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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Black History Can Do More Than Counter White Racism

Black history is a movement of ideas targeted to redress the long history of anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness is a totalizing system of thought that positions Black people, including their bodies, culture, and value systems, as bad or dysfunctional. But Black history does more than counter anti-Black ideologies; it also documents the social contexts, experiences, aesthetics, and intellectual pursuits of African Americans. This idea of both countering white racism and writing and creating from one’s standpoint—removed from the white gaze—is central to Black history.

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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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