Hawk
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"How The Word Is Passed" by Clint Smith - A Reckoning With The History of Slavery Across America
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September 7, 2026
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9:55Now Playing"How The Word Is Passed" by Clint Smith - A Reckoning With The History of Slavery Across America. The Book That Should Be Required Reading
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Hawk steps away from the daily news to recommend a book he has been reading, Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed, subtitled A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. Smith, a staff writer at the Atlantic and an award winning poet, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for the book, which the New York Times named one of the ten best of 2021.
The book travels to monuments and landmarks that shaped the country, some honest about the past and some not. Hawk shares passages from the chapter on Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, centered on Sally Hemings and the enslaved Hemings family, and from the chapter on the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which uses the Federal Writers Project accounts to center the voices and the staggering child mortality of enslaved people.
He also reads from the section on Blandford Cemetery in Virginia, where Smith speaks with a Confederate reenactor about what the Civil War was fought over, and the irony of fear surrounding monuments built to intimidate Black communities. Hawk calls it riveting, beautifully written, and full of history none of us were taught in school, and previews a future video on the chapter about Angola prison.
#ClintSmith #HowTheWordIsPassed #SlaveryInAmerica #Monticello #SallyHemings #ThomasJefferson #WhitneyPlantation #BlandfordCemetery #AngolaPrison #BlackHistory #AmericanHistory #Reconstruction #Confederacy #BookRecommendation #TheAtlantic #History #Reckoning #Education #Books #Hawk
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