What It's Like To Grow Up Black Around Confederate Statues

Poet and author Clint Smith talks about his experience growing up in a city with several prominent Confederate monuments. Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew discuss this.

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"This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. After the statue of Robert E. Lee near downtown New Orleans was taken down from its 60-foot pedestal in 2017, Clint Smith says he became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with and with teaching himself all the things he wishes someone had taught him long ago. Smith is from New Orleans, where at least 100 streets, statues, parks and schools are named after Confederate figures, slaveholders and defenders of slavery. The street his parents live on is named after a man who owned more than 150 enslaved people.

In Smith's new book, he reports and reflects on his travels to eight places to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery. The places he goes to include Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Monticello, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, where the enslaved people in that parish revolted, a cemetery in which 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried, and Angola Prison, which is built on the site of a plantation.

At the end of the book, Smith interviews his grandparents to see how this history has shaped his family. His grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His book, "Counting Descent," won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. In 2014, he was the National Poetry Slam champion. His new book is called "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America."

Clint Smith, welcome to our show. It's actually your second time on our show because you read a really excellent poem on our show awhile ago during the pandemic about growing up in New Orleans, where all - it seemed like all the streets were named after Confederate generals or people who had owned slaves. Tell us more about why you wanted to write about sites that were major places in the history of slavery, major sites of slavery.

CLINT SMITH, BYLINE: Yeah. It's a real pleasure to be here. And as you mentioned at the beginning, you know, so much of what animated this book and served as a catalyst for wanting to write this book was watching the statues - these Confederate statues in my hometown of New Orleans - come down in May of 2017 - and so statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, among other symbols of white supremacy, coming down after having been erected and located in different parts of the city for over a century, many of them."

Image Credit, Wally Gobetz

Image has been cropped and color has been altered.