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Vice President Kamala Harris: Throughout history, Juneteenth has been known by many names: Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Liberation Day, Emancipation Day, and today, a national holiday.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: That of course was Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking yesterday as President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth, June 19th, a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. It's the first new national holiday established since Martin Luther King Day way back in 1983. Since June 19th falls on a Saturday this year, federal employees have today off, and WNYC like many other organizations, has also made Juneteenth a holiday beginning this year and many of our colleagues are taking today off as well. We wanted to do this show today and come to work today to celebrate and acknowledge our new national holiday together, and we have a really great lineup this hour.

We think we'll talk to poet, essayist, and playwright, Elizabeth Alexander, about what Black Freedom means to her. She has a major new essay about that. First, with me now is Atlantic staff writer and award-winning poet, Clint Smith. He's written a new book with a very timely and simple conceit. He crossed the country visiting nine monuments and other places that have a historical link to the legacy of slavery, and wrote about how those places memorialized or distort that connection from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, to the African burial ground in lower Manhattan, to a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas, the scene of the actual Juneteenth story.

Clint Smith's new book is called How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. Hi, Clint. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much. You must be in such demand today. Thank you for giving us some time on this holiday.

Clint Smith: I'm so happy to be here.

Brian: Tell us more about why you wanted to write about sites in particular that were major places in the history of slavery.

Clint Smith: The origin story of this book is that I was watching several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans, statues to Robert E. Lee, PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does that mean? What does it mean that to get to the grocery store? I had to go down Jefferson Davis highway to get to school. I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy. That my parents still live on a street named after somebody who owned 115 slave people.

Because we know that symbols and monuments, and memorials aren't just symbols. They are reflective of the stories that people tell, and those stories embed themselves into the narratives that communities carry, and those narratives shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people's lives. It's not to say that taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee or making Juneteenth the holiday is going to erase the racial wealth gap. It is to say that these are all part of an ecosystem of ideas and stories that shape how we understand what has happened to communities and what communities deserve.

I was thinking a lot about how New Orleans, my hometown, was reckoning with or failing to reckon with its relationship to the history of slavery. Then I started broadening it out more thinking about how other places across the country were running from or directly confronting the relationship to this history or doing something in between. I ended up going to nine different places across the country that represent us with a patchwork of different experiences, places from Angola Prison in Louisiana, to the Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, one of the largest cemeteries in the country, and trying to get a sense of how these different places tell such different stories about this common history that we share.

Brian: Let's go through some of these. I wonder if you could take us first to Galveston, Texas. I think you've agreed with my producer that you had read a passage from you attending a Juneteenth 1865 reenactment. Do you have this and can you set up where we are and what we're about to hear?

Clint Smith: Yes. We are in Galveston, Texas, and I went to Galveston two years ago for the annual celebration that that community has to celebrate both the Juneteenth and the late Al Edwards, Senior, who was the state legislator in Texas, who 40 years prior had made possible and advocated for the legislation that made Juneteenth into a state holiday in Texas. This was just a year before he would pass away. He passed away last year and it is a moment in which there was such an intimacy to the way that Juneteenth was celebrated.

It was very clear for this community that this was not a performance or just a symbol, or just a day that these were descendants of people whose ancestors had heard that they were free on this day. This was a part of their lineage. This was an heirloom that had been passed down and it was clearly something very personal for them. What I'm about to read is, there's a guy named Stephen Duncan, part of what they do is have union soldier reenactors who read. Stephen Duncan pretends to be General Gordon Granger, the union general who came down and announced General Order Number Three, which said that all slaves are free.

Brian: Thank you for that setup. We're all ears.

Clint Smith: "Stephen looked down at the parchment appraising the words as if he had never seen them before. He looked back down at the crowd which was looking up at him. He cleared his throat, approached the microphone, and lifted the yellow parchment to eye level. "The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with the proclamation of the executive of the United States, all slaves are free. That involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection here to for existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The freemen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere. All slaves are free." Before words circled the room like birds that had been separated from their flock. I watched people's faces as Stephen said these words, some close their eyes, some were physically shaking, some clasped their hands with the person next to them. Some simply smiled soaking in the words that their ancestors may have heard more than a century and a half ago. Being in this place, standing on the same small island where the freedom of a quarter-million people was proclaimed. I felt the history pulse through my body."

Brian: That was Clint Smith, if you're just joining us, reading from his new book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. Clint, maybe remind us even more or for people just even becoming familiar with the basics of Juneteenth. I think there are probably many millions of Americans still, how Galveston, Texas, is central to the story. A lot of it was in that passage and your setup. Just maybe do a little bit of Juneteenth one-on-one in that respect.

Clint Smith: Yes. Juneteenth is June 19th, 1865, when General Gordon Granger on the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, and proclaimed through General Order Number Three, as I said in the passage, that all slaves are here to for free. The context of this is that this was two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This is two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse, effectively ending the Civil War. What happened is that so many enslavers from places like Virginia and the Carolinas, and places that were more proximate to the north and places that in many ways the Union Army had taken over.

Many of those enslavers took their chattel, took their human property to Texas because they figured rightfully that Texas would be among the last places to be reached by the Union Army. Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation which only applied to Confederate states, would not be enforced because the only way that obviously the Union Army couldn't enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the Confederacy, is if union forces were in control of that territory. You had tens of thousands of additional enslaved people who came to Texas and ultimately, ended up with 250,000 enslaved people in 1865 who were there.

Juneteenth is this moment in which we both mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of people who had rightfully attained it, both through the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War was effectively over two months prior. We mourn that that was kept from them. We also celebrate this symbol that represents the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done. Juneteenth is a moment of both endiness. For me personally, part of what I think about is how slavery existed for 250 years in this country. From the moment enslaved people were brought to these shores, they were fighting for freedom.

What that means is that the vast majority of people across generations, millions of people who fought for freedom, who resisted slavery in ways big and small, never got a chance to see that freedom for themselves, but they fought for it anyway, because they knew that someday, someone would. I think that that's a lesson that we carry today, is that we fight to build a better world and a more equitable world, and a more just world, not necessarily or singularly so that we can see it for ourselves, but because we are part of a tradition and a lineage of people who fight for something to make a better world for those we might not even have the opportunity to meet.

Brian: Yes. Listeners, do you celebrate Juneteenth in your family, and what are your plans for today? 646-435-7280. How does it make you feel that more and more people are recognizing the holiday? Proud, moved, or it's about time or it's an empty gesture while systemic racism continues to persist? Anything along that spectrum? 646-435-7280. You can also call in, if like my guest, you have recently visited a Memorial or a place with a connection to the legacy of slavery in the United States. What did you notice? What stuck out to you? Or maybe you want to tell a piece of your own family history. If you know about ancestors who were enslaved, what stories have been passed down to you and how does it inform how you look at life and politics, and yourself? 646-435-7280.

As we talk to the Atlantic staff writer, Clint Smith, his new book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. 646-435-7280. We can get back to some of the other sites you visited, but because I asked our listeners to share with us through the process of writing this book, you found out that your grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. How did you find that out and what did you learn about him?

Clint Smith: I spent about four years writing this book, and I had been spending so much time with the scholarship on the history of slavery, and interviewing people at these different historical sites about their relationship to the history of slavery, how they taught about it, how they curated the experience, how it fit into their lives. I had this moment about halfway through in which I realized that I had done more interviewing of strangers and had a better sense of how strangers' lives fit into this history. Then I did some of the people close to me.

I sat down and interviewed both my grandmother. My grandfather, my born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi, and my grandmother born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida, to get a sense of what their experience growing up in these places were like. Also, to get a sense of how their lives, when they were born, which were only a few decades past abolition, 1930s only, what? 65 years after the abolition of slavery. That is the world in Mississippi that my grandfather was born into. Part of what it did was ground me in our temporal proximity to this period of time. Like I said, slavery existed for 250 years in this country and is only not existed for a little over 150 until you have this institution that existed almost a century longer than it hasn't.

You have the woman who opened the National Museum of African-American History and Culture alongside the Obama family, the new Smithsonian in 2016, the woman who opened it was the daughter of an enslaved person, not the granddaughter or the great-granddaughter. She was the daughter of someone who had been born into intergenerational chattel bondage. My grandfather's grandfather, as you said, was enslaved. When my four-year-old son sits on my grandfather's lap, I imagine my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago, wasn't that long ago at all. In the scope of human history, it was just yesterday.

