How Americans deceive ourselves about slavery

Reckoning with Memory: Clint Smith’s Journey Through American Slavery History

Ecorescuezone.com – The removal of Robert E. Lee’s towering statue from its New Orleans pedestal in 2017 marked more than a physical change to the city’s landscape—it sparked a personal transformation in poet and educator Clint Smith. That moment ignited an obsession with how the nation remembers, teaches, and sometimes deliberately obscures the history of slavery. Smith, a native of New Orleans where over one hundred streets, monuments, parks, and educational institutions bear the names of Confederate figures and slaveholders, began a quest to uncover the gaps in his own understanding.

A Literary and Academic Career Rooted in Truth

Smith’s scholarly foundation includes a Ph.D. in education from Harvard University, complemented by his work as a staff writer for The Atlantic Magazine. His literary achievements span multiple genres and accolades. His poetry collection “Counting Descent” received the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. In 2023, he released “Above Ground,” a collection featuring poems addressed to his children about ancestral endurance and survival.

His nonfiction work, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America,” achieved remarkable recognition. The book secured the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, climbed to number one on the New York Times Best Seller list, and earned a place among the publication’s ten best books of 2021. For this comprehensive work, Smith traveled to eight significant locations across the United States, examining how slavery’s history has been distorted in educational settings and how many Americans maintain comfortable illusions about their past.

The Lost Cause and Hidden Histories

Smith’s observations about American memory extend beyond personal experience into broader cultural patterns. He has spoken extensively about the “Lost Cause” mythology—a narrative constructed by descendants of Confederate soldiers that transformed what many viewed as treason into something honorable. This narrative permeated textbooks and attempted to conceal crimes still unfolding in American society.

The mythology presented Robert E. Lee as an honest man fighting only for his beloved state and people. It claimed the Southern flag represented heritage and remembrance rather than the preservation of human bondage. Smith challenges this interpretation, noting that the Lost Cause is only “lost” when observers fail to look closely enough.

Voices from the Past

During interviews with Fresh Air in 2021 and 2023, Smith shared his perspective on growing up surrounded by Confederate iconography. He described passing daily beneath the statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general whose identity remained mysterious to him as a child. Beauregard, Smith later learned, ordered the first attack that initiated the Civil War, helped design the Confederate national flag, and commanded an army dedicated to maintaining slavery.

“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.”

Smith’s poem about his New Orleans childhood captures this tension between visible monuments and invisible truths. He wrote about Black children playing beneath statues of white men, their trumpets and trombones attempting to drown out the Dixie song still echoing through the city’s streets. He noted how easily Americans call something heritage when they refuse to see the Black bodies buried behind the symbols, and how simple it becomes to label something history when ignoring the laws written in its wake.

Education and the Future

As both educator and poet, Smith continues to advocate for honest engagement with American history. His work emphasizes that heritage carries a dual meaning—it represents both what we honor and what we choose to overlook. Through his writing, teaching, and public speaking, Smith encourages Americans to examine not only what monuments stand in their cities but what those monuments conceal, and to recognize that true reckoning requires looking beyond surface appearances to understand the full weight of the past.

His National Poetry Slam championship title reflects his commitment to performance and oral tradition, while his academic credentials ground his work in educational theory. Together, these elements create a multifaceted approach to helping Americans confront uncomfortable truths about slavery and its enduring legacy in contemporary society.