the shine off the guy. She said, I had no idea Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea Monticello was a plantation. Imagine, these are folks who bought plane tickets, rent cars, got hotel rooms, who came to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see the home of one of our founding fathers and had no idea that he was someone who was enslaver. Had no idea that this place was a plantation. And for me, that moment was important because it reminded me that there’s still millions of people across this country who don’t understand the history of slavery in any way that is commensurate with the actual impact and legacy that it has had and continues to have on this country.

ISAACSON: Your chapter on Monticello raised in my mind something I called the Jefferson conundrum when I teach my students here at Tulane, which is, how do we figure out, how do we memorialize people who were among the greatest people in some of their intellectual abilities but also were enslavers? How have you thought about what we should do with Jefferson now? Which statues should stay up or which should come down?

SMITH: Yes, it’s a difficult thing to wrestle with. I mean, I think first and foremost, when we have to make sure that when we’re teaching students, we have to teach them the full range of the ideas of these founders. I mean, I think — you know, I think about how for so long I was only taught the version of Jefferson that was tied to the Declaration of Independence and I had never been presented with the Notes of on the State of Virginia. And one doesn’t — you know, a teacher doesn’t present Notes on the State of Virginia and Jefferson’s really racist commentary on blacks and enslaved people in order to singular denigrate Jefferson or say Jefferson was a terrible person. It’s to provide context. And in a holistic analysis, to make sense of who this person was and how we can understand how their thinking shape the social contract upon which this country should be founded. And so, I think people of good faith can have different ideas about what should or should not be done with the statue of Jefferson. Obviously, in New York City, they recently took down a statue of Jefferson in their — I think in their City Council building and in other places have made different decisions. I do think it is important to disentangle and just sort disaggregate confederate statues from statues of founders and early Americans who owned enslaved people. Because, you know, if we were to flatten it, you know, 12 of our first 18 presidents owned enslaved people, eight of them owned enslaved people while they were in office. But, you know, Ulysses S. Grant who married into a family of enslavers and was given one enslaved person and then later manumitted, he’s different than, obviously, Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee or (INAUDIBLE). And so, for me, I think the confederate statues are sort of the low hanging fruit of this debate. The confederacy was a treasonous territory that raise an army that was predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. They wrote about it in the Declaration of Secession. They said, you know, for example, a state like Mississippi in 1861 it says, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the gravest material interest in the world. And so, they’re not vague about why they’re seceding. And so — and they’re not vague about why Civil War began. And so, I think that those statues, there’s no excuse for them to be on public property, paid for by taxpayer dollars. If you want to have a statue of Robert E. Lee in your backyard, that’s your business. But not in front of a courthouse, not in a public park, not in a traffic circle.

ISAACSON: You talk about the importance of describing people in all their complexity. Teaching all their sides, whether it be Jefferson or even Lincoln, and others. Yet, nowadays, we have a debate in our schools in which people slap labels like critical race theory that seem, in some ways, to hurt the ability to be able to teach the complexity. It makes us pick our own sides. How do we avoid that? What’s your thinking about what’s happening in schools now?

SMITH: I think it’s really unfortunate. I mean, I think that critical race theory is a boogeyman, being utilized to push back against a profound shift in public consciousness that’s happened over the past several years. I mean, I think that very directly, critical race theory is used as the sort of nomenclature of critical race theory is used as an umbrella term to describe any history of America, specifically, history related to black people, but often also indigenous people, also Latino people, also different immigrant communities. And that begins to tell a different story or perhaps a more holistic story about this country. And the problem is that there’s been a shift in public consciousness over the past several years, beginning with Trayvon Martin in 2012, Mike Brown in 2014, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd sort of supercharged that in 2020. And you have millions more people who now understand racism not as something that is just an interpersonal phenomenon, like a racial slur, but as a historical phenomenon, as a systemic one, as a structural one, and as one that’s embedded historically and sociologically in the institutions throughout our society. And as a result of that, it sort of begins to disabuse people of some of the ideas that have been central to the American project and the American experiment, which is to say the myth of meritocracy. This idea that if you just work hard, you can achieve anything. More people recognize it’s simply not true because of the context from which different communities are emerging and the state sanctioned policy that have prevented some communities from achieving up with mobility and other — and have facilitated that upward mobility for others. And so, when people begin to recognize that, it begins to call into question the very society that they live in. And if your sense of self and your sense of who you are is tied to a specific story about this country, and then people begin to tell a different story about this country, it is an existential crisis, it is a crisis of identity, it’s a crisis of who you believe yourself or your family and your community to be in relation to the world. And I think that’s part of the reason why we see such vehement pushback and such emotionally charged political discourse around this.

