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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

1 Jan

217 years ago today, on January 1, 1804, Haiti became became the first independent Black republic in the world following a 12 year revolution. It changed the trajectory of world history.

In 1893, Frederick Douglass gave a speech outlining why Haiti's revolution was so important:

"Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown for the blow struck at Harper's Ferry...but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century."

"It was her one brave example that first of all started the Christian world into a sense of the Negro's manhood. I was she who first awoke the Christian world to a sense of 'the danger of goading too far the energy that slumbers in a black man's arm.'"

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

29 Dec 20

The best teachers I know teach their students to critically interrogate *every* text they read. They teach both Morrison & Shakespeare. Baldwin & Frost. Contemporary YA & 19th century novels. They reject the idea that they are mutually exclusive. They build & imagine a new canon.

So much of what we've been taught is "valuable" literature comes from a consensus that kept many ppl out of the room. There is enormous value in a lot of canonical work, there are also enormous problems. Who is included? Who isn't? The best educators name & address that directly.

One of the things that I've found most encouraging over the past several months are the ways so many educators have reexamined what books they are teaching. Who have thought more critically about how to use literature to help their students see themselves, and to see others.

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

10 Dec 20

Brandon Bernard is scheduled to be executed tonight. The crime was 20 years ago. He was a teenager. He didn't pull the trigger.

The Trump administration is on track to execute 13 people before he leaves office. It would be more federal executions than the past 67 years combined.

Five of the nine people who served on his jury, the majority, have come out in favor of commutation saying they do not think Bernard should be killed. People who say they weren't originally presented with all of the information they should have always had

helpsavebrandon.com/jurors-who-now…

It is categorically *absurd* that someone should get the death penalty (at all) but *especially* for something they did when they were a teenager. Research shows our brains aren't fully developed until our mid-20s.

And they want to *kill* him for something he did when he was 18.

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

4 Dec 20

I truly don't think enough can be said about the work teachers have done over the past several months. Some teaching online *and* in person. Making lesson plans for both. Some caring for their own children and relatives while they teach. They deserve both praise and better pay.

Some folks underestimate the extent to which online teaching demands that teachers upend and revamp years of work they have put into their pedagogy. Teachers have to both learn new technology for themselves and also have to teach their students how to use these tools effectively.

And the teachers who are still going into schools, while rates are low relative to other indoor settings, are still putting themselves and their own families at risk by doing so. And in some places if these districts have decided to mandate they come in, they don't have a choice.

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

28 Oct 20

Very excited to share the cover of my new book, How the Word Is Passed. It’s my first book of nonfiction and I’m really proud it. It’s coming out June 1, 2021 and is now available for preorder. I hope you’ll consider getting a copy and spreading the word.

littlebrown.com/titles/clint-s…

I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever done. Traveled across the country (and an ocean) to try and understand how different places reckon with, or fail to reckon with, their relationship to the history of slavery. To try and understand how these places tell that story.

This book began after watching the major Confederate monuments come down in my hometown of New Orleans in 2017 and realizing I had grown up in a city where there had been more homages to enslavers than to enslaved people. I wanted to understand how something like that happened.

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

4 Sep 20

We're in a moment in which more and more teachers are incorporating the texts of people of color into their classrooms, and my hope is that teachers present these writers not merely as sociological or anthropological tour guides, but also as composers of beautiful literature.

Frederick Douglass, for example, should be read as much for the shape of his sentences as he is for what his life tells us about slavery and the historical moment he lived in. His work should sit alongside Melville and Whitman and Dickinson as central to the American Renaissance.

When teaching Zora Neale Hurston, are educators teaching students to find value in the way Hurston captures and employs language, or *only* to show students what Black life was like during a certain period of time in a certain region in our country's history?

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