Listen to ‘1619,’ a Podcast From The New York Times

An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling.

Credit...The New York Times

“1619” is a New York Times audio series, hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, that examines the long shadow of American slavery. Listen to the episodes below, or read the transcripts by clicking the icon to the right of the play bar. For more information about the series, visit nytimes.com/1619podcast.

1. The Fight for a True Democracy

In 1776, the nation was founded on the ideal of democracy. In 1619, when enslaved Africans first arrived in what would become the United States, black people began the fight to make that ideal a reality. Released on Aug. 23, 2019.
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1. The Fight for a True Democracy

In 1776, the nation was founded on the ideal of democracy. In 1619, when enslaved Africans first arrived in what would become the United States, black people began the fight to make that ideal a reality. Released on Aug. 23, 2019.

nikole hannah-jones

It’s quiet out here. There’re seagulls. The sun is warm, but it’s not too humid. It’s actually kind of a great day for fishing, which is why it stinks.

adizah eghan

What does it smell like?

nikole hannah-jones

It smells like dead fish. It smells like the water.

adizah eghan

What is going through your head right now?

nikole hannah-jones

I don’t know, thinking about what they went through.

I don’t know. I just wonder a lot what it was, what it was like.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after the fear had turned to despair and the despair to resignation and the resignation gave way, finally, to resolve.

They knew then that they would not hug their grandmothers again, or share a laugh with a cousin during his nuptials, or sing their baby softly to sleep with the same lullabies that their mothers had once sung to them.

The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, that everything they ever knew had simply vanished from the earth.

Some could not bear the realization. They heaved themselves over the walls of wooden ships to swim one last time with their ancestors.

Others refused to eat, mouths clamped shut until their hearts gave out.

But in the suffocating hull of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know, those who refused to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark were no longer strangers. They had been forged in trauma. They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white.

And where they were headed, black equaled ‘slave.’ So these were their people now.

adizah eghan

What happened here?

nikole hannah-jones

I mean, we really don’t know a lot. A pirate ship by the name of White Lion sails into the bay here, and they needed to trade something of value so that they could get supplies to make the rest of their journey. And what they traded were 20 to 30 Africans, and this would be at this place kind of ironically called Point Comfort, where slavery in the British North American colonies that would go on to become the United States begins.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.”

archived recording (speaker 1)

That’s your Happy Valentine’s Day, Nikole. This is a tape for Nikole.

archived recording (speaker 2)

Hello, darling. How you doing? Excuse me while I partake of this cancer stick.

archived recording (speaker 1)

That’s O.K.

nikole hannah-jones

When I was a child, my dad always flew a flag in our front yard. Our house is on a corner lot, and in the front yard right in the corner was this — I couldn’t tell you how tall it was. It always seemed really garishly tall to me at the time. There was this very tall aluminum flagpole. My parents didn’t make a lot of money, so our house always had paint chipping, and there was always something about the house that was in disarray. You know, the grass was looking disheveled or the railing on the stairs was falling off, but the flag was always pristine. As soon as it started to show even the slightest tatter, my dad would replace the flag with a fresh new flag. He would never allow a tattered flag to fly. And I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know other black kids whose parents were flying a flag in their front yard. I know lots of white people who flew flags — lots of white people who flew flags.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

My dad was born on a sharecropping farm in Greenwood, Mississippi, where his family picked cotton in the same cotton fields that enslaved people had picked cotton not too long before. That county, Leflore County in Mississippi, lynched more black people than any other county in Mississippi, and Mississippi lynched more black people than any other state in the country. So it was a pretty devastatingly violent and hard place to live.

My dad’s mom fled the South like millions of other black people during the Great Migration and came north to Waterloo and found many of the same barriers that she had sought to escape. She was forced to buy a house on the black side of town. Most jobs were unavailable to her, so she cleaned white people’s houses. My father went to segregated schools.

And at a young age, my father joined the military so that he could get his way out of poverty, but also for the reasons that so many black people join the military, which is he hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally see him as an American.

He loved being in the Army. He was stationed in Germany, picked up German very quickly. He was so smart. He loved talking about that time. It was a period where he got to see things that a poor black child born in Mississippi would not normally get to see.

But the military didn’t end up being a way out for my dad for long. He was passed up for opportunities, and the only jobs my dad ever worked were service jobs. He worked as a convenience store clerk or a bus driver. And because of that, this big, pristine American flag flying in the front of our yard was deeply embarrassing to me. And I didn’t understand why he would feel that much love for a country that clearly did not love him.

I felt this way all through high school. I was no longer standing for the national anthem. I had stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance. And really, throughout most of my adult life — I mean, clearly I know I’m an American. I was born here. Every family member for generations back that I know were all born here, but I never felt like I could claim fully that I was an American.

But it wasn’t until I really started researching and reading and thinking about this project that my own thinking started to shift, that I realized my dad understood things that I never knew.

I now understand for the first time why my dad was so proud to fly that flag.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

My name is Fountain Hughes.

I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia.

My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was 115 years old when he died, and now I am 101 year old.

Now in my boy days, we were slaves. We belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that, have an auction bench. Put you up on the bench and bid on you the same as you’re bidding on cattle, you know.

But still, I don’t like to talk about it, because it makes people feel bad.

nikole hannah-jones

So you kind of have to put yourself in the scene. It is June of 1776, and Thomas Jefferson, at the very young age of 33 years old, has been tasked with drafting the document that is going to declare to the world why the British North American colonies, the 13 colonies, want to break off from the British Empire. He goes to Philadelphia and rents two rooms on the edge of town along the river and sits down to draft what we all know now as the Declaration of Independence.

archived recording (john f. kennedy)

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers —

nikole hannah-jones

So he’s sitting at this portable mahogany writing desk that he carries with him, and he pulls out some paper and a very nice quill pen. And he starts to write these words that almost every American can recite by heart.

archived recording (george h.w. bush)

The Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths —

archived recording

We hold these —

archived recording (george h.w. bush)

— to be self-evident.

archived recording (bill clinton)

We hold —

archived recording

— to be self-evident.

archived recording (bill clinton)

— these truths to be self-evident —

archived recording (george h.w. bush)

— that all men are created equal.

archived recording

— that all men are created equal.

archived recording (bill clinton)

— that all men are created equal.

archived recording

— that all men are created equal.

nikole hannah-jones

They become some of the most famous words in the English language.

archived recording 1

That they are endowed by their creator with certain —

archived recording 2

— with certain unalienable rights, that among these —

archived recording 3

— that among these are life —

archived recording 4

— life —

archived recording 5

— liberty —

archived recording 6

— liberty —

archived recording 7

— and the pursuit of happiness.

archived recording 8

— and the pursuit of happiness.

archived recording (barack obama)

Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that’s what makes us unique. That’s what makes us strong, the shared values that we all hold so dear.

nikole hannah-jones

But what most Americans don’t know is that while he’s writing these lofty words for liberation, he had brought with him one of the many enslaved people whom he owned in order to serve him and to keep him comfortable. Now that enslaved person was a teenager, and that teenager was the half-brother of Thomas Jefferson’s wife. What that means is Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law had children with one of the women that he enslaved. So actually, he was Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law. And so as he’s writing these ideals, he knows that they will not apply even to his own family members.

So 150 years have passed since those first Africans were sold into Virginia, and slavery in America looks very different than the slavery that they experienced. The enslaved population has grown from 20 to now 500,000 people. Fully one-fifth of the population is now enslaved.

It has grown from a conditional institution where some of those first 20 were able to become free after a term of time to one where black people are born into it. They die into it. And they pass that status on to their children. You now have generations of black people who have never known a day of freedom and who will never know a day of freedom.

And yet when Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries talk in public about why the colonists need to be free from England, they refer to themselves as slaves, slaves to the king of England. And so the colonists are being criticized in newspapers for this obvious duplicity by those who don’t believe that they should break off from the British Empire. One of them writes, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?” Another writes to Benjamin Franklin and says, perhaps you should ask the people who are actually enslaved what slavery is like.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, is deeply aware of the hypocrisy and aware of the criticism of the hypocrisy. So as he’s drafting the declaration, he includes a passage in there where he actually blames the king of England for introducing slavery into the colonies. He calls slavery a crime, and he says that the king of England committed this crime, but that’s not our fault. It was not our doing. This is just one more thing that the king of England did to wrong us. So he brings this document to the Continental Congress, and it doesn’t take long before delegates from the Carolinas and from Georgia look at that language about slavery. And one can imagine they said, what the hell are you doing? And they say that there is no way that they are going to sign this document as long as that passage about slavery remains. And so it is struck, and the 13 colonies sign the declaration, and the declaration goes out into the world without mentioning slavery at all, and we start the Revolutionary War.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

Somehow, miraculously, these 13 scrappy colonies managed to defeat one of the most powerful empires in the world, and we become a new nation. And so the colonists gather, and they try to figure out the language that they are going to create in the founding document that we, of course, come to know as the Constitution. But now they have a problem.

They were trying to leave behind an old country that they believed was antithetical to freedom and create a new one that they believe will be defined by freedom. This was a country that was going to be based on individual rights, on a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, but this was also a place that, at this time, was still practicing the institution of slavery.

And so the colonists have a choice to make. Are they going to be the country of their ideals, the ideals that they were putting to paper, a country based on the idea that all men were created equal? And if they were going to be that country, then they were going to have to abolish the institution of slavery. Or were they going to be wedded to the institution of slavery because they depended so heavily on the wealth that was being generated from it? And in that case, they can’t really write the document that they want to write. And so what they do is they decide that they are going to try to have it both ways, and they bake that contradiction right into the Constitution, both codifying and protecting the institution of slavery but never actually mentioning the word. And so they have written what is perhaps the most radical constitution in the world, and from the beginning, they knew they were going to violate its most essential principles.

They call this new country a democracy, but it wasn’t one, not yet.

[music]

fountain hughes

And sometimes you say, I wonder if we’ll ever be free.

Gonna ask the Lord to free us. We’re going to sing. And one day, shall I ever reach heaven? And one day, shall I fly?

And they would sing that for about an hour. Way by and by — oh, I can hear them singing now, but I can’t repeat it like I could in them days. Someday when I’m not hoarse, I can sing it for you, but I’m too hoarse now.

Oh, I wish I could — I wish I could sing it for you.

nikole hannah-jones

On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invites five free black men to the White House for a meeting. They are part of the black elite in Washington, D.C., and he wants to have a conversation with them.

The Civil War has been going on for about a year, and Abraham Lincoln is worried because the war is not going well. And because it’s not going well, he’s feeling like he might have to do something drastic. He’s considering taking this very radical step of liberating all of the enslaved people who are in the Confederate states, and he’s thinking about doing this as a war tactic, understanding that if he takes away the South’s labor force, that might cripple them, or at least the threat of it would force them to remain in the Union. But he’s also concerned about what it might mean to suddenly free four million enslaved people and what the consequences of that might be.

I can imagine these five distinguished men are very excited to get Lincoln’s invitation. They are abolitionists. They have been pressuring Lincoln to abolish slavery. But when they get there, they are greeted by President Lincoln and another man. His name is James Mitchell. Now, James Mitchell is a new employee. He’s only been at the White House for a couple of days. And his job is a new job, and it’s called commissioner of emigration. Now that’s emigration with an “e,” meaning his job was not to help people to enter the country, but to help people to exit it. Lincoln doesn’t waste any time, according to documents that recount what happened that day. He tells the men that he had gotten funds from Congress to ship black people, once they had been freed, to some other country. And then Lincoln said, “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word,” he said, “we suffer on each side.”

We are taught to think of Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator, and he was. But the truth is, like many white Americans, he was opposed to slavery because it was a cruel and unjust institution in opposition to this nation’s ideals, but he was also opposed to black political and social equality. As he said in a speech that he gave in 1853, he considered black people a, quote, “troublesome presence,” and that they were incompatible with a democracy that was designed for white people. As he said in that speech, “Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of a great mass of white people will not.”

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

As those five black men stood in the White House, I wonder what it must have felt like. These men had been fighting for the liberation of millions and had waited for this moment, only to be told that once they were granted their freedom, they were going to be asked to leave the country of their birth. And to make it even worse, Lincoln then tells them that it’s their fault that the country is fighting a civil war at all. He says, “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.” That’s why, the president said, “it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

So Lincoln ends the meeting, and one of the men tells him that they will go back and consider his proposal. Lincoln then tells them, “Take your full time. No hurry at all.” After that meeting, those men made it clear that they were not interested in taking Lincoln up on his offer to leave the country of their birth. There’s a quote by a different group of black abolitionists that really sums up the way that most black Americans felt, and that quote said, “This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its side lie the bones of our fathers. Here we were born, and here we will die.”

