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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

9 Feb

Between 1936 and 1938, the federal government collected the narratives of over 2,300 formerly enslaved people. I tracked down the descendants of people who were interviewed and wrote about what these stories mean to them, and what they mean to our country. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

I argue that we need a new Federal Writer’s Project, a large-scale iniative that would collect the stories of those who lived through Jim Crow apartheid, Japanese American internment, and other important periods of American life that are important to have first-hand testimony of.

@TheAtlantic

This piece is part of @TheAtlantic’s INHERITANCE, an ongoing project committed to collecting, preserving, and unearthing the stories of Black life in America. We’ll have many more stories coming through this series in the days, weeks, and months to come.

theatlantic.com/inheritance/

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

1 Feb

Black History Month is a chance to remember those who have made enormous contributions to this country, but it's also an opportunity to remember that those contributions didn't just come from major figures. They also came from millions of Black folks whose names we'll never know.

It's the stories of ordinary Black people, those still living and those who have passed, that I think of most when we reflect on this country's history. It's the story of Frederick Douglass, but also the story of the millions of other enslaved people whose voices we don't hear.

It's the story of Dr. King and of Rosa Parks, but also the story of the millions of Black people across the country and across generations who fought for civil rights in their local towns, communities, and neighborhoods. The stories that didn't make the front page of the paper.

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

8 Jan

I wrote about how this photo captured the divide between who America purports to be and who we have actually been, the gap between our founding promises and our current reality. How so much of our country’s history was reflected in a single image.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

The portrait in the background is of Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and abolitionist who was beaten on the Senate floor by a Mississippi congressman for a speech Sumner gave criticizing slaveholders. Sumner experienced chronic, debilitating pain for the rest of his life.

The portrait behind the man carrying the Confederate Battle flag is one of John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery senator and vice-president to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, who wrote in 1837 that the existence of slavery "is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”

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Clint Smith

@ClintSmithIII

6 Jan

The Voting Rights Act was only signed 55 years ago. Tonight I'm thinking about all the Black folks in Georgia who have lived on both sides of it. Who voted in this election and who remember a time when they wouldn't have been able to. It wasn't that long ago. Not at all.

There are Black people still alive today who couldn't vote because of poll taxes. Black People still alive today who couldn't register to vote without the threat of violence hanging over them. Who were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap to vote. They remember it clearly.

I'm watching what the Black voters of Georgia have done, and I just can't stop thinking about all the history that preceded this moment. The history that's not just in textbooks or in black & white films, but a history that's alive in people bones. That's alive in their memories.

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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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