I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, June 18th.

Throughout history, Juneteenth has been known by many names. Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Liberation Day, Emancipation Day, and today, a national holiday.

And that, of course, was Vice President Kamala Harris speaking yesterday as President Biden signed

legislation to make June 10th, June 19th, a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery

in the United States. It's the first new national holiday established since Martin Luther

King Day way back in 1983. With me now is Atlantic staff writer and award-winning poet Clint

Smith. He's written a new book with a very timely and simple conceit. He crossed the country

visiting nine monuments and other places that have a historical link to the legacy of slavery

and wrote about how those places memorialize or distort

that connection. From Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to the African burial ground in

lower Manhattan to a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas, the scene of the actual

Juneteenth story. Clint Smith's new book is called

How the Word is Past, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Hi, Clint,

welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much. You must be in such demand today, so thank you for

giving us some time on this holiday. I'm so happy to be here. Tell us more about why you wanted to write about sites in particular that were major places in the history of slavery.

Yeah, so the origin story of this book is that I was watching the several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans,

statues to Robert A. Lee, PG-2 Beauregard, Jefferson Davis. And I was thinking

about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. And what does that mean? Like, what does it mean that to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard, that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my parents still live on a street

named after somebody who owned 150 enslaved people. And because we know that symbols and monuments

and memorials aren't just symbols. They are reflective of the stories that people tell. And those

stories embed themselves into the narratives that people tell, and those stories embed themselves

into the narratives that communities carry, and those narratives shape public policy, and public

...