After everything that black Americans have been through in this country, that they didn’t immediately take up Lincoln’s offer and go somewhere else and start over is really an astounding testimony to their belief in the American ideals. By choosing to stay, black people were saying, this is our country. We are American, and we’re actually going to work to make these founding ideals a reality.

And in the years that followed, after the Civil War ends, a very short period called Reconstruction began.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

You see the formerly enslaved pushing their white allies in Congress to start to change our founding documents and to actually resolve those contradictions that were baked in. They do this through getting amendments passed. And, of course, amendments are the way that we change our Constitution.

So, of course, the very first amendment that they have to pass is the 13th Amendment, which abolishes the institution of slavery. And what’s interesting about that is this is actually the first time that the word slavery is mentioned in the Constitution, is in the amendment that finally abolishes it. They pass the 14th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment guarantees that all of the enslaved people will finally be citizens of the country of their birth. It also ensures for the first time that the laws cannot treat people differently based on their race. This is called the equal protection clause, and this clause will be used again and again, really all the way up until now, to guarantee that all Americans are treated as equal citizens.

And, finally, they pass the 15th Amendment, which probably is the most important amendment when we’re considering what a democracy is supposed to be. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote no matter what your race is. Now, it didn’t include women at that time, but it certainly set the stage, and it, for the first time, guaranteed that whether you were born a person who was enslaved, whether you were white or you were black, you had the right to exercise your vote in this democracy.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

The only reason we saw all of these gains in the South was because there were federal troops there, and those federal troops were holding back the violence of white Southerners who were not interested in seeing these gains. This all changes with the presidential election of 1876. It was a contested election, and Rutherford B. Hayes is the Republican candidate. And remember, back then it was Republicans who were the progressive party, and they were the party of Lincoln that was working to pass all of this progressive legislation. But Rutherford B. Hayes really wants to win this election, and so he makes a deal with the Democrats in Congress that if they give him their electoral votes, he will withdraw the federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. So he makes the deal, and the troops leave, and we immediately see white Southerners implement a campaign to force black people back into the position that they had been in before Reconstruction.

The suppression of black life over the next five decades would be so devastating that it would come to be known as the Great Nadir, the second slavery.

fountain hughes

Tell you the truth, when I think over today, I don’t know how I’m living. I’m the oldest one that I know that’s living. But still, I’m thankful to the Lord. Colored people is free. We ought to be awful thankful. If I thought that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away, because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog.

archived recording

The day of days for America and her allies. Crowds before the White House await the announcement.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.

archived recording

Reporters rush out to relay the news to an anxious world and touch off celebrations throughout the country. Joy is unconfined.

nikole hannah-jones

It’s February of 1946, and a young black man is sitting on a bus watching the Georgia pines fly past the windows. He’s on his way to see his wife, and he’s probably very excited, because he’s been away at war, and he hasn’t seen her in a very long time. He’d been fighting for this country in World War II, and just that day, he’d been honorably discharged for his service. But he is a black man who is returning to the Jim Crow South.

archived recording 1

You can never whip these birds if you don’t keep you and them separate.

archived recording 2

The whole trouble with this integration business is it probably will end up with mixing socially.

archived recording 3

But to tell me that I don’t even have the right to fight to protect the white race —

archived recording 4

We are going to maintain segregated schools down in Dixie.

archived recording 5

Well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and becoming equal with the whites.

archived recording 6

You’ve got to keep your white and the black separate.

nikole hannah-jones

What happened on that day is a story that will be told across the country.

archived recording (orson welles)

Good morning. This is Orson Welles speaking. I’d like to read to you an affidavit.

nikole hannah-jones

It was a story that would actually change the course of history.

archived recording (orson welles)

I, Isaac Woodard Jr., being duly sworn to depose and state as follows, that I am 27 years old and a veteran of the United States Army, having served 15 months in the South Pacific and earned one battle star. I was honorably discharged on February 12, 1942.

nikole hannah-jones

He’s riding the bus through Georgia.

archived recording (orson welles)

At one hour out of Atlanta, the bus driver stopped at a small drugstore.

nikole hannah-jones

He wants to get off and use the restroom.

archived recording (orson welles)

He stopped. I asked him if he had time to wait for me until I had a chance to go the restroom. He cursed and said no. When he cursed me, I cursed him back. When the bus got to —

nikole hannah-jones

The bus driver gets upset with him. They have a little bit of an argument. Woodard doesn’t think much of it. He goes to the bathroom, runs back to the bus, and the bus keeps going. But then, a few miles down the road, the bus stops, and the bus driver gets off the bus, and then calls and tells Woodard that he needs to get off the bus as well. So Woodard gets off the bus, and before he can even utter a word —

archived recording (orson welles)

When the bus got to Aiken, he got off and went and got the police. They didn’t give me a chance to explain. The policeman struck me with a billy across my head and told me to shut up.

nikole hannah-jones

He’s struck in the head by a police officer.

archived recording (orson welles)

— by my left arm and twisted it behind my back. I figured he was trying to make me resist. I did not resist against him. He asked me, was I discharged, and I told him yes. When I said yes, that is when he started beating me with a billy, hitting me across the top of the head. After that, I grabbed his billy and wrung it out of his hand. Another policeman came up and threw his gun on me and told me to drop the billy or he’d drop me, so I dropped the billy. After I dropped the billy, the second policeman held his gun on me while the other one was beating me.

nikole hannah-jones

And the blows keep coming, and they keep coming, to the point that Woodard loses consciousness.

Woodard is still wearing his crisp Army uniform. He’s been discharged just a few hours earlier. When he comes to, he’s in a jail.

archived recording (orson welles)

I woke up next morning and could not see.

nikole hannah-jones

He was beaten so severely by that police officer that he would never see again.

So Woodard’s beating was not at all unusual. World War II had done exactly what many white people had feared, that once black people were allowed to fight in the military, and when they traveled abroad and they experienced what it was like not to live under a system of racial apartheid, that it would be much harder to control them when they came back. Black men in their uniforms were seen as being unduly proud. So these men who had served their country, who had come home proudly wearing the uniform to show their service for their country, would find that this actually made them a target of some of the most severe violence. But what was unusual was what happened after. Woodard’s case was picked up by the N.A.A.C.P., and they take him on a bit of a tour. They take photographs of him. Those photographs are sent out to newspapers and to fundraising efforts, where they’re saying, look what happened to this man who served his country. It’s that spark that finally determines among millions of black people that enough is enough.

And that’s largely seen as one of the sparks of the modern civil rights movement.

archived recording (martin luther king jr.)

We have people coming in from all over the country. I suspect that we will have —

nikole hannah-jones

The second sustained movement of black people trying to secure equal rights before the law and an equal place in this democracy.

archived recording 1

During the early weeks of February 1960, the demonstrations that came to be called the sit-in movement exploded across the South.

archived recording 2

Negro youngsters paraded with placards, handed out literature, and tried to sit in at lunch counters.

archived recording 3

I think, honestly, many of us didn’t realize just how important our movement would grow to be.

archived recording 4

Official reaction was both swift and severe.

archived recording 5

Don’t blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustices. The government is responsible for the injustices. The government can bring these injustices to halt.

archived recording (martin luther king jr.)

How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Hallelujah!

nikole hannah-jones

And in 1968, 350 years after the introduction of the first enslaved Africans into the colonies —

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us.

nikole hannah-jones

— Congress passes the last of the great civil rights legislation.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

— to go work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts —

nikole hannah-jones

It ends legal discrimination on the basis of race from all aspects of American life.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

— to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country.

nikole hannah-jones

We often think of the civil rights movement as being about black rights, but the civil rights movement was never just about the rights of black people. It was about making the ideals of the Constitution whole. And so when you look at the laws born out of black resistance, these laws are guaranteeing rights for all Americans.

archived recording

This experience, which black Americans were having, did not go unnoticed by the rest of America.

nikole hannah-jones

I mean, basically every other rights struggle that we have seen —

archived recording

Now we fought the public accommodations fight 10 years ago with the blacks. Are we going to have to start all over again with women?

nikole hannah-jones

Disability rights, gay rights, women’s rights —

archived recording (george h.w. bush)

That people with disabilities were still victims of segregation and discrimination.

nikole hannah-jones

— all come from the efforts of the black civil rights struggles.

archived recording

— equal rights. Equals rights to have a job, to have respect, to not be viewed as a piece of meat.

archived recording (george h.w. bush)

No Americans will ever again be deprived of their basic guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

archived recording 1

Celebrations erupted on the steps of the Supreme Court.

archived recording 2

One of its most momentous civil rights decisions. The Supreme Court found gay and lesbian Americans have a constitutional —

archived recording 3

— right to marry. The majority found its justification in the 14th Amendment, written after the Civil War to extend equal protection under law to freed slaves.

nikole hannah-jones

So we are raised to think about 1776 as the beginning of our democracy, but when that ship arrives on the horizon at Point Comfort in 1619, that decision made by the colonists to purchase that group of 20 to 30 human beings, that was a beginning too. And it would actually be those very people who were denied citizenship in their own country, who were denied the protections of our founding documents, who would fight the hardest and most successfully to make those ideals real, not just for themselves but for all Americans. It is black people who have been the perfectors of this democracy.

When I was a kid — it must have been in fifth or sixth grade. Our teacher gave us an assignment. It was a social studies class, and we were learning about different places that people came from, and this was her way of kind of telling the story of the great American melting pot. So she told us all to research our ancestral land and to write a small report about it, and then to draw a flag. I remember kind of looking up and making eye contact with the other black girl who was in the class, because we didn’t really have an ancestral land that we knew of. Slavery had made it so that we didn’t know where we came from in Africa. We didn’t have a specific country. And we could say that we were from the whole continent, but even so, there’s no such thing as an African flag. And so I remember going to the globe by my teacher’s desk — it was on the windowpane along the left side of the classroom — and spinning it to the continent of Africa and just picking a random African country.

So I went back to my desk, and I drew that random African country’s flag, and I wrote a report about it. And I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed, one, because I was lying, but I also felt ashamed because I felt like I should have some other country, and that all the other kids could trace their roots elsewhere, and I could only trace my roots to the country that had enslaved us.

I wish now that I could go back and talk to my younger self and tell her that she should not be ashamed, that this is her ancestral home, that she should be as proud to be an American as her dad was, and that she should boldly and proudly draw those stars and stripes and claim this country as her own.

2. The Economy That Slavery Built

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the institution of slavery turned the poor, fledgling nation into a financial powerhouse. Built into this system, which formed the foundation of American capitalism, was violence. Released on Aug. 30, 2019.
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-31:51

transcript

2. The Economy That Slavery Built

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the institution of slavery turned the poor, fledgling nation into a financial powerhouse. Built into this system, which formed the foundation of American capitalism, was violence. Released on Aug. 30, 2019.

nikole hannah-jones

Seven years after my dad died, I went to the place he was born for the first time. My dad was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where his family were sharecroppers in the same field that enslaved people had picked cotton for generations and generations before. Every year, our family would go on family vacations, and we would go on family reunions. But we would never go to the place of my dad’s birth. It wasn’t a place that he really wanted to take us to or a place that he wanted to return.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

It just so happened that my Great-Aunt Charlotte, my grandmother’s sister, was visiting nearby at the time that I went down. And it’s strange because I’m 38 years old, but I’m so relieved to have this elderly woman with me, because for some reason, I’m just a little afraid, which is kind of weird. But I really was.

I’d grown up with Aunt Charlotte my whole life. She’s the one who taught me how to make yeast rolls in her kitchen, and she was this woman who wore heels until she was in her 90s, who, when you would go in her house, everything was always very neat. There was plastic over the furniture. It was very important for her at all times to appear respectable, and I understood that so much of that was because in her formative years, she was not treated with respect in the place that she was born.

So we get in the car, and I try, as I had done several times through the years, to get my Great-Aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like to live down there. And for most of the ride, she was giving me the same gauzy version that she’d always given me, that life for them wasn’t really that hard, that it was a good place to grow up.

As we finally approach Greenwood, I see a big sign. It’s painted in brown, and it says, in white letters, “Greenwood: Cotton Capital of the World.”