ISAACSON: Faulkner teaches us that, you know, the past is never dead is not even past. And I thought of that when I read your Angola chapter, which is about the state pen here in Louisiana. And that, in some ways, it reflects so much of the past still being alive today. I remember going into that execution chamber. I used to bring my students and the people at “Time” magazine on a trip to be in that chamber where they strapped you on the gurney. You have that in your book. Tell me how that resonated.

SMITH: I mean, for context for people, Angola is the largest maximum- security prison in the country, it’s 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the Island of Manhattan. It’s a place where 75 percent of people held there are black men. Over 75 percent of them are serving life sentences and it is built on top of a former plantation. And what I often tell people is that, if you were go to Germany and you have the largest maximum-security prison in Germany, and it was built on top of a former concentration camp in which the people held there were disproportionally Jewish, that place would quite rightfully be a global emblem of anti-Semitism, if it will abhorrent, it will be disgusting. We would never allow a place like that to exist because it would so clearly run counter to all of our moral and equitable sensibilities. And yet, here in the United States, we have the largest maximum-security prison in the country, where the vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences, many of whom work in field with virtually no pay with someone watching over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder in fields of what was once a plantation. And not only does Angola not engage in any sort of meaningful and critical interrogation of its history and the relationship of its history to what its contemporary landscape, but it also has a gift shop. And in this gift shop, you can buy sweatshirts and t-shirts and coffee mugs and shot glasses and stuffed animals dressed in prison paraphernalia. And on some of the items in the gift shop, for example, on the coffee mug, they have the silhouette of a watchtower. And above and below the watchtower, it’s written, Angola, a gated community, as if to make a mockery of it or belittle the experiences and lives of thousands of people and the hundreds of thousands of people over time who have been incarcerated in Angola for more than a century. And so, part of what I’m thinking about when I go to Angola or one of the ways that a history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people’s bodies, but also collectively numbs it to certain types of violence that in another global context would so clearly be unacceptable. And in the execution chambers specifically, I mean, I — it was — being in the execution chamber was almost an incredibly unsettling and intimate manifestation of that history, right? Because we know how the death penalty disproportionately impacts poor black people in the way that it is enacted. We know that, you know, according to one study, one in 25 people who are on death row are actually innocent, right? And so, 4 percent of people who are on death row actually are not — are innocent of the crimes they have been convicted of and yet, continue to do it.

ISAACSON: Your grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved. When you talk to your grandfather about this book, as you do in the epilogue, what was he thinking?

SMITH: You know, when I interviewed my grandparents for this book, it was after walking with them through the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. My grandfather is born in 1930, Jim Crow Mississippi. And my grandmother in 1930 Jim Crow Florida. And we were walking through this museum and I became acutely cognizant of how proximate they were to this history. When I talked to my grandmother afterwards and — about all the things we saw in the museum, all the documentations of violence, all the documentations of this suppressive but violent history, she was like, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. She kept saying that refrain over and over again. And for me, my grandparents’ stories and my grandfather’s story, grandmother’s story reminds me that this history that we tell ourselves a long time ago truly wasn’t that long ago at all. I remember my grandfather walking with him through an exhibit at Emmett Till’s casket at the museum and having him tell me that Emmett was killed in the county right next to where he and my grandmother lived. And recognizing for myself that but for the arbitrary nature of birth and circumstance, what happened to Emmett Till could have happened to my grandfather, right? And I think all the time about the woman who opened the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, a woman named Ruth Bonner, who did so alongside the Obama family in 2016. She rang the bell to signal the opening of this museum. And she was the daughter of an enslaved person. Not the granddaughter, not the great granddaughter. In 2016, the woman who opened this museum was the daughter of someone born into intergenerational chattel slavery. And so, we often tell ourselves that this history was a long time ago, but in the scope of human history, it was just yesterday. There are people alive today like my grandfather who knew, who loved, who were in community with, who had relationships with people who were born into slavery. And so, sometimes when we delude ourselves into thinking that slavery was something that happened like in the Jurassic period when it, in fact, you know, was just a few generations ago. And I think my hope is that when people leave this book, that that is one of the things that stays with them the most, is that we are so proximate to that period of time and it continues to shape our social economic and political landscape in profound ways today.

ISAACSON: Dr. Clint Smith, thank you for joining us.

SMITH: Thank you so much.