Reed Peggram, born in Boston in 1914, a gay Black man in a world that put up barriers to his success, excelled at Harvard before heading to a Europe on the brink of war. In Europe he fell in love with a Danist artist, and despite pleas from everyone in his life and from the US government to leave the war-torn continent, Reed refused to depart without Arne, leading to his imprisonment in an Italian concentration camp. Even then, Reed overcame the barriers in his way, escaping with Arne and surviving until they were rescued by the US Army. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Ethelene Whitmire, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode audio is “Do it Again!” composed by George Gershwin and performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra; the piece, which is in the public domain, was recorded on March 28, 1922 in New York, and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a 1935 photograph of Reed Peggram retrieved from Reed Peggram's Harvard student records in the Harvard University archives; it is in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional source:

• “Unpacking Reed Peggram’s Library,” by Ethelene Whitmire, Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 9, no. 2, May 2024.

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