And then we approached the Yazoo River.

The Yazoo River is fed by the Tallahatchie River. And Aunt Charlotte said that when she was young, she was baptized in the Tallahatchie River. But as she’s saying that, I also know that something else happened in that river. Because that river is a place where they found the body of Emmett Till, who was lynched by white men when he was 14 because they thought that he had done something untoward to a white woman. And after they killed him, they had sunk him in that river, tying a cotton gin fan around his neck.

I know that Emmett Till was just four years older than my own father, and that like my father, his mother had also fled north. And like my father, he had been sent for the summers to stay with his grandparents, and that’s how he died.

And for some reason, it’s at the river’s edge that Aunt Charlotte finally starts to talk. And she tells me about another baptism of sorts that occurred there.

It was a long time ago when they were kids, and her brother and her cousin were walking through the white side of town. And black people weren’t allowed in the white side of town if they weren’t there for work. So a car approaches behind them, and a group of white boys began to chase. And my aunt described how her brother and her cousin just ran and ran and eventually jumped into those muddy rivers in order to escape, and how they came home dripping wet, their chests heaving.

And it reminded me of all the other stories I had heard about how when enslaved people tried to run away, they would sometimes jump into the river in hopes that they could hide their scent from the dogs that were chasing them.

And then she tells me about the time another brother had to come home, his chest heaving. He came to warn the family that his cousin had stood up to a white plantation owner, and everyone understood what that meant. You could not stand up to white plantation owners in the South if you were black and live to tell that story. So her own father had to grab his Winchester and another rifle, and they guarded him through that night in a well-practiced vigil to ensure that he would be safe until they could whisk him away to the North.

All these years when I had been trying to get Aunt Charlotte to talk about what it was like in Mississippi, and now here we are, with the mosquitoes swarming our legs. And it felt like the ghosts of Greenwood started to come near.

For the first time, I started to get a glimpse of my family’s story. And the stories were in the land and in the water, in the Tallahatchie that flowed to the Yazoo, and the Yazoo that flowed to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi, whose muddy waters created the delta that this vast land was named after. And that river created soils that were so rich that they led to the expansion of cotton unlike anything that the world had seen. And it also helped to fuel the modern American economy. This river, the Mississippi River, brought so much life and so much death. It created the fertile land that made cotton king and lavish riches on the white people who owned almost all of it.

But it also led to the pain and suffering for the black people who had to work almost all of it.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.”

archived recording

This is cotton, the living plant. Beauty and utility bred into the living fiber by nature herself, by nature working with her incomparable tools, the sun and the air, the soil, the rains, and the wonder of growth.

nikole hannah-jones

You want me to pull up closer? Yeah?

matthew desmond

O.K., you ready?

nikole hannah-jones

Matt Desmond, how did we in the United States first start to come to grow cotton?

archived recording

Cotton, its beginnings veiled in antiquity.

matthew desmond

So the story of cotton is an old story. You know, it goes back millennia.

archived recording

Its story older than history itself.

matthew desmond

In this country, it dates back to the earliest years of the colonies. And when slavery begins on these shores, it begins in cotton fields, but it’s also in tobacco fields. It’s in rice paddies. It’s in sugar plantations. And everyone understood the potential of cotton.

archived recording

It’s beautiful.

matthew desmond

It was the commodity the world wanted. It was like oil, in a way, in our modern day.

archived recording

And just as important, it will stay beautiful. It’s cotton.

matthew desmond

But cotton was not king at this time. And the reason cotton wasn’t king is because it was labor-intensive. It took about 10 hours for one enslaved worker just to pick the seeds out of 1 pound of cotton. And so everyone knew that if you could harness cotton, you could make a killing. But then something changed. And that something was the invention of the cotton gin. And the gin that we credit to Eli Whitney broke the bottleneck, and suddenly you were able to clean as much cotton as you can grow. And so the cotton market explodes in America. But there is a problem. Cotton needed land. You could only grow cotton on the same patch of land for about three years before that soil was depleted. So where do we get the land? Well, the United States government itself took it from Native American peoples. It dispatched its military in Alabama, and Georgia, and Florida, and it acquires land and then it sells that land back on the cheap to white settlers. And suddenly, the United States had millions of acres that could be cultivated for cotton.

And this is when we start seeing slavery take off, because once you have the land, the thing you need next is the labor. In 1790, we had just shy of about 700,000 enslaved workers on these shores. By 1850, that number is three million enslaved workers in America, and cotton is driving most of that growth. You know, we all learn about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin at fourth or fifth grade as kind of a clever invention.

archived recording

(SINGING) Oh, things were rotten in the land of cotton until Whitney made the cotton gin. Now old times there will soon be forgotten for it did the work of 100 men.

matthew desmond

What we often don’t learn about is how profound an effect that invention had on the lives of enslaved workers. Enslavers wanted to get the most out of their workers, and they did. And what took hold in America was a new kind of economic system, one that was relentlessly focused on increasing cotton productivity.

You know, many of our depictions of the cotton plantation are bucolic and small. You know, you might see a handful of enslaved workers in the fields, and an overseer on a horse, and then the owner in a big house. That’s not how it was. It was incredibly complex. The slave plantations that developed in the Mississippi Valley were huge. They resembled something much more closely to our modern multinational corporations than we often think. There was complex hierarchies with mid-level managers and workers who reported to other workers who reported to other workers. There were sophisticated data-tracking techniques that were developed, so we knew how much labor and money went into producing each bale of cotton. Complicated workforce supervision techniques were developed for making sure people met their quotas by the end of the day. Professional manuals and credentials were developed so enslavers could trade information about what to feed their enslaved workforce, how to house them, even how to speak to them. But behind all the sophistication, behind all this capitalistic rationality, was violence.

Because overseers were tracking everyone’s haul, if you fell short of that quota, you were often beat. And these beatings are horrendous to read about. Enslaved workers passed out often from pain. They wake up vomiting. Pregnant women were meant to lay down in small kind of divots in the ground so their belly could go in to allow the whip to fall flat on their back. You know, your job, this terrible job you had, was to try to hit your quota every day. And if you fell below your quota, you could be subject to torture. But if you overshot, that brought another terror, too, because the overseers might increase your quota for the next day. It’s also why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations. It wasn’t random. I read an account from 1854, from a fugitive enslaved worker named John Brown, and he wrote, quote, “When the prices rise in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects. They are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” So, you know, you increase the price of the crop in Manchester, and enslaved workers are going to feel it in the fields of Alabama and Georgia back in the United States.

nikole hannah-jones

So when I was in college, I worked at a telemarketing call center. And —

matthew desmond

I did that, too, in college!

nikole hannah-jones

Unfortunately, probably a lot of us did that. I was not very good at it. But I remember we would all have a target, and everyone’s target was determined by how many sales they had made the week before. And there was this balancing of, well, you don’t want to have a really exceptional week, because then you might be expected to repeat that exceptional week. But you also couldn’t have a really low week, because then you’d get called into the manager’s office. Are you saying that these types of management systems, that they have their genesis in the system of plantation slavery?

matthew desmond

I think that’s fair to say. These techniques of supervision were developed by folks trying to squeeze as much productivity out of their enslaved workforce as possible. And violence worked. At the eve of the Civil War, the average enslaved worker picked 400 percent as much cotton as her counterpart did 60 years earlier. It’s an incredible amount of productivity. The system is really pulling as much as it can out of its enslaved workforce.

nikole hannah-jones

So in order to expand profits, you have to expand the amount of people who are working to pick and process the cotton. Except enslaved people are very expensive. A single kind of, quote, unquote, “prime hand” could be, in current dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. So how are these planters, these enslavers, paying for this expansion?

matthew desmond

That’s where the banks come in. Planters, to expand their operations and make more money, needed more capital. And so what did they do? They took out mortgages. And the way we usually think of a mortgage is, O.K., bank, please lend me the money to buy a house, and against that loan, I’m going to leverage my asset, this house. So if I don’t pay back my loan, you can take my house. Now, that concept has been around for a long time in America, but for a lot of our history, it wasn’t about houses, and it wasn’t about land. It was about enslaved people. Plantation owners went to the banks and said, please give me a loan to buy more land and expand my workforce. And against that loan, I’m going to put up my people that I own.

nikole hannah-jones

So what does that mean? How does that work exactly, that you can take out a mortgage on a human being?

matthew desmond

For enslavers, mortgaging their workforce was easier than mortgaging their homes or mortgaging their land. You know, land wasn’t worth that much. And so what people put up was actual human beings. They mortgaged enslaved workers to buy more enslaved workers.

Something else that it means, though, which is critical, is this allowed global markets to get into the business of slavery. And so this is how it worked. State-chartered banks would take this slave-backed mortgage from this plantation owner, and this one, and this one. And they would bundle that debt and make something called a bond. And they would sell those bonds to investors all over the Western world. And so when owners made payments on their mortgages, the investors got a little return. Today, we call this securitizing debt, and it’s really a way to kind of sink global capital into the American slave economy at the time. In fact, historians have shown that the majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market. And keep in mind, this is years after Britain abolished the African slave trade in 1807. So a generation removed from that decision, and Britain and much of Europe along with it is still bankrolling slavery in the United States.

nikole hannah-jones

So you didn’t have to personally own human beings to make a great deal of profit off of them.

matthew desmond

No, you didn’t have to. And it’s interesting, the growth of these kind of newfangled financial instruments, like slave-backed mortgage bonds — they grew in popularity as the institution of slavery itself grew more unpopular around the world. It’s allowing investors in those countries to really say they’re against slavery out of one part of their mouth and use their money to invest in it from the other. And the money flowed in. So at the height of slavery, the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation.

nikole hannah-jones

Let’s just pause and reflect on that. Just say that one more time, because I remember the first time I read that statistic, I just stopped on the page.

matthew desmond

Yeah. So at the height of slavery, the combined value of all enslaved people was more than that of all the railroads and all the factories of the nation combined.

nikole hannah-jones

When you think of that comparison, how does that make you feel?

matthew desmond

Yeah, it’s, um —

nikole hannah-jones

I feel like a long pause makes sense because I’m not sure how it makes me feel either. It’s such an illuminating statistic. It really speaks to what was driving our economy at that time.

matthew desmond

Yeah. The enslaved workforce in America was where the country’s wealth resided.

[music]

matthew desmond

So America is riding this wave of cotton prices just increasing and increasing, and more money keeps flowing. And more people around the Western world are invested in this bubble. And we know how these stories end. And the bubble eventually pops. You know, the American South overproduces cotton. Consumer demand cannot keep up. And prices start to plummet in 1834, and then they drop, causing a recession, which has been known as the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors, they started calling in their debts, but plantation owners were totally underwater. They couldn’t sell their enslaved workforce, and they couldn’t sell their land to pay off their debts, either, because as the price of cotton dropped, the price of enslaved workers and the price of land dropped with it. So that debt was toxic. But investors wanted their money. So states had a few decisions. They could have raised taxes. But their citizens said absolutely not, and they listened to them. They also could have foreclosed on the plantations, essentially shutting down the cotton industry. But the cotton industry was holding everything together, and if you foreclosed on the cotton industry, you foreclosed on the economy.

And so, basically, they did nothing. They did nothing. Because cotton slavery was too big to fail.

nikole hannah-jones

Where have we heard that before?

matthew desmond

No, it sounds so familiar, right?

archived recording 1

Well, Mark, earlier this week, we heard all about these “too-big-to-fail” banks, the systemically important financial institutions. So let’s describe a too-big-to-fail bank.

archived recording 2

Do we still have banks that are too big to fail?

archived recording 3

Citigroup is too big to fail.

archived recording 4

Too-big-to-fail financial institutions were both a source of the crisis and among the primary impediments to policymakers’ efforts to contain it.

matthew desmond

It’s not hard to draw these parallels between what happened in the 1830s in America and what happened in the 2000s.

archived recording (barack obama)

We are in the most serious financial crisis in generations.

matthew desmond

You know, all of the ingredients are there.

archived recording

Complex illiquid mortgage and mortgage-related securities —

matthew desmond

There’s mystifying financial instruments —

archived recording

Help me out here. How does that make sense?

matthew desmond

— which hide the risk and connect people all over the world. There’s stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution — cotton, housing — is unshakable.

archived recording

It says Morgan Stanley encouraged a lender to push risky, more expensive mortgages on black customers in Detroit.

matthew desmond

There’s the intentional exploitation of black people.

archived recording

The suit claims they steered black and Hispanic borrowers into bad loans, resulting in mass foreclosures.

matthew desmond

And there is impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart.

archived recording

Really, the regulators had no practical choice but to keep them from failing.

matthew desmond

You know, the borrowers were bailed out after 1837.

archived recording

Because they would’ve brought down the whole financial system with them.

matthew desmond

And of course, the banks were bailed out after 2008.

archived recording (bernie sanders)

If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

matthew desmond

So this is a story about American capitalism, about the foundations of American capitalism, about the American economy. And it was an economy that got started in brutality.

