Clint Smith is a writer of nonfiction who explores cultural and historical narratives. His book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, is a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
How the Word Is Passed has recently been released in a Young Readers edition. This adaptation for younger readers seemed all but inevitable given Smith's background as a teacher—in a high school, in the carceral system, and as the host of the popular YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.
Clint Smith also has two poetry collections to his name, Counting Descent and Above Ground, both of which have won the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and were finalists for the NAACP Image Awards. In addition, Mr. Smith is the author of numerous essays that explore facets of the Black experience, both in the U.S. and across the world. These essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic, where Mr. Smith is a staff writer.
In an informal discussion with undergraduates at Butler University in February 2026, Clint Smith spoke eloquently about what inspires his work. He said that from the moment enslaved Black people stepped foot on our shores, they fought for their freedom. And that each successive generation continued the fight for freedom—despite knowing they themselves would not experience it—because they knew that someday, someone else would. He went on to note that this history has bestowed on him a responsibility to continue the work for racial equality, and that he, too, accepts that he might not see the fruits of his labor. “Hope is not something to passively engage in,” he stated. “Hope is a proactive posture.” After his Q & A with undergraduates, I sat down with Smith for the following conversation.
Susan Lerner (SL): I have a two-part question about the recent release of the Young Readers edition of How the Word Is Passed. As an educator, a writer, and a parent, I'm curious what it means to you that your book is now accessible to a young readership. Also, can you comment on how the current administration's push for schools to provide a patriotic education has impacted, or might impact, if and how teachers use your book?
Clint Smith (CS): Yeah, I am very excited to have the book out. I have to give a shout out to Sonja Cherry-Paul, who so effectively and thoughtfully adapted it. Because the book exists both as a history text and a literary one, I was nervous about the idea of having the language changed in ways that felt like it would take away from the three-dimensionality of the original product. But after talking to the folks at Little Brown and meeting with Sonja, I felt confident that we'd be able to work together so that the essence of the original book would still be present in the adaptation. And I think we were successful in that.
As a parent, I have an eight-year-old and an almost seven-year-old. I talk to them about the topics of How the Word Is Passed all the time. I'm always trying to think about how to have conversations about hard histories in a developmentally appropriate context and how to convey this information to them without overwhelming them or shutting them down. Because I think about these things all the time with regard to my own kids, I wanted to think about what it meant to do that in the context of adapting this book.
The desire to write the adaptation was also propelled by the fact that—even before this current administration came—state legislatures and school boards around the country were removing books about Black history. They were creating laws that disincentivized or threatened to punish teachers for teaching histories that fell under the banner of quote-unquote critical race theory, and this was never about the actual idea of critical race theory. They used this term as a sort of a catchall, umbrella phrase. They wanted to frighten anyone from teaching things America has done along racial lines that are not aligned with their very specific, positive idea of what a patriotic education means. Having been a high school teacher, I wanted to provide—to the extent that I could—a resource for teachers, for students, and for parents that might help them in this moment. So many of them are fighting to teach their students an honest story about what this country is.
The truth is that America has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations—in ways their ancestors could have never imagined. But it has done this at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been inter-generationally subjugated and oppressed. Both narratives are the story of America and have to be held alongside one another.
What we have is an administration that, along with many states and political leaders on the right, prefers we don't talk about the mistakes we've made, or that which we've done wrong. The way I always frame it with young people is, “I'm someone who has done things in my life that I'm proud of. And I've done things in my life that I'm not proud of. Because I'm human, and I make mistakes. What I do is try to learn from and acknowledge those mistakes in order to become a better version of myself in the future. Why would we hold our country to a standard different from the one we hold ourselves to?”
I think this is what most teachers are trying to do—hold our country up to this standard. Teachers' attempts to do this are not part of an ideological project, but an empirical one. They're just trying to tell the truth. I hope the Young Readers edition of How the Word Is Passed can be helpful in ushering that truth into classrooms and into the homes and hearts of young people.
SL: This talk about the administration's idea of a patriotic education has me thinking about the pieces you've written about museums for The Atlantic. Our public museums are one of the important vehicles through which we teach our country's history and are now vulnerable to the current administration's push to de-emphasize slavery. Which leads me to think about Conner Prairie, a living history museum here in Indiana.
