ABHM Book Club – How The Word Is Passed

Book Club graphic for How the Word is Passed

We will read How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, a special selection in collaboration with the upcoming Building Legacies exhibit at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC). How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith explores the legacy of slavery through a tour of key historical sites, from Monticello to Angola Prison. Smith reveals how monuments and landmarks—some truthful, some deceptive—reflect the nation’s complicated history. With deep research and personal storytelling, Smith shows how slavery’s impact still shapes America today, offering a powerful reflection on the role of memory and history in understanding the nation’s past and its future.

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Enslaved People Lived Here.These Museums Want You to Know

By Tariro Mzezewa, The New York Times A few years ago, people touring the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, Ga., would have heard a lot about George Owens, the lawyer, farmer and Congressional representative who lived in the massive neoclassical home in 1833. And about banker and slave trader Richard Richardson, for whom…

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Monticello recognizes the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s children

“President Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’ children. Therefore, Monticello, where they lived and worked, is now as much the family home of my Hemings cousins and all the other slave descendants as it is mine,” says Jefferson’s 6th great-grandson.

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