Slavery allowed this poor, fledgling nation to turn into a colossal powerhouse in the global economy. But what slavery also created was a culture in American capitalism that was incredibly brutal.

archived recording 1

— learned six women blamed their miscarriages on working conditions at the warehouse. Others say they passed out because of excessive heat and lack of A.C.

archived recording 2

Hundreds of employees on zero-hours contracts are subjected to a regime described as horrendous and exhausting.

archived recording 3

There are several investigations about injuries on the job.

archived recording 4

They’re monitored at all times. Even toilet visits are regulated.

archived recording 5

Breathing toxic fumes, stress, injuries, over 100 ambulance calls.

matthew desmond

It’s tolerance for inequality.

archived recording

I work 40 hours a week, and I can’t survive.

matthew desmond

The level of poverty that we have here, compared to other industrialized societies —

archived recording (elizabeth warren)

Who is this economy really working for?

archived recording

The C.E.O.s making 204 times what the average worker is making.

matthew desmond

And it’s a culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929, the global financial crisis in 2008.

archived recording

Salaries on Wall Street rose last year to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.

matthew desmond

And if the American capitalist way is uniquely brutal compared to other kind of capitalist societies in the world, it may have to do with how capitalism started on these shores and the plain fact that we haven’t shook this kind of shadow of slavery from our economic life.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

Thank you so much, Matt.

matthew desmond

Thank you so much, Nikole.

nikole hannah-jones

You’ve reached Nikole Hannah-Jones. Please leave me a message, including your name and the number where I can reach you. Thank you.

jesmyn ward

Hello, Nikole. This is Jesmyn Ward. I just want to tell you a little bit about the piece I’m going to read. It’s about what happened on January 1, 1808, when the acts prohibiting the importation of slaves went into effect. This basically banned the importation of enslaved people from abroad, but it also meant that enslaved people who were already in the United States of America, that millions of them were then sold south to provide labor for the cotton industry and the sugar industry, which then meant that thousands upon thousands of families were broken and split apart forever. So that’s why I chose to write about that moment, because I wanted to look really closely at what this change, this change in law, what that did to human beings. So here’s the piece.

jesmyn ward

The whisper run through the quarters like a river swelling to flood. We passed the story to each other in the night in our pallets, in the day over the well, in the fields as we pulled at the fallow earth. They ain’t stealing us from over the water no more. We dreamed of those we was stolen from: our mothers who oiled and braided our hair to our scalps, our fathers who cut our first staffs, our sisters and brothers who we pinched for tattling on us, and we felt a cool light wind move through us for one breath. Felt like ease to imagine they remained, had not been stolen, would never be. That be a foolish thing. We thought this later when the first Georgia Man come and roped us. Grabbed a girl on her way for morning water. Snatched a boy running to the stables. A woman after she left her babies blinking awake in their sack blankets. A man sharpening a hoe. They always came before dawn for us chosen to be sold south. We didn’t understand what it would be like, couldn’t think beyond the panic, the prying, the crying, the begging and the screaming, the endless screaming from the mouth and beyond. Sounding through the whole body, breaking the heart with its volume. A blood keen. But the ones that owned and sold us was deaf to it. Was unfeeling of the tugging the children did on their fathers’ arms or the glance of a sister’s palm over her sold sister’s face for the last time. But we was all feeling, all seeing, all hearing, all smelling: We felt it for the terrible dying it was. Knowed we was walking out of one life and into another. An afterlife in a burning place. The farther we marched, the hotter it got. Our skin grew around the rope. Our muscles melted to nothing. Our fat to bone. The land rolled to a flat bog, and in the middle of it, a city called New Orleans. When we shuffled into that town of the dead, they put us in pens. Fattened us. Tried to disguise our limps, oiled the pallor of sickness out of our skins, raped us to assess our soft parts, then told us lies about ourselves to make us into easier sells. Was told to answer yes when they asked us if we were master seamstresses, blacksmiths or lady’s maids. Was told to disavow the wives we thought we heard calling our names when we first woke in the morning, the husbands we imagined lying with us, chest to back, while the night’s torches burned, the children whose eyelashes we thought we could still feel on our cheeks when the rain turned to a fine mist while we stood in lines outside the pens waiting for our next hell to take legs and seek us out. Trade our past lives for new deaths.

[music]

jesmyn ward

Yeah, that’s it.

3. The Birth of American Music

America heard the sound of complete artistic freedom in black music, and then claimed that music as its own. “And that’s ironic,” Wesley Morris tells us. “Because this is the sound of a people who, for decades and centuries, have been denied freedom.” Released on Sept. 6, 2019.
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transcript

3. The Birth of American Music

America heard the sound of complete artistic freedom in black music, and then claimed that music as its own. “And that’s ironic,” Wesley Morris tells us. “Because this is the sound of a people who, for decades and centuries, have been denied freedom.” Released on Sept. 6, 2019.

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.” This week, Wesley Morris on the birth of American music.

[music]

wesley morris

So last fall, I am at my friend’s house. We are making dinner. I’m chopping vegetables. And I asked my friend Brett, who was cooking with me, can you put on some music? And he said, what do you want to listen to? And I said, have you ever heard of yacht rock? And he said, what? I said, yacht rock, have you ever heard of this? And he goes, no, I have not. So he finds the yacht rock station in Pandora, which — I don’t know why or how he’s still a Pandora guy, with all due respect to Pandora. He is one. And he finds the yacht rock station. At some point, Brett has to go run an errand. I think I might have sent him on one, I don’t remember. But he’s gone. So I’m alone, just me, with the vegetables and the yacht rock.

It gives me plenty of time to really think about the songs I’m hearing.

archived recording

[MUSIC - PLAYER, “BABY COME BACK”] Baby come back, any kind of fool could see —

wesley morris

We’re talking about music made between the years of, I don’t know, I would say, like, 1975 to about 1983. Things like —

archived recording

[MUSIC - ACES, “HOW LONG”] How long has this been going on?

wesley morris

— Aces, “How Long.”

archived recording

[MUSIC - SEALS AND CROFTS, “SUMMER BREEZE”] Summer breeze makes me feel fine —

wesley morris

Seals and Crofts, doing “Summer Breeze.”

I’m hearing things like —

archived recording

[MUSIC - ROBBIE DUPREE, “STEAL AWAY”] Why don’t we steal away —

wesley morris

“Steal Away” by Robbie Dupree.

archived recording

[MUSIC - ROBBIE DUPREE, “STEAL AWAY”] — steal away, why don’t we —

wesley morris

And The Doobie Brothers, “What a Fool Believes.”

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE DOOBIE BROTHERS, “WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES”] He came from somewhere back in her long-ago, the sentimental fool don’t see, trying hard to —

wesley morris

It is like our soft rock-est period in American popular music.

The joke of yacht rock is that whoever invented it, and whoever’s making a playlist out of these songs, is basically saying that they’re inconsequential and that what’s in them doesn’t matter.

archived recording

[MUSIC - SUPERTRAMP, “GOODBYE STRANGER”] Goodbye stranger, it’s been nice —

wesley morris

But what I know I’m hearing is something bigger and deeper than that.

archived recording

[MUSIC - SUPERTRAMP, “GOODBYE STRANGER”] Tried to see your point of view —

wesley morris

Every song has something about it that is similar to the other songs.

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] All I want to do when I wake up in the morning is see your eyes —

wesley morris

I’m hearing things like “Rosanna” by Toto.

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] Rosanna, Rosanna —

wesley morris

Which seems perfectly banal, has a really good beat, sort of builds to its chorus.

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] All I want to do in the middle of the evening is hold you tight —

wesley morris

But then at the end —

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] Not quite a year since she went away —

wesley morris

I’m hearing —

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] Rosanna, yeah —

wesley morris

The great doo-wop harmonies of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

archived recording

[MUSIC - TOTO, “ROSANNA”] — and I have to say.

wesley morris

There is something jazz-like in the syncopated music of something like Steely Dan.

archived recording

[MUSIC - STEELY DAN, “DO IT AGAIN”]

wesley morris

You can hear in somebody like Michael McDonald —

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE DOOBIE BROTHERS, “WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES”]

wesley morris

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah-ah.

That is, like, a gospel breakdown.

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE DOOBIE BROTHERS, “WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES”]

wesley morris

What I’m hearing in all of these songs is, basically, blackness.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”]

wesley morris

And the song in which I am hearing it the deepest, and strongest, and most powerfully, at least to me, standing in that kitchen, chopping those vegetables, was when Kenny Loggins’s “This is It” comes on.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] There’ve been times in my life, I’ve been wondering why —

wesley morris

It’s got a kind of loosely disco-like rhythm to it. There’s a lot of percussion sort of going back and forth and around.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] Now I’m not so sure —

wesley morris

“Sure” — Kenny Loggins is basically sing-whispering the verses in this song.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] One good reason to try.

wesley morris

Doing this very light coo —

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] But what more can I say?

wesley morris

And then in the pre-chorus, Kenny Loggins disappears, and who shows up? Michael McDonald.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] You think that maybe it’s over, only if you want it to be —

wesley morris

Giving Kenny Loggins plenty of time to gather himself.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] Are you going to wait for a sign — your miracle.

wesley morris

When he sings the word miracle, he doesn’t sing, miracle! He goes, mirr — a — cle!

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] Your miracle.

wesley morris

Like he is scraping the bottom of a pan to get all of the good bits off of it before you pour the gravy in.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] Make no mistake where you are. This is it! Your back’s to the corner. This is it.

wesley morris

Scraping the pan is the blackest thing you can do as a singer, and here is Kenny Loggins, as this white artist, doing it.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] The waiting is over, so don’t you run, no —

wesley morris

And then the gravy comes —

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] This is it, make no mistake where you are. This is it —

wesley morris

He is at the top of the church at this point. He has elevated himself to the rafters. There’s no more — he is at the roof, trying to clear a way to get to heaven, but there’s just church roof in the way.

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] This is it! No one can tell what the future holds. This is it! Your back’s to the corner.

wesley morris

He’s not the greatest singer, but there’s a kind of gumption and nerve to the singing of this song —

archived recording

[MUSIC - KENNY LOGGINS, “THIS IS IT”] The waiting is over.

wesley morris

— that cannot be denied. A tip of the hat to him. I just had to stand there, and I just — I actually cracked up. I just put down the knife, and I cracked up. And it felt so pleasurable. And then I started thinking about all these other singers I love.

archived recording

[MUSIC - AMY WINEHOUSE, “BACK TO BLACK”] We only said goodbye with words —

wesley morris

I’m thinking about Amy Winehouse.

archived recording

[MUSIC - AMY WINEHOUSE, “BACK TO BLACK”] I died a hundred times.

wesley morris

I’m thinking about Annie Lennox.

archived recording

[MUSIC - ANNIE LENNOX, “LITTLE BIRD”] Give me the strength to carry on.

wesley morris

I’m thinking about George Michael.

archived recording

[MUSIC - GEORGE MICHAEL, “FAITH”] Before this river becomes an ocean, before you throw my heart back on the floor.

wesley morris

I think about Chris Stapleton —

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRIS STAPLETON, “TENNESSEE WHISKEY”] — used to spend my nights out in a barroom.

wesley morris

— who practices a kind of muscly blues that gets written off as country because he’s a big white guy in a hat.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRIS STAPLETON, “TENNESSEE WHISKEY”] Liquor was the only love I’d known.

wesley morris

And one of the many phases in which David Bowie really wanted to make R&B and soul music.

archived recording

[MUSIC - DAVID BOWIE, “YOUNG AMERICANS”] Young American — the young American — I want the young American —

wesley morris

This is the sound not just of black America, but the sound of America. It is deeply American, almost especially when it’s sung by British people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Amy Winehouse. And it fills me with pride. Like, I know that there is something irresistible and ultimately inevitable about black music being a part of American popular music. But it also reminds me that there’s a history to this, a very painful history. And in the most perversely ironic way, it’s this historical pain that is responsible for this music.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”]

wesley morris

Some of the oldest recordings we have of black American music are from the 1930s.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”]

wesley morris

And they’re songs that would have been sung by Americans born into slavery.

