Gregarious, learned and engagingly open-minded, the book meets America where it is on the subject — which is to say, all over the place ... [Clint] skillfully braids interviews with scholarship and personal observation, asking, 'How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?' ... The result is a tour of tours and a reckoning with reckonings, which sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America’s historical conscience. The book’s standout quality is the range and sincerity of its encounters ... His ease with strangers is charmingly apparent ... Never getting lost in his story’s many thickets, Smith confidently interleaves the history of American slavery with his subjects’ varied relationships to the institution’s evolving legacy ... Smith has a penchant for evoking people and places, and occasionally garlands his text with descriptions of voices, landscapes and curricula vitae that distract from the substance of his research. His generosity of spirit also leads him to affirm some instances of remembrance that might deserve more scrutiny ... But it’s surely a sign of strength when even a book’s shortcomings vindicate its larger project. Smith’s unapologetically subjective map of American memory is an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves.
It is for these moments, seemingly small, that Smith reserves the hush of his own surprise and learning. Rarely in a book of this scope does one find such careful reconstruction and attention to rhetoric ... A book of how slavery is remembered will, of course, hardly be light reading. Good thing then that Smith knows when to steer toward the contemporary ... enthralling and enraging ... Also softly revelatory about Smith’s approach is how he understands the role of emotion in public history ... Importantly, the book is indubitably a radical act within the halls of knowledge. Smith knows 'preserved' sites and the public domain are hardly inherently positive places, but he knows they wield power. Citing a treasure trove of academic historians, Smith asks what many academics do not: what does the public know? What do 'I' know?.
In rich, evocative language, Smith synthesizes first hand research, textual sources, and interviews as he weaves a lyrical and precise tapestry of the truth of America's past that many would like to continue to hide ... The detail and depth of the storytelling is vivid and visceral, making history present and real. Equally commendable is the care and compassion shown to those Smith interviews — whether tour guides or fellow visitors in these many spaces. Due to his care as an interviewer, the responses Smith elicits are resonant and powerful ... Smith deftly connects the past, hiding in plain sight, with the today's lingering effects. ...
... traces, in a sustained and pragmatic way, crucial sites in our historical narrative, and exposes the bitter experiences that, as Americans, we have long sought to suppress ... Smith reveals and makes present for his readers the profoundly disturbing truths of what transpired in these places, of the systemic and strategic violence and abuse that enabled the society in which we now live ... In this important and compelling account, Smith, who conjures places and the people in them with striking attention to detail, exposes a gamut of responses to that history ... doesn’t simply bring news of the past; it seeks to convey the urgency of that news in our troubled present.
... an eminently readable, thought-provoking volume, with a clear message to separate nostalgic fantasy and false narratives from history ... Without being didactic, Smith debunks contorted arguments that the Civil War was not about slavery ... Smith forces readers to face uncomfortable truths about America ... Smith provides an important guide to learning about ourselves and our country. With a deft touch, he raises questions that we must all address, without recourse to wishful thinking or the collective ignorance and willful denial that fuels white supremacy.
... subtle and extraordinary ... a combination of historical insight and personal discovery perhaps best described by a word from his own title: 'reckoning' ... The problem with How the Word Is Passed—and it’s certainly a negotiable problem in light of the book’s generous array of strengths—is that Smith’s rhetoric sometimes moves from passionate to overblown. It’s a move that may cost him readers who would otherwise agree with him ... Despite such occasional overreaches, How the Word Is Passed is a harrowing journey through historical landmarks ... It’s a challenging text, but ultimately, perhaps, a hopeful one.
... a magnificent nonfiction retelling of America’s battle with itself over race and slavery ... Historians rarely have his gift for language ... It is beautifully written, lyrical, and poignant. His affecting narrative continues throughout his entire project ... At times, Smith’s writing sounds like a travelogue, much as could be found in a book about Nazi death camps ... Each chapter is filled with revelations about a sorrowful time in the nation’s history.
