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The knee of a police officer placed on the neck of an African American man for longer than 8 minutes - in broad daylight, brazenly in full view of a cell phone camera.

How did we get here? How have previous U.S. Presidents handled violence against African Americans? How have they reacted to high-profile criminal proceedings involving Black people? And how does President Biden's handling of the killing of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin's trial hold up against our prior presidents?

So that we better understand our present, Thomas Balcerski, a professor of American history and a frequent contributor to CNN, NBC and Washington Post provides us with perspective from the past by taking us on a journey - at times a discomfiting one – through America's history.

Tune in to ThePeel.news podcast as Professor Balcerski teaches us that free African Americans were snatched from the North into the slavery of the South. He brings this story to life through the example of the Academy Award-winning film "12 Years A Slave". From this antebellum period, he informs of the post-Civil War atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan and how President Grant and his DOJ crushed them, only for white supremacy to come back in a different form, with a different name. We learn from Professor Balcerski the heart-wrenching story of Emmett Till - a murdered African American teenager - and his intrepid mother's determination for all the world to know, and to see, what happened to her boy. We compare the responses of Presidents Eisenhower and Obama to the murders of teenage African Americans. Finally, we are reminded that George Floyd's death was not the first time that police violence against African Americans was recorded.... for all Americans to see. Here's a hint: Rodney King.

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Information about this episode's guest:

Professor Thomas Balcerski is an associate professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University (link to his academic homepage: https://www.easternct.edu/faculty-directory/balcerski.html), where he teaches classes on early American history, African American history, and presidents and first ladies. He is a frequent contributor to CNN, the Washington Post, and NBC, and is the author of Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, published b y Oxford University Press in 2019 (book link). You can find him on Twitter @tbalcerski.

Here is the long-form Amazon link to his book: https://www.amazon.com/Bosom-Friends-Intimate-Buchanan-William/dp/0190914599

🎵 The attribution, links and license for the theme music in this podcast is below: The Success by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoonMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/