There’s this one called “Old Ship of Zion.”

You can hear in it these four men, their voices are moving in and out of each other.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”]

wesley morris

And it’s beautiful, and it’s also sad.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”]

wesley morris

You can feel that in your bones.

And then there’ll be music that was completely the opposite, like “Old Coon Dog,” for instance.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD COON DOG”]

wesley morris

You can hear the playfulness in this song.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD COON DOG”]

wesley morris

And you’ve got this banjo, this great African instrument that becomes the bedrock of American music in so many ways. And that thing is dancing.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD COON DOG”]

wesley morris

And then —

archived recording

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”] We soon will be to the landing corner.

wesley morris

— you have someone like Billy McCrea.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”] Blow, Cornie, blow —

wesley morris

And oh, my God, you can hear in his singing what we would now call something like the livelong day.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”] Blow, Cornie, blow —

wesley morris

Years and years of hard work and unimaginable sorrow.

archived recording 1

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”] Blow, Cornie, blow —

archived recording 2

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”] Landed, landed, landed —

wesley morris

You can also hear in all of this music —

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”] Landed, landed, landed, mighty mother.

wesley morris

— this undeniable sound of hope.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD SHIP OF ZION”] Get on board, get on board.

wesley morris

All of these melodies and cadences and emotions are things that would have been passed down generation after generation. It’s what you would have heard on a plantation. It’s what you would have heard walking by a plantation. It’s what you would have heard passing a black person doing his job, entertaining himself doing the drudgery of work, the way a guy named Thomas Dartmouth Rice did sometime around the 1830s. As the story goes, T.D. Rice, a white man, this anonymous nobody actor trying to make ends meet, one day he’s touring with a troupe in Cincinnati, or maybe it was Pittsburgh, we don’t really know. But the myth basically goes, T.D. Rice happened upon an old black man cleaning a horse in a stable. The man was doing his job on property owned by a white man named Crow.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”] Blow, Cornie, blow.

wesley morris

He heard the tune this old black man was singing. He saw the way this man moved his body as he was cleaning this horse. Now, we don’t know what tune this old man would’ve been singing.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BILLY MCCREA, “BLOW, CORNIE, BLOW”]

wesley morris

Whatever Rice hears coming out of this man’s mouth is captivating to him. And what he sees is an opportunity.

archived recording

[MUSIC]

wesley morris

Because showbiz in the 1830s looked like this.

archived recording

[MUSIC - WILLIAM BYRD, “PAVANE & 2 GALLIARDS IN A MINOR”]

wesley morris

Italian operas, British plays, entertainment imported from Europe. All the people performing this stuff would have been white. The audiences would have been white. After all, it’s 1830. Slavery is in full effect.

And when it came to entertainment, there was nothing new, nothing truly American.

And so when T.D. Rice hears this black man singing this song and moving his body in this particular way, ding, a light bulb goes off. And he takes that light bulb and runs all the way to the theater. He figures out a way to melt down some cork. Lets it cool, presumably takes a rag, or maybe even his hand if it’s cool enough. And then he paints his face black. He goes out on stage, but instead of doing his regular act, he’s got this horse groomer’s tune. Except now, he’s given the tune lyrics.

archived recording

Come listen, all you gals and boys. I’m just from Tuckahoe. I’m going to sing a little song. My name’s Jim Crow. (SINGING) Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

wesley morris

And the lyrics give the horse groomer a name. And the name is Jim Crow.

So the crowd goes crazy. They go so bananas, the man gets 20 encores.

This is the first time a paying audience is basically electrified by a white man with a black face. This is the night that Jim Crow was allegedly introduced to America, this mascot of American racism. And this is what America really wanted, which was its own original art form that is not an Italian opera, and isn’t some British guy coming over and thespianing all over them. And here is Thomas Dartmouth Rice giving it to them. This is the night that American popular culture was born.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD UNCLE NED”] There was an old [racial slur]. They called him Uncle Ned. He is dead long ago, long ago.

wesley morris

Oh, boy. I mean, you know how it goes. This sensational thing happens, and then everybody wants to get on the bandwagon and do their own. So you have other minstrel acts who come along and try to do what Thomas Dartmouth Rice is doing — a song and a dance, and a black face on their white skin.

archived recording

[MUSIC - “OLD UNCLE NED”] Oh, oh, oh, hang up the fiddle and the bow.

wesley morris

And then from these solo acts, you have, basically, bands forming.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS]

wesley morris

And the bands have all the instruments that you would have in a band that you’d recognize now. There is a banjo and a fiddle and some tambourines, and percussion in the form of bones, which would come from a pig sometimes.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS]

wesley morris

That is the formation of what will become the minstrel troupe.

And the place that minstrelsy took hold was in the North — places like Philadelphia and New York and Boston, where you’d have these theaters dedicated to minstrel acts, where minstrel acts would just move into a theater and do their act night after night after night after night after night. And a lot of these performers had never been meaningfully south to have a meaningful relationship with black people. And so they just made stuff up, based on what they thought black people were like.

archived recording

(SINGING) I want you to know that Im ragged but right, hobo-like and living like you people ask why.

wesley morris

They were able to draw on things that were coming to America from other parts of Europe, like the polka.

archived recording

[MUSIC - EDISON MINSTRELS, “MINSTREL POTPOURRI”] Come all you colored people now and gather ‘round me close, and listen to what I’m gonna sing.

wesley morris

And so you had, over the course of the formation of this culture, an inherent mixing. You had some amazing mix of —

archived recording

[MUSIC - DAN EMMETT, “DE BOATMAN’S DANCE”]

wesley morris

— an imagined blackness, real, actual Irish melodies, and Polish music, with what we would now call gospel, but spiritual harmonies, interlaced together with this African banjo —

archived recording

[MUSIC - DAN EMMETT, “DE BOATMAN’S DANCE”]

wesley morris

— basically welding into a fusion that becomes the thing that everybody wants to try to do.

archived recording

[MUSIC - DAN EMMETT, “OLD DAN TUCKER”]

wesley morris

The whole thing just sweeps the nation. And for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit. Can we say that?

andy mills

Oh, very much so.

annie brown

I think so!

wesley morris

And so, for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit.

archived recording

[MUSIC - DAN EMMETT, “DE BOATMAN’S DANCE”]

wesley morris

This is America’s primary form of entertainment. People are going crazy for blackface minstrels. You have little boys going to bed and dreaming about how they can become part of this minstrel show. Some of those people having these dreams go on to become people like Stephen Foster.

archived recording

[MUSIC - VICTOR LIGHT OPERA COMPANY, “OH! SUSANNA”] I came from Alabama with my banjo on my knee, I’m going to Louisiana, my true love for to see.

wesley morris

Stephen Foster, the man widely credited as being the father of American music.

archived recording

[MUSIC - VICTOR LIGHT OPERA COMPANY, “OH! SUSANNA”] Oh, Susanna! Oh, don’t you cry for me.

wesley morris

Some of his songs, some of his most famous songs, songs you know, songs you love, songs you still sing, songs your children, if you have them, they still sing, some of those songs were written for blackface performers.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS, “CAMPTOWN RACES”] The camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah.

wesley morris

And if you listen to something like “Camptown Races,” you can hear in it all of its minstrel properties.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS, “CAMPTOWN RACES”] I go back home with a pocketful of tin, oh doo-dah day.

wesley morris

The song, of course, is written in so-called “Negro” dialect. I mean, instead of saying “going,” you’re saying “gwine.”

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS, “CAMPTOWN RACES”] Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day.

wesley morris

Like, instead of saying, O-F for of, you get a lot of D-E for de.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHRISTY MINSTRELS, “CAMPTOWN RACES”] The blind horse sticking in a big mud hole — doo-dah, doo-dah.

wesley morris

This is a white person imagining how a black person would sing this song. And that was a gold rush-era hit.

archived recording

[MUSIC - STEPHEN FOSTER, “CAMPTOWN RACES] Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day. I’ll bet my money on the bobtail nag.

wesley morris

This is the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” of 1851.

archived recording

[MUSIC - STEPHEN FOSTER, “CAMPTOWN RACES”] Somebody bet on the bay.

wesley morris

Part of the problem that we still live with now is that it was so much the heart and soul of American culture that it wasn’t that it became not racist, it just was a thing that you did. If you wanted to be an entertainer at any point after 1830, you, in all likelihood, were at least going to try to be a blackface minstrel, even if you were black.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BROTHER BONES]

wesley morris

After the Civil War ends, and there’s an opportunity for black people to perform, they have to do what the nation wants. And what the nation wants at that point is blackface.

archived recording

And now, giving you noise in tempo, F.E. Miller and Scatman Crothers.

wesley morris

So black people blacked up and performed as black people who weren’t actually black.

archived recording (f.e. miller)

You the laziest man I ever did see. What’s wrong with you, now? What’s wrong with you?

archived recording (scatman crothers)

I’m tired, tired.

wesley morris

By the time you have black people painting their faces black to perform as black people, the only question you can really ask at this point is, what the hell is going on? Why is this happening? What was so captivating about seeing black people represented this way? Why would a white audience have clamored for it so much? I think one of the things that it offered was an opportunity to feel good about a thing that actually felt really bad at the time. People were really torn about whether to continue with slavery or whether to abolish it. The minstrel show didn’t really give you an answer, but it provided a platform by which you could either escape from actually having to think about that question that really was tearing the nation apart, or depending on which show you would wind up seeing, it fully engaged you in the lightest possible way about enslaved people and how you didn’t really have to feel so bad for them, because they like being enslaved. You got to laugh at a thing that you actually felt so anguished about. You get to watch these black people, who are really a source of national agony outside the theater, become fools inside the theater. And in sitting in that theater, watching these white men in blackface make fools of black people, a white audience could feel cultured. They could feel civilized. They could feel superior to the people they were watching be made fun of. And in a crazy way, watching them dehumanize would really have been an opportunity for a white audience to feel so much better about their own humanity.

By the time you get to the 20th century, minstrelsy is still with us. It is the basis upon which American movies are built. This country’s first movie blockbuster, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” full of white men villainously in blackface.

archived recording ("the jazz singer")

I am privileged to say a few words to you —

wesley morris

And America’s first talking motion picture —

archived recording ("the jazz singer")

— in this most modern and novel manner.

wesley morris

— “The Jazz Singer,” about a Jewish man who feels most himself not as a Jewish man struggling with his Jewish identity and pleasing his cantor father, no, no —

archived recording ("the jazz singer")

Mammy, I’m coming. Oh, God, I hope I’m not late.

wesley morris

It’s when he blacks his face up and performs “Mammy” as a Negro.

archived recording ("the jazz singer")

[MUSIC - AL JOLSON, “MAMMY”] I’d walk a million miles, for one of your smiles, my Mammy.

wesley morris

Some of America’s favorite stars did numbers in blackface.

archived recording

[MUSIC - JUDY GARLAND, “SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT”] Oh, I come from South, from the deep, deep South.

wesley morris

Judy Garland performed in blackface.

archived recording

[MUSIC - JUDY GARLAND, “SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT”] And my pappy reads Esquire with delight, while my Alabama mammy plays bridge all night, way down South in Dixie. Swing low —

wesley morris

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire both performed in blackface.

archived recording ("white christmas")

(SINGING) I’d rather see a minstrel show than any other show I know.

wesley morris

“White Christmas” has a whole number. The most famous number in “White Christmas” involves a blackface tune.

archived recording ("white christmas")

(SINGING) — I’d pawn my overcoat and vest to see a minstrel show.

wesley morris

But at the same time, there’s the beginnings of a recording industry. And you had black artists who had access to recording studios.