... an intrepid trek covering lots of ground ... This is an elegiac discourse, sometimes a trifle overwrought. No matter. It answers the title’s question with often elegant emphasis ... Conversely, in New York his explorations inspire disappointment. He begins at the African Burial Ground, which segregated blacks outside the city walls starting in the 18th century ... Smith’s visit to the site of Seneca Village, once a rustic Manhattan hamlet of 225 residents, 150 of African descent, is of more ambiguous merit. In 1860, 10 of those blacks owned their houses and so could vote: 10 of approximately 12,000 black New Yorkers, out of 813,669 inhabitants in total. Was it worth it to lose Seneca Village and gain Central Park? Even knowing that some of those 10 black men were compensated at a rate below the true value of their property, I think so. More troubling by far is gentrification and displacement today. It has made the Treme, Washington and Harlem, with all the attainment and history each embodies, today’s Seneca Village. These were communities of color far richer than Greenwood’s Black Wall Street. Bloodless, their evisceration is no less thorough than the result of Tulsa’s race massacre. As one knows better through this welcome work, that is how the word is passed.
... Smith tells vivid and sometimes harrowing stories of places that reveal the history of slavery in America ... Smith deftly mixes well-researched history and narratives of enslaved people with contemporary descriptions of the places, landmarks and people he encounters, including tour guides, fellow visitors and historians. He captures the devastating personal impacts of slavery ... Smith is assiduous about showing the humanity of enslaved people, telling their names, their life stories and details about family members ... informs on so many levels, recounting the history of slavery but also showing its many modern manifestations, linking the present to the past. This is a brave and important book that needed to be written and demands to be read.
Smith’s purpose is never to put anyone on the spot. This isn’t Borat. What he does, quite successfully, is show that we whitewash our history at our own risk. That history is literally still here, taking up acres of space, memorializing the past, and teaching us how we got to be where we are, and the way we are. Bury it now and it will only come calling later.
Smith’s gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read about places where the story of American slavery lives on ... vital ... At each stop, Smith’s vivid descriptions of the landscape and his response to the site give readers a visceral sense of place ... quite moving ... Smith has an appreciation of nuance. He wields few cudgels here. And yet, How the Word Is Passed succeeds in making the essential distinction between history and nostalgia.
It is an ambitious undertaking, one that Smith narrates with a beauty that is often heartbreaking as it reveals (intentionally or not) our public education system’s failure to engage students with their history ... what is disappointing about Smith’s account is how he demonstrates, but never interrogates, the shallow nature of our current 'racial reckoning' ... The impulse to debate the degree of wetness rather than the substance of water itself is a problem throughout ... This lack of engagement with history and Blackness beyond mythical origin story is precisely why so much of How the Word Is Passed feels like a shadow of more nuanced historical analysis ... for all his giftedness, Clint Smith is not a historian, and because of that, How the Word Is Passed mistakes surface observation for revelation.
I'm so glad that many people are eager to read this vitally important work. For me, aside from the value of uncovering, acknowledging and narrating the stories of slavery and tracing its impacts, it is a powerful testament to the value of making history public, whether in plaques that identify long-buried (literally and figuratively) sites in the shameful history of our country, or in the invaluable work of skillful tour guides, bravely telling the truth even when it makes tourists uncomfortable. It will encourage any reader to contend more deeply with our country’s history --- and maybe even set out on their own journeys of discovery and reckoning.
... reads as both history and memoir: a stunning exploration of atrocities committed against Black people, and a thoughtful, clear-eyed account of one Black man trying to reckon with these places in the past and present ... Each place, no matter its current approach, is vital to a holistic understanding of slavery in the U.S. Smith's work is a passionate, thought-provoking, brilliantly observed call for Americans to take a new, uncomfortable but essential look at their own history.
Some of the sites and histories that Smith revisits are well-known (for instance, Monticello and Sally Hemings’s story); others, such as Louisiana’s Angola prison/plantation, or the benefit Wall Street drew from slavery long after its abolition in New York, are refreshing new takes ... An excellent travelogue and introduction to slavery’s impact on both the United States and its people. It will hold the interest of readers who are only starting to grapple with the topic.
... a devastating portrait with unforgettable details ... a vivid portrait of the extent to which venues have attempted to redress past wrongs ... A brilliant, vital work about 'a crime that is still unfolding.'
... moving and perceptive ... Suffused with lyrical descriptions and incisive historical details, including Robert E. Lee’s ruthlessness as a slave owner and early resistance by Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to the Confederate general’s 'deification,' this is an essential consideration of how America’s past informs its present.
