Reckon Interview

If you scroll through the news or turn on the TV, you see endless stories of book bans, teachers on strike, school shootings, legislative wars over curriculum, and, of course, the insane rumors about school children using litter boxes to go to the bathroom. Some of these stories are just copypasta Facebook nonsense, but there’s also a real fight at play here. 

There's a fight over the future of public education and it’s been going on for decades. On this episode, we hear from Cara Fitzpatrick, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and editor with the national education outlet, Chalkbeat, and the author of "The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America.”

That’s a provocative title and we unpack that, but Cara helps us understand the origins of education reform movements like school choice vouchers, charter schools and more. We also examine what may be on the horizon in the fight over public schools. And we also discuss why it’s so hard to get everyone on the same page about what role schools should be playing in our lives.

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Will the state of Alabama execute a man for a crime he didn’t commit?

That’s a question that’s been raised far too many times in the last decade, but right now it’s being raised for Toforest Johnson. And, shockingly, it’s a question being raised by the former attorney who prosecuted Johnson and put him on death row. Birmingham’s current district attorney, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and a former Attorney General of Alabama have all called Johnson’s conviction into question. Three jurors from the original trial have also now said they feel duped.

So what happened?

In 1995, William Hardy, a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy was killed while working off duty as a security guard at a hotel in Birmingham. There were no witnesses to the murder. Meanwhile ten witnesses can confirm Toforest Johnson was at a club four miles away in downtown Birmingham. How did he become accused and then convicted of the murder of Hardy?

That’s the story that Beth Shelburne unravels in her hit podcast Earwitness. She brings to life the stories of investigators and prosecutors desperate to close the case, the witnesses whose testimony seems to change by the minute, the judicial system that may have covered up a $5,000 payment to a witness, and the stories of the people working to get Johnson free.

It's an important story and one that's now grabbed the attention of high profile celebrities like Kim Kardashian. But it hasn't yet persuaded Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. Shelburne also examines why the state of Alabama continues to be marching toward Johnson’s execution despite the evidence of his innocence.

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You may think you know the story of the Tulsa race massacre. Maybe you’ve picked it up in pieces from HBO’s Watchmen or Lovecraft Country. Maybe you saw the documentaries that dropped a couple of years ago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that horrific moment in 1921 when white Tulsans killed hundreds of people and destroyed the neighborhood known as Black Wall Street. 

But no one has ever documented the story in such vivid, heartbreaking detail as Victor Luckerson in his 2023 book “Built from the Fire.” Victor, a journalist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Ringer, New York Times, Wired and New York Magazine, painstakingly details what – and who – was lost in the fire that day. He charts the migration of people like the Goodwin family from places like Mississippi and Alabama, heading north and west to Tulsa, searching for a better life. He writes about how Tulsa became a mecca for Black businesses and Black culture. And he captures, through deeply researched storytelling, how it was all destroyed. But, importantly, he also tells us about what was rebuilt. 

And then he describes the second “slow burning” of Greenwood that was carried out through decades of government policies that hollowed out America’s Black communities over the course of the 20th century.

Buy the book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/625438/built-from-the-fire-by-victor-luckerson/

Subscribe to Victor's newsletter here: https://runitback.substack.com/

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Frederick Joseph joins the Reckon Interview to discuss his new bestseller “Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood.” You may know Frederick as the force behind the Black Panther project, the effort that raised over one million dollars to help young Black children see Black Panther in theaters. He led a similar effort for young girls to see Captain Marvel. He raised funds to help people pay their rent during the early days of the pandemic shutdown. He’s poured a lot into the community.

His first book The Black Friend has become one of those books about race that’s getting banned in school districts across the country. Frederick’s not afraid to confront big issues. And he’s not afraid to confront his own demons either.

Patriarchy Blues is filled with essays that breakdown his ideas on what it means to be a man in America. The false binaries that we choose to accept between masculine and feminine traits. And the ways in which we’re all liberated if embrace womanist philosophies to move past some of these tropes. We’re all human beings who should get to experience the full depths of our humanity including chances to cry, laugh, get angry, get hurt, show love, show pain, sing and dance.

There’s something in this conversation for everyone. So I hope you’ll give it a listen and then pick up a copy of Patriarchy Blues.

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Neema Avashia was born and raised in the bedroom suburban community of Cross Lanes, West Virginia. She’s an Appalachian through and through. She can sing Take Me Home Country Roads by heart. She knows the state’s mountains and waterways by heart. In her new collection of essays, “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place,” she describes feeling more hillbilly than hindu.

She wrestles with big questions about identity in her book. Could she really call herself Appalachian if her family didn’t go back several generations like her neighbors? What are the ways in which the ethics of community and kinship interact with an ethics of survival and assimilation? What does it mean to grow up in a business environment like chemicals or coal that extracts so much from its places and people? And what does it mean to see the people you love posting vile, hateful things about immigrants and people of color on Facebook? 

Neema now lives in Boston as a teacher and advocate for her students and school. 

