“We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”

‘To understand somebody, understand what shaped them, understand their story.’ 

“It is not enough just to name what happened if we aren’t going to proceed with that information in a way that shapes our public policy decisions.”

Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, 2021.