A beautifully written excavation of the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism in America. The book is shaped around visits to major historic sites, with the author using those conversations and visits to interrogate our thinking and communicating about slavery. He also weaves in well sourced and convincing counterpoints to teach the reader the lie, so they can recognize it as false when they encounter it again. 

This book took me so long to read, because it was so much information and emotion to digest in each sentence—but it was well worth the read. It was well written and educational, even for someone who considers herself relatively well-educated on American and world history. I really and truly cannot recommend this book enough to everyone.

An absolute must read for everyone. So beautifully written and engaging. I recommend reading with a highlighter and some tabs. 

I loved the perspective author Clint Smith chose to take in this book. By combining historical research, journalistic-style interviews, and personal reflections, he exemplifies the theme of How the Word is Passed; that we need to get the facts of our history from those who lived it.
 
In doing so, he also explores the damage done by systemic repression of the true history of the United States. He skillfully critiques the education system, America's legal and political system, the medicine industry, and everything in between. It's truly astounding just how much history has been altered in the United States to preserve the sparkling image of freedom and justice our country claims to represent. It's equally harrowing to realize that the sheer amount of information here barely touches the surface of what the United States has swept under the rug, how many more places the author could have visited, how many more interviews could have been had (and how many possible interviewees have been lost), how many more organizations and people could have been implicated. Staggering.

Clint Smith is also very clearly a skilled writer, and is able to weave in beautiful prose and breath-taking moments of self-reflection. 

It's probably trite at this point to call books like this a "must read", but this is absolutely a must read.

a informative book on the origins of chattel slavery to its modern connections of the prison industrial complex and civil rights. Smith breaks down common misconceptions and whitewashed history through each chapter as he visits a different place. my only complaint is that it’s not longer. 

A very insightful look into the legacy of slavery through different settings. I found it so fascinating how a physical place can tell a very distinct account of how slavery played a role in its existence. It can choose to acknowledge the horrors this country committed (like the Whitney Plantation), or downplay slavery's centrality to this country's history and influence on contemporary society (like in Blandford Cemetery/Angola). Like Clint mentioned, the reason the Black people are still systematically oppressed is because many Americans do not acknowledge that this is a problem in the first place. Society refuses to acknowledge that this is a problem that stems from the institution of slavery. What these seven places showed me is that the US still does not know how to grapple with slavery, and I am unsure if we will ever get there. 

While majority of this book is comprised of historical accounts and interviews with people that have relationships with the places he visited, I appreciated him incorporating his own story into this book. The epilogue is him talking to his grandparents about their experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South. And with this he acknowledges that the word does not only get passed through places or institutions. Equally important is the word passed through our elders, those closest to us. These factors all create a more holistic picture of this country's history.

Overall, a very very good and informative book. I coincidentally read majority of this while on a road trip in the South. Passing through states that were mentioned like Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama while reading a little about their history was very interesting! 

"Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country." - from the chapter on Monticello, about Jefferson's remarks about Phillis Wheatley and Black people not being capable of poetic expression due to their ALLEGED lack of ability to turn love into poetry.

"there's a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory... somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion... I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know... but nostalgia is what you want to hear."

"The Fedral Writers' Project plays a significant role at the Whitney, enhancing its ability to center the voices of enslaved people. Created as part of the New Deal's Works Progress Adminisration, the project included an initiative to document the experience of slavery. In the late 1930s, staff collected more than 2300 firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people, including 500 black-and-white photographs." - from the chapter on the Whitney Plantation

"In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence."

"Historian Walter Johnson aptly notes that the 'language of dehumanization is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people... Julia Woodrich's words lingered. When that man made Julia's sister lie down in his bed he did not have to believe her to be less than human. He simply had to know that she did not have the power to stop him."

"Lineage is a strand of smoke making its way into the sky even though we can't always tell where it's coming from, even though sometimes we can't distinguish the smoke from the sky itself."

"simply because something has been reformed does not mean it is now acceptable." - on Angola Prison's introduction of programs for incarcerated people

"So much of the story we tell about history is really about the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throuhout our lives we are told certain stories and they are are stories that we choose to believe- stories that become embedded in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of."

"'One of the biggest lies we are still telling in this country - and I know because I'm trying to combat it- [is that] during the Civil War we were the good guys, right? New York City was good. Everybody else in the South, they were bad... Guys, what were you just standing in from of?' She pointed to the marker behind us, her voice rising an octave. 'Where we're standing' - she pointed emphatically to the ground beneath her- 'this is the second largest slave market in the United States of America'" - from the chapter on New York City and its involvement in the slave trade, the plaque for the slave market is located in FiDi.

"Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?" - from the chapter on Goree Island and the information it chooses to present.