Michael: Most people think of history as something that’s over and done with—a collection of facts in a textbook. But what if the most important parts of American history aren't in the past at all? What if they're still happening, right now, in places we walk by every day? Kevin: That’s a wild thought. That the past isn't really past. It’s like a ghost living in the house with us, and we’re just pretending it’s not there. It’s a bit unsettling, honestly. Michael: It is. And that's the central, haunting question at the core of Clint Smith's book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. And Smith is uniquely positioned to explore this. He's not just a historian; he's a poet and a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he grew up in New Orleans, a city he says is itself a living memorial to slavery. Kevin: Right, so he's coming at this with both a reporter's eye and a poet's soul. And the book was a phenomenon—it’s no surprise it swept major nonfiction awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s been hailed as this generation's defining work on the legacy of slavery. Michael: Exactly. He takes us on a journey to see how that legacy is being passed down, or "passed," in the places that shaped it. And his journey starts at a place everyone thinks they know, a place that’s a perfect symbol of America's conflicted memory: Thomas Jefferson's home.

Michael: So, we're at Monticello. And the central contradiction is one we all know, but maybe don't fully grapple with. Here is the man who wrote the immortal words, "all men are created equal," and yet, over the course of his life, he owned more than six hundred human beings. Kevin: It’s the ultimate American paradox. We put him on our money, we build monuments to him, but we kind of just... gloss over the whole enslaving people part. How does the book tackle that? How does Monticello itself handle it? Michael: That's the fascinating part. Smith finds that Monticello is in the middle of a profound shift. For decades, the tours barely mentioned slavery. It was all about Jefferson the genius, the architect, the inventor. But now, they're trying to tell the whole story. A tour guide named David gives Smith this incredible framework. He says, "There’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory." Kevin: That's a great line, but what does it actually mean for a tourist standing there? How do they handle hearing that the man on the nickel separated children from their mothers for profit? Does it land, or do they just get defensive? Michael: It’s a mix, but Smith shares this incredible story about two visitors on his tour, Donna and Grace. They’re two white, self-proclaimed Southern Republican women, there to admire the architecture. They love history, but their knowledge of slavery is pretty superficial. Kevin: Okay, I can picture them. Probably expecting a nice, clean story about a Founding Father. Michael: Exactly. But the tour guide, David, doesn't hold back. He tells them about the brutal work schedules, the whippings, and the constant threat of families being torn apart. And Donna and Grace are visibly shocked. They keep saying things like, "I'm just so disappointed in him," and "It really takes the shine off the guy." At one point, hearing about families being separated, one of them connects it to the family separations happening at the US border at the time. It becomes real for them. Kevin: Wow. So it actually works. Confronting them with the unvarnished facts, the history instead of the nostalgia, actually changed their perspective right there on the spot. It wasn't just an intellectual exercise. Michael: It was deeply emotional. And to make sure we, the readers, feel it too, Smith doesn't just talk about slavery in the abstract. He tells the story of a teenage boy enslaved at Monticello named Cary. Cary worked in Jefferson's nail factory, a brutal operation. One day, his friend hides one of his tools as a prank. Kevin: Oh no. I have a bad feeling about this. Michael: Cary, under immense pressure, gets so angry he hits the other boy with a hammer. The boy recovers, but Jefferson's response is chilling. He doesn't want to disrupt the "harmony" of his workforce. So he gives an order to sell Cary "to a place so far away he'll never be heard from again, so that it will appear to the other nail makers as though he had been put away by death." Kevin: My god. "Put away by death." He just erased a child's life to make a point. Michael: He erased him. And Smith connects this single, heartbreaking story to the larger data. Historians estimate that up to half of all interstate slave sales destroyed a nuclear family. A million people separated from their families. This wasn't an occasional tragedy; it was the business model. And at Monticello, you see how that business was run by the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Michael: And if Monticello shows us how we sanitize the past, the next stop on Smith's journey, Angola Prison in Louisiana, shows us how the past never really ended. It just changed its name. Kevin: Hold on, Angola Prison? The infamous, maximum-security prison? What on earth does that have to do with slavery? Michael: Everything. This is one of the most shocking parts of the book. Angola Prison is built on the grounds of a former 8,000-acre plantation. The land was named "Angola" by the enslaver because that's where most of the people he'd enslaved were from in Africa. Kevin: You're kidding me. So it's literally the same piece of land. Michael: The very same. And Smith goes on a tour led by an assistant warden named Roger. When Smith asks about the prison's connection to slavery, Roger gives this very evasive answer. He says, "This was a… this— [They] housed slaves on this land, and I can’t change that. Our history is our history." Then he immediately pivots to all the "positive things" the prison is doing now. Kevin: He’s acknowledging it with one breath and dismissing it with the next. "Can't change it, let's move on." Michael: Precisely. But Smith is traveling with a man named Norris Henderson, an activist who was wrongfully incarcerated at Angola for nearly thirty years. And Norris says, "If we want to end mass incarceration, we’ve got to kind of get the history of where it comes from, and how it still exists." Kevin: This is blowing my mind. So the land itself is the same, but what about the system? Is it just a metaphor, or is the connection more direct? Michael: It's a direct, unbroken line. After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. So Southern states created new laws, the Black Codes, to criminalize Black life. Things like "vagrancy" could get you arrested. And where did you go? You were leased out to private companies—or back to the very plantations you were just freed from—in a system called convict leasing. It was slavery by another name. Angola was one of the most brutal convict-leasing camps before it became a state prison. Kevin: So the economic incentive to have a captive, free labor force never went away. The legal justification just shifted. Michael: Exactly. And the echoes are terrifyingly loud. Smith describes seeing the incarcerated men, who are overwhelmingly Black, marching to work in the fields, overseen by white guards on horseback. Norris Henderson tells him about his own experience picking cotton on those same fields. He says, "I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again." And for this labor, they're paid as little as two cents an hour. Kevin: That is chilling. It's not a metaphor at all. It's a direct lineage. The same land, the same labor, the same racial dynamics. It's just been institutionalized differently. It makes you rethink what "abolition" even means.

