In Conversation: On Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White & How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Counting Descent: Poems. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, in How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, and Company), Smith leads readers on a tour of monuments and landmarks, some honest about the past and some not. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than 400 people. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum security prison in Louisiana, now filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre parcel for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. Deeply researched, How the Word Is Passed offers an intergenerational view of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history and ourselves. The New York Times noted that the book “sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America’s historical conscience … an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves.”

Patricia Sullivan is a history professor and author. Her books include Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era; Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years; and Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. Her tome Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White (Belknap Press) is a landmark reconsideration of Kennedy’s life and legacy. Drawing on government files, personal papers, and oral interviews, Sullivan argues that he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader and places him at the center of the movement for racial justice of the 1960s. When protests broke out across the South, he confronted escalating demands for racial justice. What began as a political problem soon became a moral one. In the face of vehement pushback from Southern Democrats, he put the weight of the federal government behind school desegregation and voter registration. When the Watts uprising brought calls for more aggressive policing, he pushed back himself, pointing to the root causes of urban unrest: entrenched poverty, substandard schools, and few job opportunities. The Washington Post celebrated it as “a moving and enlightening account of a life of public service marked by ambition and marred by serious errors in judgment, but more than redeemed by a sincere, powerful and enduring commitment to social justice.”

Peniel E. Joseph is an American scholar, author, teacher, and public voice on race issues. he holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the history department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books); Stokely: A Life (Basic Books); Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (Civitas Books); and Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Holt Paperbacks). Joseph joined UT Austin in 2015 from Tufts University, where he had founded the school's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD). He also founded the second Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) on the University of Texas campus in 2016, and serves as its director.