Bonus Episode: Revisiting Reparations

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In 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15— a promise to redistribute 40 acres of once Confederate-owned land in coastal South Carolina and Florida to each formerly enslaved adult to begin mending the seemingly unmendable. It never came to pass. H.R. 40, also known as the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been brought to Congress repeatedly since 1989, first by the late Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), now by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex). Hear Jeffery Robinson, founder of the Who We Are Project and deputy director of the ACLU take on the past, present and future of reparations with veteran political activist Dr. Ron Daniels and legal expert and reparations advocate Nkechi Taifa.

Left: Dr. Ron Daniels. Right: Nkechi Taifa.

Courtesy of Dr. Ron Daniels and Nkechi Taifa.

Additional Resources

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1992

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. June, 2014.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860 - 1880. Free Press, 1999

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014.

H.R.40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act

Lockhart, P.R. The 2020 Democratic Primary Debate Over Reparations, Explained. Vox.com, June 19, 2019

Marable, Manning. Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader. Routledge, 2011.

National African American Reparations Commision (NAARC) 10-Point Reparations Plan

Taifa, Nkechi. Black Power, Black Lawyer. House of Songhay II, 2020.

Episode 6: The Myth of Post-Racial America

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From slavery to sharecropping to mass incarceration, American institutions have reproduced cycles of social rupture and exploitation by design. Is it even possible to imagine true equity as long as the current carceral system stands? Carvell Wallace and Jeffery Robinson begin with Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill before turning to the ways in which incarceration ripples through questions of voting, health, wealth, and state violence. With final words from Afro-futurist author Sheree Renee Thomas, we’ll explore how we might dream a new America into being and the possibilities of Black liberation.

Additional Resources

• “Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Stanford.edu. April 24, 2017.

• Baptiste, Nathalie. “Study: Black People Are 75 Percent More Likely to Live near Toxic Oil and Gas Facilities.” Mother Jones. November 14, 2017.

• Blackmer, Peter. “Police Used the Myth of Black Snipers to Justify Brutality in the Long Hot Summer of 1967.” Timeline. August 11, 2017.

• Crime Bill Signing Ceremony. C-SPAN. 1994.

• “Governor Newsom Signs Bill Eliminating Barriers That Block Former Inmate Fire Crews from Becoming Career Firefighters after Serving Their Sentences.” Gov.ca.gov. September 11, 2020.

• Hopkinson, Nalo, and Uppinder Mehan. So Long Been Dreaming. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2009.

• Lauterbach, Preston. Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis. New York, NY: WW Norton. 2016.

• Lavender, Isiah, III, and Lisa Yaszek, eds. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.

• Li, Shirley, “The Evolution of Police Militarization in Ferguson and Beyond.” The Atlantic, August 2014.

• Lopez, German. “Nixon Official: Real Reason for the Drug War Was to Criminalize Black People and Hippies.” Vox. March 22, 2016.

• “Mandatory Minimums and Sentencing Reform — Criminal Justice Policy Foundation.” CJPF.org.

• Maraniss, David. “Race ‘war’ in Cairo Reconciliation Grows as Memories Recede.” Washington Post, March 22, 1987.

• PEW Public Safety Performance Project. 2015. “Federal Drug Sentencing Laws Bring High Cost, Low Return.” Federal Sentencing Reporter 28, no. 1: 4–15.

• Pitts, Steven. “Black Workers and the Public Sector.” Berkeley.edu. Accessed October 19, 2020.

• “Redlining Was Banned 50 Years Ago. It’s Still Hurting Minorities Today,” Washington Post. March 28, 2018.

• Rosenau, William. “Bringing It All Back Home: The Roots of Militarized Policing.” Warontherocks.com. August 21, 2014.

• Royce, Eden. 2018. Apex Magazine August 2018. Edited by Sheree Renee Thomas and Jason Sizemore. North Charleston, SC: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

• “Sheree Renée Thomas.”

• “The Racial Dot Map.” Demographics Research Group. Coopercenter.org.

• TooleMan87. “Martin Luther King Jr. Shot — CBS Radio News First Report.” Youtube. April 5, 2011.

• “War Comes Home.” American Civil Liberties Union. June 2014.

Episode 5: How We Arrive

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What does it mean to be well in America? Who is seen as deserving of healthcare? Racism has plagued the American medical system since its inception and continues to produce disparities in health and life expectancy to this day. In this episode, Carvell Wallace and Jeffery Robinson trace the decades-long epidemic of sharply higher mortality rates among both Black people giving birth and their babies. In conversation with OB/GYN and maternal/infant health advocate Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, as well as SéSé Doula Services founder Nicole JeanBaptiste, we’ll examine the way the healthcare system was designed to fail Black people, with a focus on Black maternal and infant health.

