Episode 515: Clint Smith

Clint Smith is a poet and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America and his latest feature is “Monuments to the Unthinkable.”

“I've been to a lot of places that carry a history of death and slaughter and murder. I've been on plantations. I've been in execution chambers. I've sat on electric chairs. I've been on death row. But I have never experienced anything like what I experienced walking through the gas chamber in Dachau. I mean, there's reading books about the Holocaust, and then there's that. And that is something that I hope to continue doing for the rest of my life: putting my body where these things happen. Because it completely transforms your understanding of what it was like.”

Show notes:

@ClintSmithIII

clintsmithiii.com

Smith on Longform

Smith's Atlantic archive

00:00 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little Brown • 2021)

01:00 "Monuments to the Unthinkable" (Atlantic • Nov 2022)

17:00 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Matthew Desmond • Crown • 2017)

33:00 The Hemingses of Monticello (Annette Gordon-Reed • W.W. Norton • 2009)

34:00 Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing • 2016)

57:00 The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank • 1947)

57:00 Number the Stars (Lois Lowry • Houghton Mifflin • 1989)

1:07:00 "The Stories Tamir Rice Makes Us Remember" (New Yorker • Dec 2015)

1:08:00 Smith's New Yorker archive

1:08:00 "Freddy Adu and the Children of the Beautiful Game" (New Yorker • Mar 2017)

1:09:00 Above Ground (Little Brown • 2023)

1:09:00 Crash Course Black American History

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices