Clint Smith

Across the country are innumerable places that have direct ties to slavery—our schools, our streets, our prisons, our cemeteries, our cities—places that illustrate how some of this country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view. In this talk, #1 New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith discusses how the history of slavery has shaped the contemporary landscape of inequality, and shares what he learned from trips to different historical sites throughout the country that are tied to slavery’s legacy.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the stories of people living today, Clint’s talk outlines how these places reckon with—or fail to reckon with—their relationship to slavery, and how it is our responsibility to collectively document, learn from, and account for this history. Drawing on his award-winning book, How the Word Is Passed, he shows how the history we tell ourselves was a long time ago really wasn’t that long ago at all. Audiences will walk away understanding not only how our country became like this, but where we go from here.

America is a place that has provided unparalleled opportunities and upward mobility for millions of people across generations in ways that their ancestors could have never imagined. And it has often done so, at the direct expenses of millions of other people across generations who have been systematically exploited and oppressed. America is a place that has given and a place that has taken away. It is the Freedom Bell, and is is the enslaver’s whip. It is manifest destiny, and it is the Trail of Tears. It is what Thomas Jefferson wrote, and it is what Jefferson did.

In this powerful, far-ranging talk, #1 New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith reveals how the story of America is one of complexity, of contradictions, and of cognitive dissonance. There is no single American story, he says—there are many. In order to understand America, we must hold all of these stories alongside one another—and we must be honest about them—in order to truly understand our country’s history, and how it shapes the society we are a part of today. Audiences walk away with a greater understanding of who we are, who we have been, and who we could be.

Clint Smith traveled to six locations around the world to learn how citizens memorialize the war that remade their global order. In this powerful talk, he reveals what he discovered.

For his book Just Beneath the Soil: How We Remember World War II, Clint spent time at monuments, memorials, museums, and historical sites alongside people who carry that history in their blood—the atomic bomb survivor, the Holocaust survivor, the Japanese internment camp survivor, the surviving Korean “comfort woman,” and the Navajo Code Talker. Each conversation with a survivor, as well as their descendants, took these histories out of the realm of abstraction and made them real. Their narratives took a decades-old history and made him proximate to that pain. The past was on their breath. The stories were in their hands. The history was in the creases of their faces. Soon, however, there will be no survivors left. And the question that stayed with him as he visited each place was: what happens after they die? What can we do to keep this awareness, of war’s true meaning, alive? Are the memorials that we have built to remind of us of the horror these survivors witnessed enough to prevent us from falling back into cycle that led us to 1939?

In this talk, audiences learn more about how these memorials, museums, and historical sites are a way of preserving memory and enhancing our proximity to the past, so that it never becomes an abstraction we can easily ignore. Along with the audience, Clint examines whether these memorials retain enough moral, spiritual force to act as a proxy for those who lived through this violence. Are these statues and stones enough to keep us from doing it again?

The world we live in is changing faster than ever before. How do we grow and find our footing? In this talk, Clint Smith reads and discusses poems from his New York Times bestselling collection of poetry, Above Ground. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult.

Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Clint’s lyrical, narrative poems and insightful discussions bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.

Being a teacher has never simply been about pedagogy or lesson plans. Teachers are in a unique position right now to help their students understand that the state of the world is not an inevitability, and that we shouldn’t accept it as such. They can help their students understand that the inequality we see across the world was created and constructed—and thus it can be deconstructed and reconstructed to build something better, something more just.

In this fireside chat, Clint Smith provides teachers with the framework and the tools to approach these conversations in their schools. A former English teacher and host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History, Clint offers his expertise and personal experience to audiences in education, encouraging them to use their classrooms as spaces of transformation to help students dream of building a better world.