It just so happens that a friend of mine served as a president of Conner Prairie, so I asked her about how the museum taught Indiana's Black history during her tenure. She told me that, for the most part, the museum's visitors were white, and at one point—this was a handful of years ago—the museum decided to broaden their audience. In order to get a sense of the kind of Black history exhibits Black visitors might want, the museum conducted focus groups. The participants of these groups were Black women who had taken their children to other museums. This former president said that the results showed a number of the women in these focus groups did not want exhibits that focused on slavery. They preferred uplifting narratives, both for themselves and for their children. They expressed a hope that exhibits that showcased Black achievement would inspire their children. I'm curious about your thoughts on this.
CS: I think our country's history of slavery and Jim Crow, as well as its narratives about the violence against and the exploitation of Black people, are sometimes made to be singularly synonymous with Black life. If Black children are taught that the only history Black people have is one of violence, exploitation, and subjugation, they might feel distressed and depressed about that history. I can understand why some people may say, “Actually, I don't want to read this book about slavery. I don't want to go to a museum exhibit about slavery. I don't want to see this movie about slavery.” I think the history of slavery has often been conveyed in ways that don't humanize the people who were a part of it. We are sometimes taught about the horror that was inflicted, without being taught about the three-dimensional humanness of the individuals who were subjected to that system. That these Black people were full people, just as we are. That they experienced fear, dread, and despair, but also laughter, joy, and wonder. Black people are sometimes presented almost as two-dimensional caricatures, which then makes our history feel two-dimensional and rendered as a caricature. But as much as I empathize with and understand why people might prefer to only have uplifting exhibits of Black history, it is essential that we not run from this traumatic history, even when it is uncomfortable to us, the descendants of such a history.
As a kid growing up in New Orleans in the 90s, I was inundated with messages about all the things wrong with Black people. That the reason there was so much violence, poverty and inequality among those in the Black community was because of something Black people had done wrong or something Black people had failed to do. As a result, I experienced a sort of emotional and intellectual paralysis. I knew that the pathologies and stereotypes about Black people I'd heard from celebrities, politicians, the media, and the news were wrong. But I didn't know how to say they were wrong. I didn't have the language. I didn't have the historical context. I didn't have the intellectual toolkit with which to push back against it.
When you hear something and don't know how to push back against it, inevitably—especially as a young person—you begin to internalize it. I internalized some of the things I heard about myself, my family, and my own community. It wasn't until years later that I encountered scholars, thinkers, artists, filmmakers and other folks who used their work to help teach me how to more fully understand the world. They gave me the language, the historical context, and the toolkit. Then I was able to see that the reason one part of New Orleans looks one way and another part of New Orleans looks another way is not because of the people in those communities. It's because of the things that have been done to those communities or taken from those communities—generation after generation after generation. You can say the same thing about Indianapolis. You can say the same thing about New York. You can say the same thing about Atlanta. This is the case for every city across this country.
Museums are uniquely suited to share this kind of information with people who might not encounter it in any other place. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has over a million visitors every year. Monticello has around half-a-million visitors every year. Even more visit the Legacy Museum in Montgomery Alabama. The Whitney Plantation has had over 700,000 visitors since it opened in December of 2014. These places are incredibly important because they tell the story of Black suffering. But it's also important to communicate the story of Black life in this country in a way that shows it is not singularly a story of violence and exploitation. It's important to examine the ways in which Black life is far more expansive, joyful, and dynamic than that.
I want my own kids to have an acute sense of this country's history and what it has done to our people. This will help them understand and situate themselves in the world they inhabit. This will make it so this world can't lie to them anymore. We literally have an administration that is attempting to lie to millions of American children about what this country is. I want to ensure that my children, and as many young people who read How the Word Is Passed or watch my YouTube series Crash Course: Black American History, can't be lied to in that same way anymore.
My kids have children’s books about Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass. They also have children’s books about the little Black girl who wants to grow up to be a doctor, the little Black boy who wants to grow up to be a scientist, and the little Black child who wants to grow up to be a Pokémon. I want my kids to understand the history from which they come and to also know that their futures and their lives are limited by nothing but their imagination. Again, it's this idea of “both, and...” You have to convey both things when you talk about Black life because Black life is both things.
SL: Much of your writing, at its core, explores the ways we remember history. As I read about this complex topic, three different ideas stayed with me. I thought I'd share them as a way of exploring your own thoughts about this topic.