That's important because the more we collectively realize our proximity to that period of time, and the more we realize how it wasn't that long ago, the more effectively we're able to identify how that period of time and all that it produced shaped what our contemporary landscape of inequality looks like, and shaped through our political, economic, and social infrastructure look like. That is deeply important if we are going to fully account for what has been done to certain communities over time and how to effectively make amends for the harm that was done.

Brian: After that reenactment of Juneteenth in Galveston, that you attended, you watched the rest of the proceedings or I should say, after the reenactment itself came the rest of the proceedings, which involve children performing a history lesson, moving through some dates that are central to the story of slavery in the United States. You write, "I felt in that moment, envious of them, had I known when I was younger, what some of the students were sharing. I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long, I could not name," that from your book. Can you talk about that unnamable paralysis and have you found a name for it, because I think it's an animating force for this project, right?

Clint Smith: Yes. It's an animating force for this project. It's an animating force for so much of my work, I think. I think so much of what I'm attempting to do with this book is filling the gaps that to my mind should have been filled a long time ago. I remember growing up in New Orleans, young Black child in New Orleans being inundated with these messages about how New Orleans was the murder capital of the nation, how we incarcerate more people per capita in Louisiana than China, Iran, and Russia. How the assault of the culture of the projects, and poverty was reflective of the laziness or violence embedded within a community.

I knew that these things were wrong. I knew these, to the extent that they were even implicit commentaries on Black life in New Orleans. I knew that what I was hearing was wrong, but I didn't know how to say it. I didn't have the language. I didn't have the toolkit. I didn't have the history. I didn't have the sociology. I didn't have the framework to effectively push back against what I was hearing. I think what happens is that you know something is wrong, but you don't know how to say it's wrong. I experienced a sort of psychological and emotional paralysis, and the worst manifestation of that is that because you don't have the tools to push back against it, many young people begin to internalize it and begin to internalize the messages that this country tells them about themselves.

I think what this book does, is an attempt to do, is to give myself the language and the toolkit, and the framework to more effectively understand how slavery shaped what our society looks like today, and to teach myself some of the things that I should have learned in eighth-grade history class, like these things that are just so central to us understanding what this country is. The book is written as a journey of learning. This is not a book that was written by someone who began this project as an expert on the history of slavery. The book itself is a literal journey of me going to different places to try to understand this thing that I wish I had understood more effectively a long time ago.

Brian: We have many calls coming in. Let's start with one; Robertson Josette in Mahwah. Robertson Josette, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in with Clint Smith.

Robertson Josette: Thank you, Brian. Good to be able to talk to you again. Clint, thank you so much for coming on today on the celebration of Juneteenth. We also just quickly wanted to thank you so much for your work on the crash course series on Black-American history that has been amazingly helpful, and we know will be an amazing resource for so many. We wanted to talk about how -- we wish that there was so much more being done with legislation to help people of color in this country, particularly Black Americans and African Americans, but we're grateful that this holiday has been created as a federal holiday. We hope that it's celebrated by all people, all Americans in the country.

It's someone who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, which feel like the celebration of Juneteenth should be something that is embraced in our communities. Whether we all have ancestry from the continent of the United States or not, which many of us do, particularly on the Dominican side and don't know it because of the eraser of that history of 19th century, 18th-century immigrations. It's something that we as having been the people going into our family history have done a lot of research on and found many cousins, found many connections to that history.

We feel like the celebration of holidays like Juneteenth, and really now that we have writers like yourself and activists have been working on finding that language for us to describe this ethos that was imposed upon us. Whether we call it White supremacy, whether we call it [foreign language], that this inculturalization by the European powers as a way of infighting our minds, not only our bodies, that we have to create the language first in order to teach people who -- it's like that lifting up as we climb, where we were teaching people as we learn ourselves to be able to break out of that mindset and really find the strength to take pride in our heritage and to be able to understand our heritage, whether -- especially with mixed race people, we know that we are the descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, but being able to reckon with that history.

Brian: Robertson Josette, I'm going to move on and let some other people on, but thank you for all the many thoughts in that wonderful call. Thank you very, very much.

Robertson Josette: Thank you.

