This compelling #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller 

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Winner of the Stowe Prize 

Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism 

PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist 

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 

A Time 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 

Named a Best Book of 2021 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Smithsonian, Esquire, Entropy, The Christian Science Monitor, WBEZ's Nerdette Podcast, TeenVogue, GoodReads, SheReads, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Fathom Magazine, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library 

One of GQ’s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century 

Longlisted for the National Book Award Los Angeles Times, Best Nonfiction Gift 

One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2021

Clint Smith is a writer, speaker, podcaster, poet and academic and one of our most prominent examples of a true public intellectual. His work first came to national attention with his viral TED Talks, The Danger of Silencein 2014 and How to Raise a Black Son in America in 2015. Clint speaks to these same social issues on social media, specifically Twitter, where he has 245,000 followers with 40-60 million views each month. He is a weekly contributor to Crooked Media's Pod Save the People, a graduate of Harvard's interdisciplinary doctoral program in Culture, Institutions, and Society (Graduate School of Education), and an award-winning poet. In recognition of his achievements, he was selected as one of Forbes' 2018 "30 Under 30" list in Media and Ebony Magazine's 2017 Power 100 list.