Michael: Exactly. And that battle over the narrative—what we call things, what stories we tell—is the focus of Smith's visit to Blandford Cemetery, a Confederate memorial in Virginia where 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. Kevin: Ah, the Confederate monument debate. This is where people say, "You're erasing history!" But Smith's book seems to argue the opposite, right? Michael: Completely. He argues that the monuments themselves are the act of erasing history. He quotes the great W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote about the absurdity of a Confederate monument that says "Died Fighting for Liberty!" Du Bois says the plain truth would be an inscription like: "Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery." Kevin: Which, you know, doesn't look as good on a statue. So they created a new story. The 'Lost Cause.' Michael: The Lost Cause. This is the revisionist history that claims the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but about "states' rights," and that enslaved people were happy and loyal. Smith has this incredible conversation at the cemetery with a man named Jeff, a Confederate sympathizer. Jeff is adamant the war wasn't about slavery. He says Lincoln was like someone "going in your house and telling you how to live in it." Kevin: And that's the narrative that's been passed down in so many families. It's a story that allows you to see your ancestors as noble heroes instead of people fighting to own other people. Michael: And to support this narrative, they have to invent things. Kevin, this is where you get the myth of the Black Confederate soldier. Jeff tells Smith this story about a man named Richard Poplar, a supposedly loyal Black Confederate who refused to betray his comrades. Kevin: A story that gets trotted out to "prove" the Confederacy wasn't racist. But Smith debunks this, right? Michael: He demolishes it. He shows that Richard Poplar was a cook, a servant—an enslaved man. He wasn't a soldier. The entire myth was constructed in the 1970s to sanitize the Confederacy's image. And this gets to the most crucial point about these monuments: their timing. They weren't mostly built right after the war to mourn the dead. The vast majority were erected decades later, during the height of Jim Crow and again during the Civil Rights Movement. Kevin: Wait, really? So their construction spikes when Black Americans are gaining political power? Michael: Precisely. They were a physical manifestation of white supremacy. They were a terror campaign, built to intimidate Black communities and remind them of their place in the racial hierarchy. They were designed to say, "We lost the war, but we still run things here." Kevin: So the monuments themselves are the historical revisionism. They are the act of erasing the true history of why the war was fought and what it was for. That completely flips the script on the "erasing history" debate.

Michael: And that's the thread that runs through the whole book. Whether it's a founder's home, a prison, or a cemetery, the American landscape is a text. And Clint Smith teaches us how to read it, to see the stories that are hidden in plain sight. Kevin: It's not about feeling guilty. It's about being honest. The book’s epigraph from Toni Morrison is perfect here—the story about the Mississippi River. When they straighten it out to build houses, it occasionally "floods." But she says it's not flooding; it's "remembering. Remembering where it used to be." You can't just pave over the past. Michael: You can't. It will always find a way to reassert itself. The past isn't past. Smith's journey shows us that the word—the story of slavery—has been passed down, whether we've been listening or not. He reminds us that his own grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. This history is not abstract; it's in our families, in our communities, in the soil beneath our feet. Kevin: It leaves you with a profound sense of responsibility. It’s not just about what happened, but about what we do with that knowledge. What story are we choosing to pass on? It makes me wonder, for our listeners, which places in your own towns or cities tell a story about this history, either honestly or dishonestly? Let us know what you think. Michael: A powerful question to end on. This is Aibrary, signing off.