Midday

(This conversation first aired on January 12, 2022)

Back in January of this year, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta to speak about the importance of voting rights, and the need for federal legislation to overcome the dozens of state laws that have been enacted and the hundreds of laws that are being considered to restrict voting.

Currently, legislation on voting rights continues to be at a standstill in the United States Congress with the stalling of two bills that seek to support voting access: The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. As American voters look forward to the 2022 midterm elections in November, we must also remember the significant progress made thus far for access to the ballot box. 

Today on Midday, we revisit a conversation about an important and often overlooked dimension in the history of voting rights: the long fight for Black women’s suffrage.

Tom's guest is the acclaimed legal and cultural historian, Martha S. Jones. She has written a broad, insightful survey of the unsung heroes of the movement for equality, a movement that started two centuries ago, and which included scores of remarkable women whose importance and impact are made clear by Dr. Jones’ compelling narrative.

The book is called Vanguard:  How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.  

Dr. Martha S. Jones joined us for the hour on Zoom, from her home in Baltimore.

(Because this conversation is recorded, we are not taking any calls or comments today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on December 8, 2021)

The House Select Committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and made several criminal referrals to the US Justice Department for witnesses who have refused to appear before the Committee. Meanwhile, hundreds of rioters have been indicted and many imprisoned for their role in the attempt to subvert democracy.

A federal jury in Charlottesville, Virginia, found 12 individuals and five organizations liable for $26 million in damages stemming from the Unite the Right Rally in 2017.

Did the mob that stormed the US Capitol simply coalesce around the fantasy that the election was stolen from Donald Trump?

What effect do monetary verdicts and criminal penalties have on the neo Nazi and White supremacist organizations that are behind this tragic deadly violence?

Can the roots of the violence be traced back to rage about government that began in the 1970s?

Today, we'll listen back to a conversation Tom had back in December, 2021, with Dr. Kathleen Belew. She’s an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, where she is also the faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. She is the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Published by University of California Press

And along with Ramón Gutiérrez, she is the editor of, and contributor to, a new collection of essays called A Field Guide to White Supremacy, in which she and other leading scholars explore how different forms of White supremacy and hatred manifest in events like those that took place on January 6th, and extend to domestic partner violence, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and anti-Semitism.

The authors chronicle how hate groups have moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America, and they send a clear warning that the violence we’ve seen in recent years may well be repeated.

Kathleen Belew joined us on our digital line from Chicago.

(Because this conversation is recorded, we can't take any call or comments today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation was originally broadcast on April 26, 2022)

Good afternoon and welcome to an encore edition of Midday.

Tom's guest today is Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of four books, including Killing the Black Body, about systemic abuse of African American women, and Fatal Invention, which explores the relationship between race, science and politics.

Her new book argues that the nation's foster care system, putatively designed to protect children, instead deprives Black parents of fundamental rights and leads to traumatic consequences for Black children. The child welfare system, she argues, is “more accurately described as the family policing system,” and she calls for it to be dismantled.

The book is called Torn Apart:  How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.

Dorothy Roberts joined us on Zoom from Philadelphia.

Our conversation was pre-recorded, so we can’t take any new calls or online comments.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest today is Eric Holder, who served as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States during the first six years of the Obama Administration. He was the first African American to serve in that position. Today, he is working to advance voting rights with the organization he founded in 2016 and now chairs called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

The NDRC works to remedy the gerrymandering that causes so many areas of the country to be poorly represented in Congress. Holder contends that voter suppression is as old as the republic itself, and he believes basic fixes are needed to counter the anti-democratic impulses that lead to laws that target people of color to make voting harder.

When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, many states responded by enacting draconian voter restriction laws. Mr. Holder says it made him realize that the Supreme Court and the Congress are facing what he calls a “modern day existential crisis,” and that our democracy can only be pulled back from the brink of disaster by rigorous reforms to the most basic tenet of our representative government: voting.

In his new book, Mr. Holder and his co-author Sam Koppelman observe that the country is operating with an “unrepresentative Senate, a gerrymandered House, an anti-democratic Electoral College and a stolen Supreme Court.” And they offer prescriptions for reforms.

The book is called Our Unfinished March:  The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, A Crisis, A Plan.

Eric Holder joins us on Zoom from Washington, DC.

This conversation was recorded on June 28, 2022, so we aren't taking any listener calls today.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on April 27, 2022)

Welcome to an archive edition of Midday. We’re going to listen to a conversation Tom had in the spring of 2022 with Dr. Terry Anne Scott, the chair of the History Department at Hood College and a good friend of the Midday show.

Dr. Scott has written a book that is as difficult as it is important. It chronicles the evolution of mob violence in Texas at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The NAACP has documented more than 4,700 lynchings across America from the 1880s through the 1960s. 

Terry Anne Scott has found evidence, in just the state of Texas, of 469 Black people, as well as 140 white people, 111 Mexicans and at least one Native American who were victims of mob violence in roughly that same time period. 

Her book traces how these killings, once furtive, clandestine acts, eventually became popular public spectacles, and she examines what that means for our understanding of the legacy of racial violence and discrimination in America.

A warning: we’ll be talking today about a book that includes graphic descriptions of torture and murder.  It is difficult to hear about and to comprehend the cruelty of the White mobs that inflicted painful deaths on so many people.  But understanding the depravity of these acts is fundamental to understanding what Black people faced and feared on a daily basis.  Dr. Scott’s book is the result of important research that we think is very important to share. 

It's called Lynching and Leisure:  Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas.  It's published by University of Arkansas Press.

