By Colleen Coveney
In May 2017, the city of New Orleans dismantled a 133-year-old bronze statue of Robert E. Lee which towered atop a 60-foot column in Lee Circle, a central traffic circle in the heart of the city.
Clint Smith, author and staff writer for The Atlantic, spoke to a UC Santa Barbara audience about conducting research for his recent book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America.
Lee was a Confederate war general who eventually became commander of the Confederate States Army. Extracting his statue was among efforts many American institutions are undertaking to remove or alter historical landmarks that many people experience as celebrating slavery’s atrocities and legacy.
The statue’s removal captivated Black author Clint Smith, who was born and raised in New Orleans, and prompted him to dive headfirst into research on how slavery is commemorated by American monuments which were built on the backs of slaves. He published his research in a nonfiction novel How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America.
“I wanted to write a book of history that in some ways felt like a novel,” Smith said last week at an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) Regeneration Talk.
Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic, told IHC director Susan Derwin and a UC Santa Barbara virtual audience that he wished to incorporate his personal experience grappling with historical tension at the monuments to show readers that the “history” impacts individuals’ lives in the present.
“The afterlife of slavery continues to shape our social, political, and economic institutions,” Smith said. “This history we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn’t that long ago at all.”
Smith’s book takes the reader on a journey through Monticello Plantation, Whitney Plantation, Blandford Cemetery, and Angola Prison, four landmarks whose history is intertwined with black stories. In each chapter, Smith weaves together the brutal history connected with each landmark, the way this information is presented today, and his experience touring each location and conversing with other visitors.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) director Susan Derwin interviewed author Clint Smith at a Regeneration Talk last week about the different approaches historical monuments take to represent slavery in their histories.
Smith said each memorial’s curators took a different approach to acknowledging slavery; some hardly mentioned it at all, while others, like at the Monticello Plantation, have reimagined tour content to honor the slaves who built the buildings, memories, and families on the land.
Most, however, opted to paint over the gruesome acts committed on the land, thereby glorifying the Civil War and Southern pride.
“For so many people history is not about primary source documents or evidence… it is a story people are told, in which loyalty, community, family, lineage, all take precedence over truth,” Smith said.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when the story being told does not match up with the gruesome reality, so people avoid situations and information that might cause them discomfort, he explained.
Because many individuals’ identities are directly tied to the legacy they are told about the American South, Southerners often refuse to accept any other version of history, even when the evidence is irrefutable.
Smith experienced this dissonance when he attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration at Blandford Cemetery, one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country with remains of over 30,000 soldiers. He spoke with someone named Jeff who said his grandfather used to bring him to the cemetery and tell him stories about the brave men buried there. Jeff now does the same with his granddaughters.
Author Clint Smith, who spoke at a recent Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) Regeneration Talk, read a poem from his poetry collection Counting Descent.
“A reassessment of this country’s history represents not only an inconvenience but an existential threat for many of the people in this country. The story people tell about themselves begins to crumble for a lot of people,” Smith said.
But while acknowledging the truth may be uncomfortable for some, ignoring the racist reality of American history is extremely damaging to Black people because it belittles the history of those who were and still are affected by slavery.
“White supremacy numbs us to the violences that would be unacceptable in a global context,” Smith said.
The author said he experienced difficulties while writing the book and finding how much work still needs to be done, but that all his work stems from a place of love and a desire to build a better world. Reparations are vital to accomplish this.
“Each of the Black people in this country is a memorial to that history… you [must] recognize what you did was horrible,” Smith said. “You have to make amends for that mistake, you can’t just acknowledge it and move on.”
He admitted that “reparations” is a gray area in which it is difficult to determine what is enough, but stressed that it begins with remembering those disturbing actions that took place and seeing the people who are still being affected.
“The act of remembering is an act of love,” Smith said.
Colleen Coveney is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Psychology and Brain Sciences. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.