How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Much of what shaped my desire to write this book was my experience as a high school teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, right outside Washington, DC. Though I was an English teacher, history informed both the way I approached the texts that we read and how I made sense of the social realities of my students’ lives. It was as a teacher that I first began to fully account for the way the history of this country shaped the landscape of my students’ communities, from slavery to Jim Crow apartheid to mass criminalization and beyond. I have come to realize that those conversations with my students, now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the world around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud.