Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Keynote Address from Clint Smith, “Our History, Reimagined”

UNC Asheville presents “Our History, Reimagined,” a Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Address from keynote speaker Clint Smith in Lipinsky Hall on Wednesday, January 18. This event is free and open to all, no tickets are required.

The United States is a country of great opportunity and economic mobility, but we must wrestle with how certain opportunities are contingent on different facets of one’s identity, and how the history of violence and exploitation helped to generate its economic foundation. The United States has freed millions around the world from despots and genocide, and we must wrestle with this same country’s pervasive history of barbarous imperialism. In a conversation exploring Civil Rights movements over the decades, as well as how memorials tie into our perceptions and collective memories of these eras, Clint pushes the audience to wrestle with the complicated truths about the country we live in and helps crystalize how this history has shaped the contemporary social, political, and cultural landscape of our world today.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021.

He is also a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, as well as the host of the Youtube series Crash Course Black American History.

This event is part of UNC Asheville’s Equity & Arts Series.