Brian: Keep calling us. I'm going to go right onto Janet in Brooklyn. Janet, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Janet: Thank you. I've always celebrated it at Coney Island for about all the 25 years. I regret not knowing that people in Texas had celebrated. I just thought it was a recent celebration. I'm also afraid of it becoming too commercialized and it was always something that we did that was very within the community, but I'm glad that people know American history, African-American history. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you very much. Clint, anything you want to say in response to the first two callers?

Clint Smith: I think that we should recognize that, to the second call with point, the Juneteenth becoming a symbol or becoming a federal holiday, that it is important and that it does matter, and that it is reflective of the work that activists, Black in Black, in Texas, Black activists and cultural historians, and public historians across the country have been doing for decades. That this isn't something that happened just because of what happened with George Floyd, even though that clearly was very much a catalyst to this moment, but it is the work of activists over the course of decades who opened up the space to make this possible.

This is a Testament to their work and it should be taken seriously that this is the first federal holiday in 40 years. We should also recognize that it is-- while symbols matter, while we should not undervalue what they can do, that it is not in and of itself enough. I think part of what we're experiencing is a marathon of cognitive dissonance in which is reflective of the way that Black people have always lived in this country. You have the first federal holiday, a new federal holiday in 40 years to celebrate the end of slavery, something we should have had since 1865. You also have a state sanction effort across state legislatures across the country that are attempting to prevent young people from learning about the very history that shapes the context from which Juneteenth emerges.

It's strange, and so many of those states are also attempting to create voter suppression laws to prevent Black people from having equal access to the vote in the ballot box in the franchise. It is we hold both of those realities at once and we recognize that America is a story of contradictions. It is a story of cognitive dissonance. We honor the people who made this holiday possible. Also, we recognize that in and of itself is not enough, and that there is much more work to be done.

Brian: One of the sites you visited as you went to historical sites around the country was a Memorial Day event at the cemetery organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I will say that you will raise reader's blood pressure with this chapter because your presence was felt and not necessarily welcomed. Can you describe that experience?

Clint Smith: I went to Blandford Cemetery. It is one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country, a place where the remains of over 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. I was there for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration. As you alluded to, I was a conspicuous presence, if you will, and part of what I learned-- it was a deeply unsettling experience in many ways. I was very clearly being recorded on people's phones. People turned around and were taking pictures of me under the guise of attempting to intimidate or subtly threaten me or make me feel unwelcome.

I went up to several Confederate Reenactors and Neo-Confederates, people who were dressed in Confederate garb engaged in this reenactment and holiday procession. What it did was these conversations helped give me a deeper clarity about how the contemporary manifestation of the lost cause comes to be. The lost cause, for those who might be unfamiliar, is the idea narrative propagated following the Civil War, that the Civil War by the Confederacy, by the south, that the Civil War was not actually about slavery, that slavery was-- and that slavery itself was not even the malevolent institution that we think of, that it was actually a benevolent institution.

There were many benevolent slave owners, that it was as the late Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina said that it was a positive good for both Black and White people alike. Or there's the historian, Ulrich B. Phillips, one of the leading historians in the early 20th century, said that it was a civilizing institution for Black people and rescued them from the savagery of Africa. That was the predominant view of what slavery was for a century after the end of the Civil War until the Civil Rights Movement. You had historians like Kenneth Stampp help us recalibrate our understanding of what slavery was and ground the Black-White inequality we saw in the mid-20th century in the history of slavery.

When I'm having these conversations with these Confederate Veterans, it became clear that for so many people, history is not about empirical evidence or primary source documents, or historical fact. It is a story that people tell and then there's a story that they are told. It is an heirloom that's passed down over generations. It is deeply entangled in their sense, their relationships, and their sense of who they are in the world.

One guy I was talking to named Jeff talked about how his grandfather used to bring him to the cemetery, and they would sit in the gazebo and his grandfather would sing him these songs of the Confederacy. They would sing the Dixie song. He would tell him these stories about the brave men buried in this cemetery, who fought to keep Virginia safe from the violent, aggressive north who was attempting to impose their way of living on to Virginians.

Brian: Does he erase slavery from the story in that telling to his kid or excuse it, or do you know?