The first idea comes from your writing about Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. You wrote that Stevenson said we have an ahistorical sense of how the movements for racial equity have manifested themselves.
The second idea comes from the journalist Masha Gessen. When they came to Butler recently, they said that although we process the present in a textured way, as a narrative, we process the past in a way that pares it down to dates and events.
And the third idea comes from the epilogue in How the Word Is Passed. In the part about your grandmother, you wrote that black-and-white photographs and footage can convince us that the events they depict took place in a distant past, one completely separated from our contemporary world.
Given these perceptions about the ways our minds consider time and history, how do you think the way we view the past impacts how we consider current racial issues in our country?
CS: If you don't have a clear understanding of America's past, you risk thinking that the social, political and economic dynamics of the country reflect a sort of natural order of things. You risk thinking that the reason some people live in certain communities, have certain jobs, or attend certain schools is simply because of cultural disposition. Or, more insidiously, because of a sort of genetic or biological reality. If you don't have historical context, you risk not understanding that the landscape of inequality today is a direct result of policy decisions that have been made over the course of centuries. These policy decisions have afforded some people access to the levers of social, economic, and political mobility and have explicitly prevented other people from having access to those same levers. If you don't have a clear understanding of America's past, you might assume that the way inequality exists in the world is an inevitable facet of different people's agency, autonomy, or their cultural and personal orientation. That is why history is so necessary: it explains so much about why we are where we are today.
Part of what I realized when I wrote about my grandmother in that epilogue was that these histories we tell ourselves were a long time ago, weren't all that long ago. How the Word Is Passed is about the history of slavery in this country, and there are people alive today who knew, loved, and were raised by people who were born into chattel slavery. The woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016 was the daughter of a man who was born into slavery. My own grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. I'm now working on a book about World War II memory. Over the past four or five years I have spent time with people who fought in, or were a part of, World War II—whether they were in Japanese internment camps, in bunkers in Germany, on the shores of Normandy, over the Pacific flying planes, or were victims of the atomic bomb. Our global infrastructure as it exists today is a part of the post-World War II global infrastructure that has largely dictated our world for the past eighty years. That infrastructure is now falling apart, in large part because of our administration. This is a reminder that the histories that shape the world we live in today are not always abstract notions from long ago but are part of histories that are quite recent. People who experienced those histories are still with us. Or, in the context of slavery, there are still people who knew others who did experience it themselves. This is one of the central pieces of my work: the histories we tell ourselves took place a long time ago weren’t all that long ago, and we have to understand them in order to understand the world we live in today.
SL: You referenced your upcoming book, Just Beneath the Soil, which has been described as telling the stories of people whose lives during World War II sat at the periphery of the conflict's dominant narrative. I wonder how you see the dominant narrative and how you hope your book might shift or widen our perspectives?
CS: This book began with my experience of going to Germany in 2021 in an attempt to place memory of the Holocaust in conversation with memory of slavery in the U.S. I wanted to see how each nation engages in the project of memory—on a community-based level and on a state-sanctioned level. When I was in Germany, so much of the history that had previously been an abstraction to me became very visceral and real. Standing in front of the homes from which Jewish people were taken; standing on the train tracks where they were sent to the camps; walking through concentration camps like Dachau; walking past the heavy iron gates, gravel crunching beneath your feet; looking to your left and seeing the remnants of the gas chambers where people were killed; looking to the right and seeing the remnants of the crematorium where the bodies were burned. There's a singular power in putting your body in the place where history happened. Suddenly, the Holocaust was no longer the intellectual abstraction of six million Jewish people, or twelve million people. My body was in the same places those bodies had been, and this made me feel physically and viscerally connected to the Holocaust in a different way.
Because I've come to realize how powerful it is to put your body in the place where history happened, and because my project over the past decade has been to examine how memorials, museums, and sites of memory attempt to convey these histories, I wanted to get a sense of how other places conveyed these histories. I wanted to get a clearer sense of what the stories of World War II looked like beyond the specific American framework—beyond the Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg, kind of frame. I wanted to ask, “What are the parts of the WWII story that I don't know as much about?”
This brought me to places in the U.S. I was thinking about the experience of my own uncle, my grandfather's brother, who served in World War II. What did it mean for him, as a Black man, to serve in the military of a country that was still lynching people who looked like him? What did it mean for Navajo code talkers to use their native language—the very language this country attempted to strip from them by sending them to boarding schools—to help win the war in the Pacific? What did it mean for people of Japanese descent to fight for a country that was still holding their families in internment camps—and to fight in the 442nd, the most decorated military division in World War II history?