Out of these recordings, you have people like Muddy Waters —

archived recording

[MUSIC - MUDDY WATERS, “YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME”] Well, now, let me tell you people a low-down thing or two, I just can’t stand that old evil way she do. She’s gonna miss me.

wesley morris

— inventing and perfecting blues rhythm, blues ideas, blues expression, the expression of —

archived recording

[MUSIC - MUDDY WATERS, “YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME”] Oh, you gonna miss me, child, when I’m dead and gone.

wesley morris

— of a fully human black self in American popular art.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MUDDY WATERS, “YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME”] She wouldn’t let me in. Told me, go away, Muddy, I’ve got too many friends. She’s gonna miss me.

wesley morris

He had a kind of confidence that most people would never have heard coming from a black person before.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MUDDY WATERS, “YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME”] All right, son.

wesley morris

And this is just the beginning.

archived recording

[MUSIC - SIDNEY BECHET, “ALL OF ME”]

wesley morris

You have the advent of a place like Blue Note Records, where lots of amazing jazz was created and then released into the world.

People like Sidney Bechet.

archived recording

[MUSIC - LOUIS ARMSTRONG, “LA VIE EN ROSE”]

wesley morris

And then Louis Armstrong.

archived recording

[MUSIC - LOUIS ARMSTRONG, “LA VIE EN ROSE”]

wesley morris

And Duke Ellington.

archived recording

[MUSIC - DUKE ELLINGTON, “JACK THE BEAR”]

wesley morris

You have black musicians thinking about how to move not only music forward, but American culture forward.

Thinking about how these instruments can do other things besides make what we think of as Western European classical music.

archived recording

[MUSIC - CHARLES MINGUS, “BETTER GIT IT IN YOUR SOUL”]

wesley morris

And taking music to a place that nobody had ever tried to previously take it.

archived recording

[MUSIC - JOHN COLTRANE, “BLUE TRAIN”]

wesley morris

People who just kept pushing it forward and beyond.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MILES DAVIS AND CHARLIE PARKER, “A NIGHT IN TUNISIA”]

wesley morris

Then you have the development of the single most important movement black people have ever had artistically. And that is the advent of Motown Records.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MARTHA REEVES AND THE VANDELLAS, “NOWHERE TO RUN”] Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

wesley morris

Motown is the most powerful mass-produced expression of black glamour, of black self-confidence, of black self-reliance.

archived recording

[MUSIC - BARRETT STRONG, “MONEY (THAT’S WHAT I WANT)”] The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. I need money —

wesley morris

Its project was to get black producers, black musicians, black singers to take, quote, “white,” quote, “Western” musical ideas of orchestration, strings and horns —

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE DRIFTERS, “THIS MAGIC MOMENT”] This magic moment —

wesley morris

— and straightforward harmonies —

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE DRIFTERS, “THIS MAGIC MOMENT”] — so different and so new —

wesley morris

— and you marry them to a black weekend.

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE CONTOURS, “DO YOU LOVE ME”] Do you love me? I can really move —

wesley morris

Where on Saturday night, you’re at a juke joint, having a good time with rhythm and blues music, guitar and drum and bass.

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE CONTOURS, “DO YOU LOVE ME”] Now that I can dance — dance —

wesley morris

Sex, basically.

archived recording

[MUSIC - THE CONTOURS, “DO YOU LOVE ME”] Watch me now — work, work — oh, work it out, baby — work, work —

wesley morris

And then you go home, slightly hung over.

And you wake up, and you go to church on Sunday morning.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MARVIN GAYE AND TAMMI TERRELL, “AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH”] Listen, baby, ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low, ain’t no river wide enough, baby —

wesley morris

Where there’s a whole other musical experience involving hand claps, and different harmonic arrangements, and call and response.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MARVIN GAYE AND TAMMI TERRELL, “AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH”] No matter how far. Don’t worry, baby. Just call my name —

wesley morris

A lot of feeling, a lot of oomph, a lot of gratitude.

archived recording

[MUSIC - FOUR TOPS, “BABY I NEED YOUR LOVING”] Baby, I need your loving, got to have all your loving —

wesley morris

You have the combination of these three different areas of musical expression happening at the same time in just about every single Motown record.

archived recording

[MUSIC - FOUR TOPS, “REACH OUT I’LL BE THERE”] Darling, reach out — come on, girl —

wesley morris

Whether it’s the Four Tops doing “Reach Out I’ll be There.”

archived recording

[MUSIC - FOUR TOPS, “REACH OUT I’LL BE THERE”] I’ll be there —

wesley morris

Or Martha and the Vandellas doing “Heat Wave.”

archived recording

[MUSIC - MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS, ”(LOVE IS LIKE A) HEAT WAVE”] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, girl, oh —

wesley morris

On something like “Heat Wave,” you can hear hands slapping the tambourine like it actually is Sunday morning.

archived recording

[MUSIC - MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS, ”(LOVE IS LIKE A) HEAT WAVE”] I feeling it burning right here in my heart —

wesley morris

Then when everything is firing —

archived recording

[MUSIC - FOUR TOPS, “I CAN’T HELP MYSELF (SUGAR PIE, HONEY BUNCH)”] Girl, it starts the flame, burning in my heart, tearing it all apart. No matter how I try, my love I cannot hide. Oh, sugar pie, honey bunch — sugar pie, honey bunch —

wesley morris

It’s just the most exciting, romantic sound you’re ever going to hear. And at the center of it is what can only be described as a refulgent, tasteful blackness.

Here you have in Motown a force that is actively combating these ideas of black people as being inherently inferior.

Motown is the antidote to American minstrelsy.

archived recording 1

[MUSIC - THE SUPREMES, “BABY LOVE”] Ooh, baby love, my baby love, I need you, oh, how I need you.

archived recording 2

[MUSIC - THE JACKSON 5, “I WANT YOU BACK”] Oh, just let me tell you now —

archived recording 3

[MUSIC - SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES, “YOU’VE REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME”] Really got a hold on me. Really got a hold —

archived recording 4

[MUSIC - MARVIN GAYE, “I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE”] A man ain’t supposed to cry, but these tears I can’t hold inside. Losing you would end my life you see —

archived recording 5

[MUSIC - PLAYER, “BABY, COME BACK”] Baby, come back, oh, baby, any kind of fool could see there was something in everything about you.

wesley morris

And this is what I was thinking about standing there in that kitchen, chopping those vegetables. It’s — the thing that made me laugh was just how all that history is just very silently coursing through this music. It might not even be aware that it’s even there. It’s so thoroughly atomized into American culture. It’s going to show up in a way that even people making the art can’t quite put their finger on. What you’re hearing in black music that’s so appealing to so many people of all races across time is possibility, struggle. It is strife. It is humor. It is sex. It is confidence. And that’s ironic. Because this is the sound of a people who, for decades and centuries, have been denied freedom. And yet what you respond to in black music is the ultimate expression of a belief in that freedom, the belief that the struggle is worth it, that the pain begets joy, and that that joy you’re experiencing is not only contagious, it’s necessary and urgent and irresistible. Black music is American music. Because as Americans, we say we believe in freedom. And that’s what we tell the world. And the power of black music is that it’s the ultimate expression of that belief in American freedom.

[music]

4. How the Bad Blood Started

Black Americans were denied access to doctors and hospitals for decades. From the shadows of this exclusion, they pushed to create the nation’s first federal health care programs. Released on Sept. 13, 2019.
bars
0:00/39:11
-39:11

transcript

4. How the Bad Blood Started

Black Americans were denied access to doctors and hospitals for decades. From the shadows of this exclusion, they pushed to create the nation’s first federal health care programs. Released on Sept. 13, 2019.

nikole hannah-jones

My Uncle Eddie was my favorite uncle. He was my dad’s younger brother, not that much older than me, and he was a complete jokester and cutup. He was the one who was always playing some practical joke on you, or who, in some ways, you always felt was taking things too far, because he just thought everything was funny. So for instance, if you fell asleep in his house, he might light a match and stick it between your toes and let it burn down to wake you because he thought it was funny. He called me Bird, which was my nickname. And we liked to listen to music together. We liked to watch TV together. He was never mad. I never remember him ever disciplining me for anything. And in fact, when my father and I would fight when I was a teenager, I would sometimes pack my bag and go stay with him for a couple of days, and he would never kind of sell me out.

When I got into college at the University of Notre Dame, I think the only person prouder than my mom and dad was my Uncle Ed. And when I graduated, my uncle picked out this all-red outfit from head to toe. He had on a red hat and a red shirt and red pants and these red gators, and he was determined that he was going to show everyone how proud he was of me by out-dressing everyone at the graduation, and he certainly did.

So we just were always very close. Whenever I would come home, we would get breakfast together at Morg’s and just talk about life. And all he would tell me all the time was how proud he was of me.

Besides being a lot of fun, my Uncle Ed was also one of the hardest-working men that I knew. He worked a lot of jobs doing things like working in animal processing plants. And the last job that he had was roofing, and he did roofing for a lot of years, often coming home at the end of the day kind of grimy, and sometimes with his joints in his hand so swollen that he couldn’t even make a fist. He relished working hard. He was proud that he could provide for his family, even without an education. And then about 2009, he started to feel a pretty severe pain in his back. And that pain began to spread from his back down into his legs. And he started to have trouble moving. And there were some mornings where he would have to kind of crawl out of bed. But around that time, my uncle also got laid off from the job where he was doing roofing, and with that layoff, he lost his health insurance. So like many people, he at first avoided going to the doctor altogether, because he didn’t have insurance. But then when it got kind of unbearable, he went to the free clinic. Because my uncle did not have health insurance, they would not give him the tests that he probably needed to find out what was going on with his back. They wouldn’t give him an X-ray, they wouldn’t give him a CAT scan or a PET scan, and instead, they just tried to diagnose based on what he was telling them. And they told him that he probably just needed an alignment in his spine, that that’s what was bothering his back. So they sent him to a chiropractor. My uncle would end up going back about five or six times as his back was getting progressively worse, and the final time that he went to the chiropractor, as the doctor was working on his back, they both heard a big pop. That pop concerned everyone, and so the chiropractor told him, as my uncle kind of gets up off the bed and is barely able to stand up, that he better go to the emergency room right away. When he got to the emergency room, that doctor recognized right away that something serious was going on, and actually gave my uncle the X-ray and the CAT scan that he probably had needed months before. And what that doctor saw scared him.

He saw these spots on the scans that he had taken all over my uncle’s back and along his spine. And it’s at that point where we find out that my uncle has cancer, and that he’d likely had cancer for many, many months, if not longer. And we learned that the cancer is Stage 4, and it has metastasized throughout his entire body. And because of that, the cancer is terminal.

And it is because of that diagnosis that my uncle was finally able to get access to the insurance that he had needed so badly all those months before. And that’s because, with this diagnosis of terminal, untreatable cancer, my uncle was able to qualify for federal disability. And federal disability means because your physical health is so poor and you are unable to work, the government will help you and pay for your insurance and your medical treatment. So it took, literally, my uncle getting a death sentence before he was able to get health insurance. That health care gets him out of those free clinics and into an actual cancer clinic in Illinois. And it’s there that the doctors give us the news that had they been able to see him months before, he could have had a fighting chance. But it was too late. And so in those next four months, we just saw my uncle’s health deteriorate more rapidly than any of us could have imagined, and his body wither to almost nothing. And in the end, the pain of the cancer was so bad that he didn’t even want to fight anymore. So at the age of 50, just two weeks after my daughter was born, my uncle passed away.

I remember in those last days, when he was in hospice and I had just had my baby, I called him to give him the news. He was really weak. He could barely talk. But he said, I’m so happy that I’m going to get to see my baby bird.

And so when my daughter was just two weeks old, I had to wrap her up and put her on an airplane as we flew back to Waterloo to bury my uncle.

["1619" theme music by daoud anthony]

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.”

