Loved The 1619 Project for dismantling sanitized histories? takes that reckoning into the streets with How the Word Is Passed.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Pilgrimage journalism: slavery's afterlife made visceral
- First-person witnessing > abstract academic distance
- Confederate monuments decoded through living descendants
- Raw confrontation w/ America's memory infrastructure
If The 1619 Project armed you with the language to dismantle sanitized histories, Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed extends that mission into physical space—pilgrimages to plantations, prisons, and monuments where America's foundational sins are either honored or erased. Smith wields the same journalistic rigor and emotional urgency you crave, blending meticulous research with firsthand encounters that transform abstract legacy into visceral truth. This is revisionism you can walk through, a reckoning mapped onto the geography of collective memory.
Where The 1619 Project reframed the timeline, Smith reframes the landscape—proving that slavery's afterlife isn't buried in textbooks but alive in the tours we take and the statues we defend.
This is the intellectual ammunition you need when the backlash insists on forgetting.
What Readers Are Saying
"How the Word is Passed deserves a place in today's high school and college curriculum...each part combining to provide a fuller, more accurate account of US history. Highly recommend!" — Susan Barber, Goodreads
"One of the few 5* reads I had last year. Clint Smith is a poet and I felt like I could tell at certain points, as it was a beautiful book despite the subject matter. Also very educational." — whoiskatherine, Reddit
"I would buy a copy of this book for every person in the United States... A future Pulitzer winner, in my opinion, and maybe the best non-fiction work I’ve ever read." — Trent, Goodreads
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