Terry Anne Scott joined us on our digital line from Frederick, Maryland.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on July 28, 2022)

Welcome to this encore edition of Midday.  Tom's guest for the hour is the award-winning author and journalist Mark Leibovich. He was the Chief National Correspondent for the New York Times for 10 years, before moving to The Atlantic  this past spring.

He’s the author of four books, including the number one NY Times bestseller, This Town, in which he chronicles the incestuous relationship between Washington media and the political class.

His latest book was number one on the bestseller list just two weeks after it was published in July. It examines the unprecedented and often inexplicable spell cast on the Republican party by Donald Trump, whose demands for fealty and obsequiousness know no bounds. As Leibovich deftly observes, official Washington not only curried favor with Mr. Trump, it groveled with a degree of servility unmatched in American political history.

Leibovich offers an insightful glimpse into a world where Trump’s supporters remain enthralled, despite the revelations of the January 6th Committee, or the ignominy that Trump continues to heap upon himself as he repeats, over and over, a medley of malicious lies about the election he lost.

The book is called Thank You for Your Servitude:  Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission. 

Mark Leibovich joined us in July on Zoom from Washington, DC…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on February 22, 2022)

Welcome to Midday.  Tom's guest today on this encore edition is Jabari Asim, one of the country’s most imaginative and versatile writers, whose body of work encompasses fiction and non-fiction, poetry, plays and children’s literature.

He’s a former editor of The Crisis , the journal of the NAACP, and the Washington Post, where he wrote a syndicated column. He is the author of acclaimed non-fiction books, including The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why and We Can’t Breathe:  On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival. He is the author of the novel, Only the Strong and a collection of short stories called A Taste of Honey.

Professor Asim directs the MFA program at Emerson College in Boston, where he is also the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice.

Jabari Asim’s latest book is a historical novel set in 1852 in the American South. It chronicles the lives and loves, the longing for liberation, and the heartbreak and violence visited upon a community of enslaved people. This book is a profound masterpiece, peopled with a fascinating cast of characters who never lose touch with their dreams, in spite of unthinkable trauma. And one of the things that makes them so compelling is the fact that, as Tom observes at the top of the show, they never let the trauma of enslavement define them.

It’s called Yonder. 

Jabari Asim joined us on our digital line in February from Boston.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, we revisit a conversation Tom had in May with John Waters. He’s the director of 16 films, a visual artist with museum shows to his credit, a spoken word artist who performs in venues around the world, an actor, and a pitchman for haute couture.  He is also a Son of Baltimore and one of America’s most original and enduring voices in the arts, with a deep artistic palette.

Waters is the author of several books of non-fiction, including his memoir, Mr. Know it All, a road trip diary called Carsick, and Role Models, his compendium of profiles of people who have influenced his work.

Waters’ non-fiction commentary is fascinating, funny, insightful and often a bit outrageous. His latest book is his first novel, a book that dials up the outrageousness in a big, wild way. His protagonist is as despicable as they come, and the entourage of people in her orbit are as odd as anyone we encountered in the cult classic movies John Waters made more than 50 years ago.

It's called Liarmouth, which Waters describes as a “feel bad romance.”

John Waters joined Tom on our digital line from his home in Baltimore.

Because our show was pre-recorded, we can’t take any new calls or comments, and before we listen to the conversation, we want you to know that John’s book makes more than a few explicit sexual references, and he and Tom refer to a few of them.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on May 23, 2022)

Welcome to an encore presentation of Midday.

Today, a conversation about aging. We are, as a general rule, living longer. The average life expectancy of Americans in 1960 was just over 69 years. In 2022, it’s 79 years. A team of physicians and researchers at Johns Hopkins have formed a group called the Johns Hopkins Human Aging Project, that looks into ways that we can stay healthy as we get older, exploring medical and technological fixes for what might ail us.

This past May, Tom spoke with two researchers at the Aging Project about the work they are doing.Dr. Jeremy Walston is the director of the Johns Hopkins Human Aging Project and Raymond and Anna Lubin Professor of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins.Dr. Peter Abadir is a scholar at the Human Aging Project. He is an associate professor of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and he holds a joint appointment in the School of Engineering.They both joined us on Zoom.

Folks over 65 who would like to volunteer for the Human Aging Project can contact the team by email at [email protected], or by calling the Healthy Aging Studies Unit at 410-550-2113.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on June 9, 2022)

“Let me be very clear to all of you, and I've been very clear to the president. He bears responsibilities for his words and actions, no ifs, ands or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened and he needs to acknowledge that.”

— House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, speaking with fellow Republicans about Donald Trump’s culpability for the attack on the Capital on January 6th 2021.

The House Select Committee investigating that attack and efforts to overturn the election held its first public hearing on the 9th of June, 2022. It was a prime-time event, viewed by 20 million people.

Today, on this archive edition of Midday, we’re going to listen to a conversation Tom had, on the afternoon of that first hearing, with New York Times national correspondent Alexander Burns. With his Times colleague, Jonathan Martin, Alex has written a compelling and comprehensive book about the last year of the Trump administration, including the months preceding the insurrection, through the first months of the Biden Administration.

Burns and Martin make a strong case for the fragility of the basic architecture of American Democracy. They argue that government cannot function in a two-party system in which neither party is internally coherent and serious about governing. Their book is full of excellent reporting and trenchant insights. And given, what we have all since learned from testimony by many witnesses presented by the January 6th Select Committee, we thought it would be interesting to re-visit Tom's conversation with Alex, and think about all that led up to that terrible day, in which for the first time in our history, we did not experience a peaceful transfer of power between one administration and the next.

The book is called This Will Not Pass:  Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.  Alexander Burns joined us on the phone from Washington, DC

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.