O.K., Jeneen Interlandi, where do you want to start?

jeneen interlandi

I think we should start in the fall of 1866, with a woman named Rebecca Lee Crumpler. Rebecca Lee Crumpler is a young black woman who was born free and raised in Pennsylvania by her aunt. Her aunt was a medicine woman. She used to go from home to home tending to the sick, and Rebecca liked to tag along and to help her. She liked it so much that she went on to become a nurse, and she was so good at being a nurse that she makes the really unusual decision to go on and become a doctor. So she eventually goes to the New England Female Medical College, which is a college that was specifically built to train women in medicine, and that’s really extraordinary. Because around the time she graduates, there’s about 54,000 doctors in the country, and only 300 of them are women, and only one of those women is black. And that woman is Rebecca Lee Crumpler. And so about a year after she finishes medical school, the Civil War comes to an end, and she makes another unusual decision, which is to completely uproot her life and to head down to the South.

archived recording (speaker 1)

Do you remember when the Civil War was being fought?

archived recording (speaker 2)

Well, I can’t remember much about it, but I remember this much.

jeneen interlandi

Because four million people have just been released from slavery into freedom.

archived recording (speaker 2)

And I thought old master was dead, but he had been off to the war and come back. You know, and old master didn’t tell you no one was free.

archived recording (speaker 1)

He didn’t tell you that?

archived recording (speaker 2)

No, he didn’t tell —

jeneen interlandi

And Crumpler knows that it’s going to be a huge challenge to help these people assimilate into society and to address their many basic needs, including health care.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

Mama, where they going? They said, well, all of you [racial slur] is all free now. The Yankees all going home.

nikole hannah-jones

I spent a lot of time reading the slave narratives. And we’re not really taught that emancipation came, and someone would walk on the plantation and say, you are free. But nothing came with that. These were people who just literally were told, you’re free to go, but given no resources to go with.

jeneen interlandi

Even just with basic shelter.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

We didn’t have no property. We didn’t have no home.

jeneen interlandi

They didn’t have places to go.

archived recording

I was about 9, 10 years old, maybe more. Stayed right there. We didn’t know where to go.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

We had nowhere or nothing. We didn’t have nothing. Just like your cattle, we were just turned out.

jeneen interlandi

So they were forced to take up residence in abandoned prisons, former military barracks, empty churches, refugee camps.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

I know I remember one night, I was out after I was free, and I didn’t have nowhere to go. I didn’t have nowhere to sleep. I didn’t know what to do.

jeneen interlandi

They’re crammed together in very close living quarters. They don’t have the tools necessary to maintain good hygiene.

archived recording (fountain hughes)

And get along the best you could.

jeneen interlandi

And as a result of all of this, they’re getting sick. But they can’t tap into any health care system, because at that time, there really isn’t any organized health care system to speak of. Most medical care is provided at home by family members, or by doctors who would actually visit the house. And the only hospitals that exist are much more like institutions for the very poor or for people who get sick and don’t have any family members to take care of them. And those facilities were private, and they were run by charitable groups. And when the newly emancipated turned to those facilities for help, they were turned away. They were told no.

And they start dying in really high numbers, so much so that in some towns and cities, their bodies are littering the streets.

This is a massive public health crisis. And so to deal with this crisis, the federal government creates what ends up being the nation’s first federal health care program. It’s called the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division. And this is what Rebecca Crumpler is heading south to do. She’s going to Virginia to treat the newly emancipated through this new medical program.

nikole hannah-jones

And what does she see when she gets there?

jeneen interlandi

So when she gets to the South and she starts working, she sees that this new program is a complete mess. The hospital she has gone to, just like all of the other hospitals in this program, are completely under-resourced. They don’t have enough beds or sheets or linens. They don’t have enough medicine. They don’t have enough quarantine facilities, and they’re in the middle of a smallpox outbreak. And there’s this horrible shortage of doctors. There’s only about 120 doctors employed by the entire program.

nikole hannah-jones

So you’re saying that the federal government at that time was only supplying 100 doctors to serve the entire emancipated population of 4 million people?

jeneen interlandi

Yeah, so this is one of the crazy things about the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division, which is, it was founded in utter ambivalence. Officials wanted their communities clean enough to prevent diseases that might eventually spread into white communities, but they don’t want to provide any free assistance, because they’re worried that it’s going to create dependency among the black American community. And so what they do is they open these hospitals, and they staff them with a few doctors. But then they close them down at the first sign of progress, and they refuse to send resources that their own doctors, including Crumpler, are requesting. They’re saying, can we have additional staff to address the smallpox outbreak? No. Can we have more blankets and more bedding? No. Can we have an extra facility for quarantine so that the diseases don’t spread? No. And so unsurprisingly, black people continue to die at very, very high rates.

nikole hannah-jones

In that hospital in Virginia where Rebecca Crumpler has gone, what specifically is standing in the way of hospitals like that getting more support?

jeneen interlandi

Well, one of the things was, as you have all of these people dying from preventable things, a theory emerges.

And the theory goes that this high death rate is actually just nature taking its course. So black people aren’t dying for want of basic necessities, they’re actually dying because they’re biologically inferior to whites and ill-suited for freedom. The argument became that African-Americans specifically were literally going extinct, and that to provide any type of funding or resources to fight that would be wasteful and foolish, because you’re just trying to prevent the inevitable. And this theory actually gains pretty wide traction. There’s a congressman from Ohio who uses it to argue against the Freedmen’s Hospitals in the U.S. House of Representatives. He takes to the House floor, and he says, quote, “No charitable black scheme can wash out the color of the Negro,” can “change his inferior nature or save him from his inevitable fate.”

nikole hannah-jones

So what you’re saying is that this theory of extinction was so mainstream that you could actually hear it being argued on the floor of the House.

jeneen interlandi

Yes, that’s correct. And so, because that theory became so mainstream and so kind of generally accepted, the lack of funding and the lack of resources persists, and the Freedmen Hospitals continue to struggle. And the ambivalence is so profound that at a Freedmen’s Hospital in North Carolina, when doctors detect smallpox in a couple of their patients, bureau officials are terrified of the disease spreading into the community, but they also don’t want to invest the resources to treat it and to prevent that spread. So they put out an order to burn their own hospital down.

nikole hannah-jones

So this is the first example of government-funded health care, and it is an example of something that was set up to fail.

jeneen interlandi

That’s exactly right, and as that hospital burns to the ground, there is this feeling that black people have that they’re on their own, that the government created this system to help them, but that they didn’t really want to help them, and so that they were going to have to take care of themselves.

And Rebecca Lee Crumpler understands this, and she decides to write a book. It’s called the “Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts.” And it’s not addressed to her colleagues in the white medical community or to segregationists in Congress. It’s addressed to the black community, specifically to black mothers and black nurses. And what she tells them in this book is how to take care of themselves, how to prevent diseases like cholera, how to treat basic ailments like hemorrhoids and bronchitis. And what’s so profound about this book is that she’s telling black Americans, you’re not inferior. You’re not going extinct. You can take care of yourself. And this is kind of the first example of something that echoes down through the ages, which is black medical professionals taking matters into their own hands. And in the coming decades, they open medical schools, they build hospitals, and they organize themselves to push back against this system that’s trying to shut them out completely.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Mr. President.

jeneen interlandi

So fast forward —

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Mr. Speaker.

jeneen interlandi

— to January of 1947 —

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Members of the Congress of the United States.

jeneen interlandi

— and President Truman’s State of the Union address.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

I come before you today to report on the State of the Union.

jeneen interlandi

It’s actually the first State of the Union that’s televised, and he opens with this joke about how both chambers of Congress have been taken over by Republicans.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

It looks like a good many of you moved over to the left since I was here last.

jeneen interlandi

And so one side of the room is much more full than the other side of the room. And as the New York Times reports, you can clearly see his smile when he makes this joke.

A little more than halfway through his speech —

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Of all our national resources, none is of more basic value than the health of our people.

jeneen interlandi

He turns to health care.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Over a year ago, I presented to the Congress my views on a national health program to provide adequate medical care to all who need it.

jeneen interlandi

What he wants is a government-run health insurance program that everybody pays into ahead of time and that people can draw from when they need it.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

Not as charity, but on the basis of payments made by the beneficiaries of the program.

jeneen interlandi

What he’s essentially talking about is universal health care.

So by the time Truman’s giving this address, the nation’s health care system has grown up a bit from the days right after the Civil War, but not by much. All of the hospitals that were created through the Freedmen’s Bureau have been closed down except for one that’s in Washington D.C. And other hospitals have been built, but there’s not nearly enough of them, especially in the South. And to make matters worse, the hospitals that do exist are all segregated. In fact, a “separate but equal” clause had actually been written into the law. And what that meant was black patients had to either go to their own black facilities, which were few and far between in a lot of places, or they were relegated to the basement wards of white hospitals, and those wards were small, and they did not provide as good care as you got in the white facilities.

nikole hannah-jones

And there were also lots of rules about who white nurses could serve in these hospitals, because I know I’ve read Jim Crow laws that said white nurses couldn’t serve black patients — particularly black men — and this is also true for doctors, right?

jeneen interlandi

Well, for nurses, specifically, because there was a lot of concerns about keeping white women away from black men. So you maybe had a couple of white doctors that would check on black patients. But again, even the white doctors that would attend to the black patients would do that after they took care of all of their white patients, so it was second-class in every conceivable way. But it’s not just black Americans who are not getting enough care. It’s many poor white Americans as well. So at that time, most Americans were not insured. And the insurance that did exist was employer-based, which means you had to get a certain type of job where the employer actually offered this benefit, and then you could have it. The problem for black people and for poor white people is that they didn’t have those kinds of jobs that offered health insurance, so they had to pay out of pocket. Basically, the whole system is not working, and Truman sees this as one of the most pressing problems the country is facing. And so he decides that national health insurance is the fix.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

I’ve repeatedly asked the Congress to pass a health program.

jeneen interlandi

And this government-sponsored health insurance initially has really widespread support.

archived recording (harry s. truman)

The nation suffers from lack of medical care. That situation can be remedied.

jeneen interlandi

But then, days after Truman wins the election, the American Medical Association, which is the largest and arguably the most powerful professional organization for doctors in the country, launches this massive campaign to take it down.

And what you have to understand about the A.M.A. is that it’s an almost exclusively white organization at that time. Virtually all of its local chapters exclude black doctors completely, and just a few years earlier, the organization had refused to protest the separate but equal clause that legalized hospital segregation. Plus, this is a time when health care costs are rising and private insurance is really taking off. And what the A.M.A. understands is that a national health insurance program is probably going to hurt their profits. And so they’ve actually been fighting against this idea for years. And now, with Truman’s national health insurance program, they take that fight to a whole new level. They’ve hired a P.R. firm. It’s actually the first political consulting firm in the country. And together, they devised this plan to completely torpedo universal health care.

nikole hannah-jones

And what does that fight look like?

jeneen interlandi

What it looks like is all-out war. It’s radio ads. It’s newspaper ads. It’s magazine ads. They’re delivering pamphlets and mailers to people’s homes. In the end, they send some 100 million pieces of literature all across the country. And what’s on that literature and what’s in those ads is a campaign slogan. It says, “Keep politics out of medicine.” They call Truman’s plan socialized medicine. They labeled Truman as a communist — and you have to remember, this is during a time when communism was a real scare — and they terrify people with this idea that if Truman gets his way, government officials are then going to be able to intervene in private medical decisions. And when they do, they’re going to destroy the sacred doctor-patient relationship. And that campaign works. Popular support for the bill suddenly plummets. It fails to get through Congress, and the health care system the nation is left with at the end of this fight is still too expensive for most Americans to afford and as segregated as it has ever been.

[music]

nikole hannah-jones

Jeneen, when did all of this start to change?

jeneen interlandi

So it really starts to change with a man named Montague Cobb.

Montague Cobb is this fascinating character. He’s a beloved doctor and medical professor at one of the only black medical colleges in the country at that time, Howard University. Over 41 years, he teaches thousands of medical students about anatomy, and he’s kind of famous for playing classical music on his violin and reciting poetry for his students while they’re dissecting cadavers.

He’s already established himself on the national stage. During the fight between Truman and the American Medical Association, Cobb was one of the only doctors to defend Truman’s plan and defy the A.M.A.

archived recording (w. montague cobb)

Three commissioners said that he had no objection to having colored interns at Gallinger as soon as he could build separate facilities for them. Well, that was a bad thing to say at that time. And incidentally —

jeneen interlandi

You know, there’s not a lot of recordings of Cobb out there, but there is a documentary from the 1980s called “Step by Step,” where Cobb himself talks about this time.

archived recording

Steps were also being taken by Dr. Cobb to end segregation in the medical profession.

archived recording (w. montague cobb)

I think our first point of overt attack was on the theme of old clothes to Sam, the Negroes’ hospital dilemma.

archived recording

Cobb used the analogy of whites giving hand-me-down clothes to blacks to illustrate how they also gave blacks hand-me-down hospitals.

archived recording (w. montague cobb)

This one isn’t new, but it’s better than anything he has or could get.

jeneen interlandi

He’s also been outspoken about hospital segregation for years, because he recognized how deadly it could be. There’s all these horror stories — they’re true stories — of black Americans who are mistreated or denied care at white hospitals and die as a result. There’s this one example, from 1931, where a light-skinned black man gets into a car accident, and he’s taken to a white hospital. It’s Grady Memorial Hospital. This is in Atlanta. And doctors there, they mistake him for a white patient, so they start treating him. And it’s only when his family comes to the hospital that they realize he’s actually black. So what do they do? They pull him off the examining table and they send him to the black ward across the street, where he later dies.

