A Confrontation With History

As a Black literary scholar, Shermaine Jones was unsure of how to live and work through the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd uprisings. She wondered, is it appropriate to study fiction and poetry during times of crisis? And how could she give her students grace and compassion in their own work? She turns to Black women writers to answer these complicated and enduring questions. And: Desegregation changed things on paper. But people continue to live how they were taught to live, and how history has taught them to live. As a Richmond native, Marvin Chiles understands this well. His new book The Struggle for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond explores the slow and ever evolving desegregation of Virginia’s capital city.

Later in the show: The 2017 Summer of Hate in Charlottesville became a worldwide media event. Images and videos from that day were shared millions and millions of times and continue to be used in pop culture. Aniko Bodroghkozy’s new book, Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right looks at how the far right borrowed media strategies from the Civil Rights movement and how the images that each created continue to shape politics.