Additional Resources

• “Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Healthier Mothers and Babies.” 1999. CDC.gov. October 1, 1999.

• Campbell, Kendall M., Irma Corral, Jhojana L. Infante Linares, and Dmitry Tumin. 2020. “Projected Estimates of African American Medical Graduates of Closed Historically Black Medical Schools.” JAMA Network Open 3, no. 8: e2015220.

• Duffy, Thomas P. 2011. “The Flexner Report—100 Years Later.” The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84, no. 3: 269–76.

• Greenwood, Brad N., Rachel R. Hardeman, Laura Huang, and Aaron Sojourner. 2020. “Physician-Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 35: 21194–200.

• Haskell, Rob. 2018. “Serena Williams on Motherhood, Marriage, and Making Her Comeback.” Vogue, January 10, 2018.

• Henson, Martelia L. “Medicalized Childbirth in the United States: Origins, Outcomes, and Opposition.” Marshall.Edu.

• “Interpretation: The Slave Trade Clause.” Constitutioncenter.Org. Accessed October 12, 2020.

• Kelkar, Kamala. 2016. “When Labor Laws Left Farm Workers behind — and Vulnerable to Abuse.” Pbs.Org. September 18, 2016.

• NPR. 2008. “End of Slave Trade Meant New Normal for America.” NPR, January 10, 2008.

• Onion, Rebecca. 2018. “How the C-Section Went from Last Resort to Overused.” Slate. May 21, 2018.

• Sidhu, Jonathan. “Exploring the AMA’s History of Discrimination.” Propublica.org. Accessed October 12, 2020.

• Stahnisch, Frank W., and Marja Verhoef. 2012. “The Flexner Report of 1910 and Its Impact on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry in North America in the 20th Century.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine: ECAM 2012: 647896.

• Sullivan, Louis W., and Ilana Suez Mittman. 2010. “The State of Diversity in the Health Professions a Century after Flexner.” Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 85, no. 2: 246–53.

• Vilda, Dovile, Maeve Wallace, Lauren Dyer, Emily Harville, and Katherine Theall. 2019. “Income Inequality and Racial Disparities in Pregnancy-Related Mortality in the US.” SSM - Population Health, Volume 9, December 2019.

• Washington, Harriet A. 2008. “Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine.” The New York Times, July 29, 2008.

• Wiencek, Henry. 2012. “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson.” Smithsonian Magazine. September 30, 2012.

• Zhang, Sarah. 2018. “The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves.” Atlantic Monthly, April 18, 2018.

Episode 4: Broken Bootstraps

“To pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps” was originally a metaphor for the impossible. It’s now one of the most American of American idioms — encapsulating a belief that one’s fortunes and failures hinge on individual responsibility alone. It simultaneously obscures the systemic economic theft of Black people and other people of color in the US by state and commercial interests, as well as the systemic economic enrichment of white populations by those same forces. In this episode, Carvell Wallace and Jeffery Robinson explore how Black wealth has been routinely destroyed, using the example of a 1919 massacre in Elaine, Arkansas, where Black sharecroppers organizing for better financial conditions were killed by a white mob. We’ll also hear from law professor and scholar of banking history Dr. Mehrsa Baradaran on how discriminatory housing policies, unequal access to credit, and predatory banking continue to hinder attempts at wealth-building, even among the Black middle class.

Additional Resources

• “13th Amendment - Abolition of Slavery.” National Constitution Center. Accessed October 5, 2020.

• “1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” Tulsa Historical Society & Museum. Accessed October 3, 2020.

• “A Massacre of Blacks Haunted This Arkansas City. Then a Memorial.” The Washington Post, August, 30, 2019. Accessed October 5, 2020.

• Agyeman, Julian, Kofi Boone. “Land Loss Has Plagued Black America since Emancipation – Is It Time ...”, The Conversation, June 18, 2020

• “Blacks in the U.S. Face a Huge Gap in Homeownership Rates.” The Washington Post, July 23, 2020.

• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.“ The Atlantic, June 2014

• “The Emancipation Proclamation.” National Archives, issued January 1, 1863

• Fan, Andrew, Linda Lutton, Alden Loury. “Where Banks Don’t Lend”. June 3, 2020. WBEZ.org

• “The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and African American.” Federal Records and African American History (Summer 1997, Vol. 29, No. 2)

• George, Alice. “The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened.” The Smithsonian Magazine, March 1, 2018

• Merritt, Keri Leigh. “Land and the Roots of African-American Poverty.” Aeon, March 11, 2016. Accessed October 3, 2020.

• Meyer, Stephen Grant. As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

• Sani, Christina Sturdivant. “Homes in Black Neighborhoods Are Vastly Undervalued, Costing ...”, Greater Greater Washington, accessed October 3, 2020.