Then, across the world, there were comfort women in South Korea, atomic bomb survivors in Nagasaki, and Nazis who fled to Argentina after the war. What do these places reveal about how these countries relate what happened and how they see and understand themselves today?
I hope Just Beneath the Soil teaches people, Americans in particular, about the World War II history that exists beyond our dominant narrative. That it helps people remember how recent this was and, simultaneously, how we are in the final few years of having people with meaningful memories of World War II around. That it asks the questions: What happens after these people are gone? What is going to be lost when they are no longer with us? And in what ways can the lessons of World War II be applied to our understanding of the world we live in today?
SL: Okay, this is not a question I prepared for, but in the Q&A you had just now with undergraduates, you said something about being in Germany and writing about that country's memorialization of the murdered Jews of Europe and how what you would write today, post-October 7, might be different than the way you wrote about it then. Can you talk about that more?
CS: Because of what the Nazi regime did to Jewish people throughout Europe, post-World War II Germany has largely engaged in an ongoing project of contrition toward Jewish people. Understandably so. That contrition manifests itself in museums, in memorials, and in the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stones that are placed in front of the homes that Jewish people were taken from. There's over 100,000 of them, these tiny brass stones, across thirty countries in Europe. Contrition manifests itself in the physical landscape of the country. It manifests itself in the curriculum and classrooms of the country. As Angela Merkel said, part of Germany's reason for being is to protect the state of Israel, as that is where many European Jews fled to after World War II.
After October 7 and the terrorist attack Hamas engaged in on the Israel, on Israeli people, the response from Israel, as well as the initial response from Germany, was to conflate criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism. This conflation makes it so that criticism of the State of Israel and its actions—which would become the genocide they engaged in on Palestinians in response to the terrorist attacks—became synonymous with antisemitism.
In Germany, a country with that history and the largest population of Palestinians in Europe, any manifestation of Palestinian solidarity was perceived as antisemitic and would often be punished as such by Germany. Part of why Germany was so severe in the way it defined antisemitism and punished those engaged in anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian activities—both of which the Germans perceived as antisemitic gestures and protests—came from this feeling of having to demonstrate solidarity with the people whom they themselves slaughtered. This took the memory of the Holocaust, this horrific, horrific thing, and used it as a way that prevented Germany, for a long time, from criticizing what Israel did. This led to Germans arresting Jewish people who were protesting Israel's actions against Palestine, to arresting Jewish people whose ancestors were killed in the Holocaust, for antisemitism. Germans are unable to escape what they believe history demands that they do and how they behave.
In writing about Holocaust memory in Germany, you now have to account for the ways in which Holocaust memory in Germany has been used as a mechanism by which the state of Germany continued to send Israel weapons and money and to stifle pro-Palestinian protests and activist movements in the name of Germany's solidarity with the Jewish people. Because of Germany's relationship to the Holocaust, they are unable to separate criticism of the state of Israel, and the political actors therein, from the larger idea of antisemitism. So, anybody writing about this now has to account for that reality in order to name that as part of what exists. Masha Gessen has written about this really thoughtfully for The New Yorker. Susan Neiman wrote a book about this...
SL: Learning from the Germans?
CS: Yes, and she recently had a story in The New York Review of Books about how Holocaust memory in Germany has gone haywire—I think that's the word she used. Holocaust memory has been used as a way to prevent Germany from criticizing or playing a role in stopping Israel from the war in Gaza, and it has also resulted in a disproportionate clamping down on pro-Palestinian dissent within Germany itself.
It is a complex yet important thing to navigate and address. My book is not about Gaza or Israel, but because of the relationship those two places have to Germany, and because Israel was created in the aftermath of World War II, it's inevitably a part of the story.
SL: And this conflation also comes from some in the American Jewish community, that having anti-Israel opinions, by definition, is antisemitism. That plays out here as well...
CS: In America. Yeah, certainly.
SL: Back to one of your pre-October 7 writings in The Atlantic, in “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” you wrote about your experience at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I'm curious about your personal reaction to the enormous scale of the project, not as it pertains to the murdered Jews of Europe, but as it pertains to our own country's approach to publicly memorializing murdered Black people.
