How America Remembersâ and Distorts â Its Slavery Past Monticello, photographed in 2018. In âHow the Word Is Passed,â Clint Smith visits nine places that memorialize or distort their link to the legacy of slavery, from Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va., to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. He skillfully braids interviews with scholarship and personal observation, asking, âHow different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?âCredit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times Buy Book â¾ By Julian Lucas HOW THE WORD IS PASSED A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America By Clint Smith