• Sisson, Patrick. “The Fair Housing Act: An Explainer,” Curbed. April 11, 2017

• “The Story of SNCC.” SNCC Digital Gateway

• Uenuma, Francine. “What Was the Elaine Massacre?” Smithsonian Magazine, August 2, 2018.

• Washington, Booker T. “The Awakening of the Negro”. The Atlantic, September 1896.

• Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press., 2017

Episode 3: A Home and a Country

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Black bodies have always been on the line in America, whether on the auction block or in a parking lot in Minneapolis. American law has enshrined the state’s ability to enact violence with almost total impunity. And, going back to as far as the Colonial Marines in 1808, reclaiming one’s body from this system has required fearless acts of rebellion. In this episode, Carvell and Jeffery trace the evolution of slave patrols into modern policing, exploring the consequences of that origin story with activist and lead of Black Visions Collective Miski Noor and Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, an historian of Black resistance and rebellion in the US. Collectively, they make the case that protest is vital to American progress and racial justice — and that we must keep taking to the streets.

The third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner was performed and arranged by Sandra Lawson-Ndu.

Additional Resources:

• Black Visions Collective

• Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.

• Carter Jackson, Kellie. Force And Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

• Leepson, Marc. Francis Scott Key: A Life. From What So Proudly We Hailed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014.

• Lineberry, Cate. “The Story Behind the Star Spangled Banner,” Smithsonian.com, March 1, 2007.

• McWhirter, Cameron. Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2011.

• Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019.

• North, Anna. “How Racist Policing Took Over American Cities, Explained By A Historian.” Vox.com. June 6, 2020.

• Ward, Geoff. “Living Histories of White Supremacist Policing: Towards Transformative Justice.” Du Bois Review, Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2018

• Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895

• Wilson, Christopher. “Where’s the Debate on Francis Scott Key’s Slave-Holding Legacy?,” Smithsonian.com, July 1, 2016

• US Constitution, Article 4: Section 2. Signed in convention September 17, 1787. Ratified June 21, 1788. (A portion of Article IV, Section 2, was changed by the 13th Amendment)

Episode 2: The Failure of the Great "Compromise"

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The right to vote is the right to help define the future of the country. It’s at the heart of our democracy. But for much of US history, only property-owning white men had access to this right. Suffrage for Black men was hard won and enshrined by the 15th amendment after the Civil War. But, even that limited enfranchisement was quickly stymied by campaigns of terror and voter suppression that were then codified by the creation of the Electoral College—amplifying the power of white Southern voters and essentially bringing an end to Reconstruction in 1877. In this episode, host Carvell Wallace explores the history of, and ongoing battle for, total Black enfranchisement in conversation with formerly incarcerated Florida-based voting rights activists Betty Riddle and Marq Mitchell, as well as historian Dr. Yohuru Williams.

For more on what you can do to protect voting rights in the US, visit the ACLU’s resources on Voting Rights.

Additional Resources:

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow (Revised). New York: New Press, 2012.

• Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

• Disenfranchisement And Rights Restoration: Spotlight On States. The Appeal

• DuVernay, Ava, et al. 13th. 2016. Made available on YouTube by Netflix, April 17, 2020.

• Logan, Rayford Whittingham. The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Collier Books, 1965.

• Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster: 1997.

• Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City,” August 7, 2018, video, 3:50,

• Williams, Yohuru. Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement. New York: Routledge, 2015

Episode 1: Desire, Prosperity, Fortune, Hope

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Far from promising the fruits of equality and justice for all, the United States was founded on white supremacist ideals. Given this legacy, how do Black parents decipher and explain American history to their children? Or, even what it means to be Black in the US? These are questions that host and writer Carvell Wallace and ACLU Legal Deputy Director and attorney Jeffery Robinson have had to confront. Their answer has been to look more closely at the past and at the laws that continue to enshrine and reinforce racial inequity. This is how we both make sense of the present and shape a more equitable future for generations to come. Hear them start this journey into some of the lesser-known moments in America’s history which will reckon with the state of voting rights, the wealth gap, healthcare, policing, and the carceral state.

Featuring the performance of a new work by city of Boston poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola.

Additional Resources:

• i shimmer sometimes, too by Porsha Olayiwola, Button Poetry, 2019
• Genealogy Bank: African American Slave Trade: Ships & Records for Genealogy
• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• Slavery and the Law in Virginia
• 1740 South Carolina Slave Code
• Jonathan Elliot, The Debates in the Several State Conventions of the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, vol. 3 (Virginia) [1827]
• Ratification of the Constitution by the State of Virginia; June 26, 1788, Yale Law School, The Avalon Project.