On this episode of the Reckon Interview, she describes her Appalachian upbringing and how it feels to love and support a place from afar – even on days when it doesn’t feel like it gives you the love you deserve in return.

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In his book, “All the White Friends I Could Not Keep,” Andre Henry describes what it’s like to live through an apocalypse. And he’s going back to the original roots of that word. A time of revelation. For Andre, the last few years in America have laid deep truths bare. 

He grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He had close white friends. People he even considered like a second family. He had a white church community. But as more and more Black people were killed by police. As Donald Trump encouraged more and more racism in the public square, Andre started to realize that he was spending so much of his time trying to convince people he thought were his friends to just see his humanity. It was draining him of his time and his art.

Instead, he threw himself into activism, art and study. He studied global activist movements at the Harvard Kennedy School. He organized protests in Los Angeles. He wrote award-winning music. He started a podcast. And he wrote this book. Andre grew up in Georgia but can trace his activists roots back to his family’s history in Jamaica. You’ll hear a little bit about that on today’s episode of the Reckon Interview.

You’ll hear about how to best use your time when fighting for change. And you’ll, hopefully, find a little hope.

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They call Delbert McClinton the Godfather of Americana for a reason. 

Across the span of a 60 year career, he’s played with everyone. Little Richard and Jimmy Reed. Muddy Waters. Willy Nelson. Tom Petty. Mavis Staples. BB King. ​​He's written songs performed by Emmylou Harris, Etta James, Vince Gill, George Strait, Martina McBride. He even taught a young John Lennon the finer points of the harmonica. 

His blend of country, soul and blues is a sound that has endured for 60 years. He’s somehow found himself at the center of the Texas music scene, the California music scene, the Nashville music scene, even the Muscle Shoals music scene. He’s a musician’s musician, releasing more than 30 albums and winning four Grammys and the Americana Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. He’s witnessed entire genres of music come and go and he’s seen America change in the process.

He’s, quite simply, a legend. And now he’s released his latest album, "Outdated Emotion," which is a tribute to the artists that first inspired him. Across 16 tracks, he’s recorded songs by Hank Williams, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Lloyd Price and others. These are some of the songs and artists from which all of modern American music sprang. They’re songs that endure and ones that Delbert still loves.

Today on the Reckon Interview, Delbert McClinton joins us to discuss what these songs meant to him, stories from six decades on the road, how the music industry has changed and more.

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If you want to know the truth about Appalachia, you won't find it in a certain elegy. You'll find it from people like Chuck Corra and Appodlachia, a podcast committed to examining the region in all its complexity. Corra joins the Reckon Interview to discuss JD Vance, Sen. Joe Manchin, and all the people that have been putting in work to make Appalachia a better place for generations.

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Some of you may not know his story but David J. Dennis Sr. was a titan of the civil rights movement. Born in Louisiana, he joined the movement while at Dillard University in New Orleans. Like many people, he got pulled into the movement reluctantly at first. But by the time he was in his early 20s he was the field director for the Congress of Racial Equality  in Louisiana and Mississippi. He was working with Bob Moses to organize voter registration and turnout. And he was risking his life as a Freedom Rider. 

David Dennis Sr. helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He challenged the Democratic Party at virtually every level to become more integrated. He put his life on the line time and time and time again. And he lost friends. Friends like Medgar Evers who was gunned down outside of his home. Friends like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner who were abducted and murdered because of their work in Mississippi.

David survived but he lived with the guilt of that. For years, he couldn’t talk about the movement until one day Bob Moses brought him back into the fold. And David found a new purpose leading the Southern Initiative Algebra Project in Mississippi. And traveling across the country talking about the movement.

David Dennis Jr. grew up in that. And he’s become a titan in his own right, an award winning journalist that has chronicled the ongoing freedom struggle embodied through the work of Black Lives Matter. He won the 2021 American Mosaic Journalism Prize for his incredible coverage of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

Now, the father and son duo have a new book out chronicling the way that the movement shaped their lives. Today on the Reckon Interview, David Dennis Jr. joins discusses that book, “The Movement Made Us” and what it was like growing up in a civil rights household. He also discusses the ways in which movements are shaped by people in their twenties and the ongoing trauma of surviving a fight that never ends. As David Jr. asks can you call something post traumatic stress disorder if the trauma is ongoing?

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As the horses take their place in the upcoming Kentucky Derby, thousands of people around the country will join in singing “Our Old Kentucky Home,” the state song of Kentucky and one that also has its roots in minstrel shows. The song was written by Stephen Foster a couple of decades before the Civil War. Foster is sometimes called the father of American popular music. And this song along with others that he wrote became a global sensation. Today it’s usually associated with the Derby, America’s longest running sporting event. 

On this episode of the Reckon Interview, we hear from Emily Bingham who grew up just a few miles from the iconic Churchill Downs. In her new book, “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song,” she charts a surprising and fascinating history. This song has evolved and adapted over the course of nearly 200 years, changing to better fit the culture mores of the time.

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