How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers)

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How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers)

By Clint Smith

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“The echo of enslavement is everywhere,” Clint Smith writes in the prologue to his brilliant book, How the Word Is Passed. The young readers edition of Smith’s book captures a few of these echoes and tries to make sense of them for our lives today.

Smith shows how in different sites, slavery is remembered, slavery is distorted, and slavery is forgotten. He travels to Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello, where over the course of his life Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people; to the Whitney Plantation outside of New Orleans, near the largest revolt of enslaved people prior to the Civil War; to Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, site of a former plantation; to the Confederate burial ground of Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia; to Galveston Island, where the first non-Native enslaved person arrived in 1528, home of the first Juneteenth commemoration; to New York City, which on the eve of the American Revolution had the highest proportion of enslaved Black people to Europeans in the North; to Gorée Island in Senegal, a center of the trade in enslaved Africans from the 16th century to 1848; and finally, Smith returns to his own family, whose ancestors were enslaved, to make sense of the intimate, close-to-home impact of the “crime that is still unfolding.” [Adapted from Rethinking Schools description.]