The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center held its first back-in-person Big Tent Jubilee fundraiser since the COVID-19 pandemic to celebrate this year’s Stowe Prize winner, Dr. Clint Smith, for his No. 1 New York Times best selling book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America.”
The Stowe Prize is awarded biennially “to honor the work of a contemporary writer who, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, inspires readers through their words to work for social justice and positive change,” according to the center’s website.
Using scholarly research and stories of people living today, Smith’s book talks about the legacy and history of slavery throughout the United States. The book illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view in places where the history of enslaved men, women, and children were imprinted.
“We have to shine a bright light on those that have stained our past, and … lift up those who have made us see it, including people like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped to change the world and people like tonight’s honoree,” Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said during Wednesday’s celebration.
Along with Smith’s book being a New York Times best seller, it was also named one of the 10 best books of 2021 by the New York Times Book Review, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021.
During Wednesday’s conversation with moderator Linda Norris, senior specialist in methodology and practice for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, Smith discussed how different groups of people experience different parts of American history in profoundly different ways.
Whether people share the same political and historical ideologies or not, the only way to understand what they actually believe is to approach the conversation with a sense of generosity, empathy and curiosity, said Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic and award-winning poet.
“I don’t have to be the person to say, ‘You’re wrong; that’s not true,’ and try to prove them wrong every time they say something wrong. I have the primary source documents that can do that,” he said. “I can let them say what they’re going to say, and then sort of lay it out for the reader. … This is what people are saying, and this is what the evidence, the primary source documents and the empirical evidence have to say for themselves.”
Asked about the importance of humbling ourselves in order to understand that there is not one single story, Smith said we must accept that different parts of our American history are both understood and experienced in different ways by different people without lending legitimacy to a set of ideas that are demonstrated to be empirically incorrect.
“A white person might tell the story about how their great-grandfather was given land by the Homestead Act, [that] it was … terrible, you couldn’t grow anything on it, it was filled with rocks, the soil was horrific, and the weather was bad,” Smith said. “So, they had this land, but couldn’t do much with it. Their great-grandfather died trying to make something of this land, and it wasn’t until a couple generations later that it actually [produced] some sort of fruit. So, their sense of their relationship to a piece of legislation like the Homestead Act is one of antagonism. That exists, because the stories that they were told about how their family experienced that piece of legislation is grounded in trauma and difficulty and a very real sense of (what) we were given. …
“It can also be true that an Indigenous person [says] that’s true, also my family was completely removed from that in order for that land to be made possible and given to your great-grandfather. My family was killed, so that your great-grandfather could have this land that he couldn’t grow anything [on].
“Black people could say, that’s true, that your great-grandfather had a difficult time growing anything on that land. My great-great-grandfather didn’t have any land. He wasn’t allowed to have access to the Homestead Act because Black people weren’t given access to so many of the levers of social mobility throughout the 18th, 19th, or 20th century. All of those things can be true.”
It is very important to understand why people believe the things that they believe, and realize that many of these bigoted and harmful ideologies emerge from an emotionally complex space, not simply rejecting the ideas that slavery was bad or the Civil War was about slavery, Smith added.
“If I hadn’t spent time there, I think it would be very easy for me to make these folks into two-dimensional caricatures of bigotry,” Smith said. “It’s not to say that they don’t carry bigoted views. It’s not to say that they don’t believe things that are deeply racist and deeply harmful. It’s less about that rejection and more about an affirmation of a relationship that the people who share the story with them.
“I try to approach people with the same sort of generosity that people have so often given me, the level of grace and generosity in talking about things that I might not always be well-versed in. [In] just trying to do like so many of the guides and docents that I spent time with did, which was both extend grace and generosity, but also demand accountability and responsibility, [while recognizing] that those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
The Stowe Center will be hosting a free, livestreamed conversation with Dr. Clint Smith on Sept. 22 at 6 p.m., on 77 Forest Street in Hartford. For more information, contact the center at 860-522-9258 or info@stowecenter.org. Registration will be coming soon.
