In this episode, we talk with sisters Alice Jones and Corrine Antoinette Smith. Alice and Corinne are the granddaughters of Corinne Antoinette Tureaud, great aunt of our earlier guest, AP Turead Jr., but a great aunt whom he never knew.

They were strangers to each other because in a moment of economic crisis when the elder Corinne was a young woman, she and three of her sisters Louise, Carmen, and Virginia, decided to leave the Tureaud family and live the rest of their lives as white women. The other eight siblings stayed. While that choice was known to all twelve siblings, they decided to mostly keep it a secret from future generations.

Over a century later, Alice bought her sister, Corinne, an Ancestry DNA subscription for Christmas, and the results raised questions for the sisters. Through their own genealogical search, the two of them managed to reconnect with their long-lost relatives. Over a century after four sisters made this choice, the Tureaud family has been reunited. They held the first complete family reunion in over 100 years in New Orleans in the summer of 2022. What follows is Alice and Corinne’s story, and in many ways their grandmother, Corinne Antoinette Tureaud’s story, of unequal opportunity in America.

This month's episode is about Marie McGruder, a fifth-generation descendant of Charles McGruder, and great granddaughter of Charles McGruder, Jr. who Marie believes was the first Black landowner in Greene County, Alabama. After emancipation, the McGruder family joined together, purchasing and then farming large homesteads that were home to multiple groups of relatives. But as each generation grew larger and moved further from the land, the ability to manage this distant homestead also became a strain on relationships among relatives, which ultimately led the fourth-generation descendants (Marie’s father’s generation) to make the difficult decision to sell the land. After receiving a check in the mail in 2020 for her share of a property sale, Marie made a series of decisions that led her to reassemble over 100 acres of her great grandfather Charles Jr.’s original landholdings. She has spent the last year creating a business plan to make profitable use of the land that could also chart a new course for heirs' property throughout the South. Heirs' property is land that never went through a formal succession, and often leaves inheriting family members without important legal protections that would otherwise be in place. What follows is the story of 300 acres in Greene County, AL and Marie’s story of unequal opportunity in America. 

In this episode, we are talking with Angela Kyle about her family’s multi-generational connection to Carpenter’s Creek in Pensacola, Florida. Angela’s great, great grandfather, Fred Hudgins, bought 10 acres of land adjacent to the creek in 1901. That land was inherited by his wife, Jennie Hudgins, and two acres of that land (the part that is not adjacent to Carpenter’s Creek) remains in the family today. The other 8 acres, which included the Creek access, were sold by her great grandparents, Sim and Minnie Dawson, in 1956, seven years after Jennie’s death. After the sale, that land was redeveloped as an all-white subdivision in an area that came to be known as Spring Hill. According to a 1959 letter to the editor, prominent Pensacola businessman, town leader, and member of the KKK, TT Wentworth, promised continued public access to Carpenter’s Creek when it was sold. The creek had come to be used for baptisms for Black churches on Sundays and recreation by both Blacks and Whites throughout the week. This access was especially important for the Black community because their options for recreation and religious gathering places were severely constrained by segregation. Mr. Wentworth reneged on that promise, and Carpenter’s Creek was cut off from all Pensacolans, but especially its black community for the last 66 years. But thanks to the 2012 Restore ACT, and the concerted efforts of a number of local residents, including Angela and her mother, Carpenter’s Creek is enjoying something of a renewal. Angela has joined us today to share this story, her family’s story, of Carpenter’s Creek and unequal opportunity in America. 

This episode again features Mr. A.P. Tureaud, Jr. recounting how he learned the story of the Tureaud lineage, something that had been a mystery to him for his entire life. When A.P. received an unexpected call one day from a white man who was also his cousin, Duke Rivette, A.P. found a window into the history of his father’s family in the Americas. 

What follows is the Tureaud family story of America’s original sin, played out on Bagatelle and Union Plantations in St. James Parish. It is a story of how French sugar farmers enslaved their African relatives, and this entangled web of exploitation and familial regard, violence and love wound its way into the present day. What follows is the Tureaud Family story of unequal opportunity in America. 

This episode discusses the integration of LSU, the first all-white State University in the South to admit an African-American student. Mr. A. P. Tureaud Jr. successfully sued LSU to gain entry in 1953. Mr. Tureaud attended LSU for 55 days that year, one year before Brown versus Board of Education toppled the separate but equal doctrine established by the Plessy versus Ferguson decision in 1896, which made segregation the legal system in the Southern United States.

Mr. Tureaud describes the choice to attend LSU as the worst mistake he ever made, and marvels nearly 70 years later at the meanness that people displayed towards him, especially the faculty and other adults. This is the first of several interrelated stories about Mr. Tureaud and his extended family. Mr. Tureaud comes from two New Orleans based Black Creole families. The Dejoie clan, his mom's side, founded Louisiana Weekly and include a number of pharmacists, including the first Black female pharmacist in the state, Lucille Dejoie Tureaud, his mother.

The Dejoies lived uptown and had a large extended family. His father's side, the Tureauds, lived downtown along Esplanade Avenue at Kerlerec Street and there were no familial connections outside his immediate family, a mystery that would only make sense later in life. His father became a prominent civil rights attorney, winning a case to equalize teacher pay in Louisiana, before he began practicing full-time at the behest of Thurgood Marshall and others at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

As his father's traveling companion, Mr. Tureaud frequently went through LSU and Southern, and saw the differences between the state's flagship undergraduate institutions for White and Black students respectively. As he finished at Clark High School, he decided to attend LSU and won the right to do so. The conversation today is focused on that story, A. P.'s story of unequal opportunity in America.

This episode discusses the servicemen’s readjustment act, better known as the GI Bill. This remarkable program, forged by World War I vets to help World War II vets transition back to civilian life is widely heralded as ushering in an American economic boom. But there is another part of this story, one where the unequal application of this program compounded systems of structural inequality, and, according to our guest Dr. J Philip Thompson, ultimately had an order of magnitude greater impact on the black/white wealth gap than did slavery. 

Dr. Thompson is an associate professor of urban politics at the Massachusetts institute of technology. He has written extensively on this subject and other topics related to race and economic opportunity. He just completed his second stint as a deputy mayor of New York City, where he managed a diverse portfolio ranging from the office supporting woman-owned and minority-owned businesses, the department of veterans affairs, and the public engagement unit, to name a few areas of focus. Previously in the Dinkins administration, he ran the housing office. 

But before he was on the MIT faculty or working to make New York City a more equitable place, he was a kid in Philadelphia, living both the opportunity and disparate impact that the GI Bill offered his family. This conversation is focused on that story, Phil’s story, of unequal opportunity in America.