Democracy Now! presented a special Juneteenth broadcast marking the 1865 day when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with a 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, aired just after Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since MLK Day. Author of How the Word Is Passed, Smith reflects on Juneteenth as both a moment of mourning delayed freedom and a celebration of slavery’s end. While recognizing the holiday’s symbolic value, he emphasizes it is “clearly not enough.
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About Clint Smith:
Clint Smith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Clint has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Previously, Clint taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.
Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.
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