CS: I was so struck by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I had never encountered a memorial as massive and centrally located as that. I mean, this enormous monument to the crimes that Germany had engaged in is in the heart of downtown Berlin. Many people have very different ideas of the monument's efficacy. For some people, it's too amorphous, unclear, and not direct enough in its condemnation—too abstract. It is too big, too present and too direct a condemnation of Germany for others. I think it's inevitable that any monument of significance is going to have detractors on either end.
From my vantage point, as someone who's a Black American who does not have a direct relationship to that history, whose subjectivity is shaped by the fact that I am the descendant of enslaved people in a country where there is no such monument, I remain struck by its presence. This monument, which conveys a crime committed by Germany, is in such a prominent location in its capital city. It’s difficult to imagine the U.S. ever doing something close to that. I still feel moved and haunted and impressed by the monument, even as I understand many Germans have very different ideas of what role it plays.
SL: One of the ideas in that article was that Germany might have had a simpler process in memorializing the dead Jews of Europe because there are no longer living Jews of any number in Germany, whereas in the U.S., a significant population are the living descendants of the dead Black people. Can you speak about that idea?
CS: In Germany, some of the folks that I was there with said that Jewishness is a canvas upon which Germans paint their contrition.
SL: An empty canvas.
CS: Yeah. Jews are not people who folks encounter every day. They're more of an historical idea that Germany has to apologize to, along with apologizing for their actions against them.
In the article, I wrote that Jewish people in Germany are less than a quarter of a percent of the population now. There are more Jewish people in the city of Boston than there are in all of Germany. In America, there's some forty-odd million Black people who make up 12 or 13 percent of the country. We are still a meaningful political block and play a disproportionate role in shaping the social and cultural landscape of the country. In that way, we are omnipresent forces because of sports, culture, entertainment, and politics. Even if you don't know individual Black people, you are forced to contend with the presence of Black people in this country in a way that is simply different than what non-Jewish Germans are forced to encounter there. And it also speaks to, unfortunately, how successful the Holocaust was. I mean, two-thirds of the Jewish people in all of Europe were killed. It's just an extraordinary and horrific number. When you go to the museum underneath the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, you see that around ninety percent of the Jewish people in Poland were killed. You know, three million people, just slaughtered.
SL: So, is the idea that because Black people have such a presence in our country, it's harder for the country to apologize or acknowledge or...?
CS: If you were to meaningfully apologize, it would then beg the question of, well, what are you going to do about it? That would lead to questions about repair. And that would lead to questions about the reallocation of material resources. And that would lead to questions about resource distribution and reparations.
Black people are still so present. You can trace our history, and you don't even have to go all the way back to slavery. I can go to the city of Indianapolis and look back over the records of the last eighty years. I can see who was denied a loan because of redlining, who was prevented from moving into certain neighborhoods. The city of Indianapolis, the city of New Orleans, the city of New York could engage in a project of attempting to redistribute money that was functionally taken and stolen from people, or that people were prevented from having access to, because of things done to Black people in the twentieth century. You don't even have to go all the way back to slavery.
So, if the U.S. were to actually apologize for what happened, the question would be: “What are we going to do to fix it?” The line from acknowledgment and apology to repair is a clear and, in some ways, inevitable one. As a result, many people don't even want to apologize and acknowledge because it would demand an action people don't want to partake in.
Germany has its own program of reparations to Jewish people who survived the Holocaust. But again, because there were so few of them, that looks different than reparations to Black people in the U.S. In the same way, the U.S. paid a relatively nominal fee, $20,000, to people who were interned and incarcerated in the camps for Japanese Americans. But they did that because there were 110–120,000 of them, not forty million. So, part of this is a question of resources.
But beyond the question of resources, part of this issue is that to fully acknowledge what was done to Black people, you would then have to tell a fundamentally different story about America, and for many Americans, that means they would have to tell a new story about themselves. A lot of people simply don't want to do that because who they understand themselves to be in the world is deeply tied to the story of America they've been told. When you have to tell a new story, a more complex and honest story, then you can find that people are having existential crises because they don't understand who they are outside the dominant American story they've been told. That's how they've situated themselves in this country over the course of their lives.
SL: Which then places Black people in the position of accepting all the incongruity, disparity, dissonance, or whatever, of living in a culture that doesn't acknowledge them and their history.
CS: One hundred percent. One hundred percent.