Clint Smith: He says slavery existed, but the war wasn't about slavery. Slavery had almost little or if anything, to do with it, this was about Northern aggression. This was about state's rights. This was about our ability to decide who we wanted to be for ourselves, which of course it was about state's rights. It was about a state's right to decide whether or not they wanted to keep enslaved people. Part of the insidiousness of White supremacy and the insidiousness of what we see now is that it attempts to turn empirical statements into ideological ones.

If I say the Confederacy was a treasonous territory that raised an army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery, in today's political climate in some spaces, if I were a teacher saying that, that would be me being perceived as attempting to indoctrinate my students with my political beliefs. That will be considered an ideological statement, but it is in fact, one that is just grounded in historical evidence. All you have to do is look at the Declarations of Confederate Secession of 1861, where a state like Mississippi said that, "Our position is thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world".

We don't have to guess why they were seceding from the union and about to fight the Civil War. They said, so for themselves, but in Blandford, there is a rejection of that because what happens is if they accept that reality, then it completely decimates and crumbles their sense of who their family is and thus, their sense of who they are.

Brian: One more call and then we're going to go on to our next guest; poet and educator, and president of the Mellon Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander. Ginger in Bronxville, you're on WNYC with Clint Smith. Hi, Ginger.

Ginger: Hi, thank you for having me.

Brian: We've got about a minute for you. Go ahead.

Ginger: I called in, I'm actually a native Texan that lives in New York. I'm a Juneteenth descendant on both sides of my family, and has planned a celebration of my own tomorrow, a barbecue in my backyard. I plan to do Ms. Opal's virtual two-and-a-half-mile walk. Of course, things in the tide is really turned, but I had mixed feelings. I started out with Annette Gordon-Reed's possessiveness about the holiday and fears that it would be exploited and be more of a performative thing than the really serious event that it is back home. I've gotten over that. I'm overjoyed about the holiday.

As you all have discussed, my great-great-grandfather registered to vote in Davis County, Texas in 1867, a year after the Juneteenth, and we're still fighting for voting rights. Also, Governor Abbott is working to erase the history of my entire family's experience in the state. My mom was a Texas on the Texas Historical Commission and worked on the Dallas Freedman Cemetery project. This is really concerning to me as well. It's a mixed feeling because I'm overjoyed that we'll have the holiday to have a teaching moment and opportunity. It's something that all of us can celebrate and share in, but by the same token, it feels a little hollow because we're fighting the substantive fight for what emancipation is supposed to mean.

Brian: Ginger, thank you so much. A last thought, Clint, in response to Ginger, and anything else you want to say, maybe how having written this book and just being who you are, you're going to observe Juneteenth today or tomorrow?

Clint Smith: I think that we have to hold space for both of those feelings. We hold space for a recognition that this will be used by some people as something performative, as something that they do at the expense of or in lieu of a meaningful material change, or recalibration of their values, but also that's not something that we have control over. What we can control is the way that we honor and tell the story of this holiday. Hopefully, that this serves as an entry point into a continued recalibration of our collective consciousness around what slavery was. Again, how recent it was.

Again, she mentioned her great-great-grandfather, that this wasn't that long ago. We talk about slavery. The way I learned about slavery in elementary school was as if it happened in the Jurassic era. It was like the dinosaurs and the Flintstones, and slavery almost as if they existed at the same time, but this was so recent. This history is not that long ago and I hope that, for me, that is what I will be grounding myself in today and tomorrow, is a reminder that this wasn't that long ago and that there were so many people, again, over generations who fought to make this possible. What responsibilities does that bestow on me moving forward to create the an even better world for my own descendants.

Brian: Listeners, if you want to know about some of the other sites that Clint visited for his book, how he measured change at Jefferson's Monticello and says things are changing for what tourists see there, how he visited the Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary, a former plantation where inmates currently pick cotton under the supervision of correctional officers, or what he looked at in New York City in particular, or in Senegal. You'll just have to read his book, which is called How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America.

You can also see Clint Smith at two virtual events, which are free with RSVP. One is tonight with Ted Johnson, hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice, and tomorrow with Dr. Andrew Roberts, hosted by the Schomburg Center Literary Festival. We have those links on our website. Clint, thanks so much for coming on and is it appropriate to say happy Juneteenth? What's the right salutation?

Clint Smith: I think happy Juneteenth is fine, indeed.

Brian: Then happy Juneteenth. Thank you again so much. I know you're doing so much. Thank you for giving us this time.

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