So these kinds of stories were common knowledge. And Montague Cobb really wanted to change that, so he launches a national conference on hospital desegregation, and he pulls people in from all over the country to come and talk about this issue every year. And he really implores his white colleagues to take the matter seriously and to think about it, but he didn’t get very far. Even with all of those efforts, not much changed, and he realized eventually that left to their own devices, white hospitals are going to stay white.

Then, in 1963, he takes the reins of the nation’s leading black medical organization. Because remember, the A.M.A. has this history of excluding black doctors. So what black doctors have had to do is create their own professional societies, and the leading one is called the National Medical Association, or the N.M.A. And it’s at this moment, when Cobb is in this leadership position, that the fight for universal health insurance that started decades back and the fight for a desegregated health care system that started at the end of the Civil War finally merge into one fight. And that fight is about Medicare.

[music]

archived recording

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

My fellow Americans, we have had many a hard-fought presidential campaigns.

nikole hannah-jones

So what was the role of Medicare in all of this?

jeneen interlandi

Well, the proposal for Medicare is actually born from the ashes of Truman’s failed national health insurance program.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

I intend to preserve and strengthen our Social Security system.

jeneen interlandi

After that plan dies in Congress, people who want something like it conclude that they need to think smaller and more incrementally.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

I intend to make it stronger by keeping benefits up with —

jeneen interlandi

So beginning under President Kennedy and continuing under President Johnson, their efforts target what is perhaps the most uncontroversial group anyone can think of —

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

I do not believe that older Americans should be forced to live out their lives in poverty —

jeneen interlandi

— old people.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

— their tiny savings destroyed by illness, dependent upon their relatives, feeling unwanted by their country. The choice is yours.

jeneen interlandi

Once again —

archived recording

This bill would put the government smack into your hospital, defining services, setting standards —

jeneen interlandi

— the A.M.A. comes out in full force against the idea.

archived recording

— whether they need it or not, whether they want it or not, they’d be in.

jeneen interlandi

They use all the same tactics and all the same arguments that they used last time around —

archived recording

The American taxpayer certainly has a right to question the free ride those who do not need these benefits would be taking at the expense of his children.

jeneen interlandi

— to convince the American public that this is a terrible idea and that it’s going to destroy health care as they know it.

archived recording

To the millions of Americans who may have a doubt, I implore you, ask your doctor. Ask your doctor. Thank you.

jeneen interlandi

But this time, under Montague Cobb’s leadership, the nation’s black doctors come out in full force to support Medicare.

archived recording (w. montague cobb)

I decided that all this was bad, and I picked up a baseball bat and began to swing it about to get a little room.

jeneen interlandi

They lead protests, they lobby Congress, and they launch their own public relations campaign explaining to the nation that, in fact, this won’t destroy medicine. This will make medicine more equitable. And their message is what it’s been for a long time: Health care is a human right, and that any program that expands access to health care is the duty of a free and democratic society.

["1619" theme music by daoud anthony]

jeneen interlandi

Meanwhile, the fight for civil rights is escalating all across the country outside of the medical world.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us.

jeneen interlandi

And of course, that effort culminates in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

The last vestiges of injustice.

jeneen interlandi

And more specifically, it says that the government can pull federal dollars from any facility or entity that does not comply with the law, and that includes hospitals.

archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)

We must not approach the observance and enforcement of this law in a vengeful spirit. Its purpose is not to punish.

jeneen interlandi

But the vast majority of hospitals do nothing. They don’t just suddenly desegregate, and it’s unclear when — or even if — they’re going to face any consequences at all for that. And this is where Medicare comes in, because Medicare is like a new pile of federal money that’s dangled in front of hospitals across the country. But in order to get that money, hospitals have to comply with federal law, like the Civil Rights Act. They would have to actually desegregate. So as Congress begins to debate the bill, Montague Cobb knows that this is the moment to both create a national health insurance program and desegregate the nation’s hospitals. And when he’s called upon to testify, he says that after two decades of arguing and equivocating, it is past time for the nation’s leaders to take, quote, “definitive action to expand access to health care.”

[music]

jeneen interlandi

And at the end of his testimony, he recites this hymn by George Matheson, and it goes, “O love that will not let me go, I hide my helpless self in thee. I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.”

And then he tells Congress, “Like this love, the benefits of Medicare cannot be taken away.” And he asks them, “Can we deny this small assurance to those on whose shoulders we stand?”

archived recording (w. montague cobb)

So I’m willing to struggle along and let us learn step by step, but because man is such a slow learner, let us recognize our mistakes and remedy them without having to repeat the historical process again and again and again.

jeneen interlandi

And so Medicare passes, and what happens is within four months of implementation, nearly 3,000 hospitals desegregate. But of course, the health disparities between black Americans and white Americans persist to this day. Black women are three times more likely to die of causes related to pregnancy than white women. Black people with H.I.V. tend to get worse care than white people with the disease.

One study found that black patients with diabetes did worse than white patients, even when they had the same doctor.

Black Americans die at higher rates from many cancers that would have been treatable had they been caught earlier.

[music]

yaa gyasi

My name is Yaa Gyasi, and I’m going to read a short piece I wrote called “Bad Blood.”

Upon closer inspection, the leaf her 2-year-old was attempting to put in his mouth in the middle of the playground on that lovely fall day was in fact a used tampon. She snatched it from him and Purelled both of their hands before rushing them back to their apartment on Dean. She put him in the bath and scrubbed, and by the time her husband found them, they were both crying. “We have to leave New York,” she said after he put the baby to bed. “Let’s move back home.” “There are tampons in Alabama,” he said, and then, “What’s the worst that could happen?” It was the question they’d played out since graduate school, when her hypochondria had been all-consuming. Back then, leaning into her fears, describing them, had given her some comfort, but then they had Booker and suddenly the worst looked so much worse. “He could get an S.T.D., and then we’d be the black parents at the hospital with a baby with an S.T.D., and the pediatrician would call social services, and they would take him away, and we’d end up in jail.” “O.K.,” he said slowly. “That would be bad, but it’s statistically very, very unlikely. Would it make you feel better if we called the doctor?” She shook her head. Her husband only used the word “statistically” when he wanted to avoid using the words “you’re crazy.” She knew that the doctor would just tell her to trust him, but she also knew that when the worst happens in this country, it often happens to them. She comes by her hypochondria and iatrophobia honestly. When she was growing up in Alabama, people still talked about their grandfathers, fathers and brothers who had died of bad blood. That was the catchall term for syphilis, anemia and just about anything that ailed you. The 600 men who were enrolled in the Tuskegee Study were told they’d get free medical care. Instead, from 1932 to 1972, researchers watched as the men developed lesions on their mouths and genitals. Watched as their lymph nodes swelled, as their hair fell out. Watched as the disease moved into its final stage, leaving the men blind and demented, leaving them to die. All this when they knew a simple penicillin shot would cure them. All this because they wanted to see what would happen. For years afterward, her grandmother refused to go to the hospital. Even at 89, perpetually hunched over in the throes of an endless cough, she’d repeat, “Anything but the doctor.” Bad blood begets bad blood. She’s more trusting than her grandmother, but she still has her moments. Like many women, she was nervous about giving birth. All the more so because she was doing it in New York City, where black women are 12 times as likely to die in childbirth as white women. And in that very statistic, the indelible impression of Tuskegee. The lingering, niggling feeling that she is never fully safe in a country where doctors and researchers had no qualms about watching dozens of black men die — slowly, brutally — simply because they could. When she held Booker in her arms for the first time and saw her grandmother’s nose on his perfect face, love and fear rose up in her. “What’s the worst that could happen?” her husband asks, and she can’t speak it — the worst. Instead, she tries to turn off the little voice in her head, the one that wants to know: How exactly do you cure bad blood?

[music]

5. The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1

150 years after the promise of 40 acres and a mule, the story of black land ownership in America remains one of dispossession. The Provosts, who trace their family to the enslaved workers on Louisiana’s sugar-cane plantations, know this story well. Released on Oct. 4, 2019.
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5. The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1

150 years after the promise of 40 acres and a mule, the story of black land ownership in America remains one of dispossession. The Provosts, who trace their family to the enslaved workers on Louisiana’s sugar-cane plantations, know this story well. Released on Oct. 4, 2019.

june provost

Yeah, just be careful, because it will kind of slice you.

annie brown

Ah.

[sugar cane rustling]

june provost

There’s not a better sound, to hear that sugar cane move. It’s very thick.

You know, to turn over that dirt and to watch this thing from a few inches to grow into almost a 12-foot stalk is just — it’s amazing.

I mean, y’all don’t realize how depressed I get when I see people getting ready to plant cane, because that was my time of the year. That was like, I would wake up and just so pumped, ready to go to the shop and start repairing wagons. That was my, you know — just, that was mine.

And I miss it. I miss it so much.

I can’t say enough how I miss this, I mean —

annie brown

Do you think the fields miss you?

june provost

Oh, I know they miss me, because I used to talk to them all the time.

adizah eghan

What would you say?

june provost

I mean, I want you all to do well. I want you all to grow well. It sounds silly to an unheard person. Like, why are you talking to dirt? But it’s just like, the love that you have for the land is just — I mean, it’s unreal. It’s unreal.

annie brown

What would you say to it now?

june provost

That I want it back. I want the land back.

["1619" theme music by daoud anthony]

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.”

In the fall of 1864 at the height of the Civil War, one of the most famous Union generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, begins his march out of the city of Atlanta to the sea.

And as Sherman and his men make their way through Georgia, black Southerners are seeing an opportunity.

And so by the thousands, they start to leave the plantations where they’ve been enslaved and are falling behind Sherman’s troops as they make their way to the coast.

But these newly liberated people were not exactly welcomed. Sherman didn’t actually oppose slavery, and so he’s really not that sympathetic to those who are fleeing these plantations, and he also sees them as a drain on his resources. They are families. They are people of all ages, young and old, who need food and care, and they are slowing the troops down.

By December of that year, some of Sherman’s troops are about to approach Savannah, and they come upon a creek that is both too wide and too deep to cross without a bridge. So the troops start building one, and they instruct the black people who are following them to just wait, that the troops need to cross first, but then they’ll be able to come after. But the Confederate Army is on their heels, and once the Union troops cross, they break up the bridge, leaving all those people who had just escaped slavery behind to face either the icy waters or the rebel army that was in pursuit.

It is a massacre. Some of them drown trying to swim across. Others are trampled or shot to death, and those who remain are captured and re-enslaved. When word gets back to Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, he is outraged. He has Sherman pull together a meeting with 20 black church leaders. There’s a transcript of this meeting, and it shows that these two men, Stanton and Sherman, actually turned to this group of black leaders and asked them, what do you want for your own people?

Speaking for the group, one of the men tells them, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor — that is, by the labor of the women and children and old men, and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare.”

And what’s remarkable is that Sherman turns that request of those men for land to work for themselves into a government order, Special Order No. 15. It said that the government would take 400,000 acres that it had seized from the Confederacy and split it up among those thousands of newly emancipated people. This becomes what is perhaps the most famous provision of the Reconstruction period, which we all know as 40 acres and a mule. President Lincoln approves the order, but soon after, he’s assassinated. And Andrew Johnson, a Southerner who had once enslaved people himself, takes over the presidency and quickly overturns it. And within a few short months, the small amount of land that had been distributed to black people was returned to white Southerners.

adizah eghan

Do you want me to pull around?

annie brown

Maybe. Yeah, that’s a good idea.

nikole hannah-jones

Adizah Eghan, tell me about your trip to Louisiana.

adizah eghan

So I went to Louisiana because despite the fact that 40 acres and a mule was reversed and that land was taken, back people actually managed to acquire a significant amount of land.

adizah eghan

O.K., now, let’s navigate.

adizah eghan

By the 1920s, black people owned about a million farms, which is actually 14 percent of all the farms in the country at that time, which reflected the population of black people.

gps

— Frontage Road West.

adizah eghan

But in the decades that followed, that number has dropped drastically, from 14 percent to below 2 percent.

And so to understand why that’s happened, I went down there —

annie brown

So I’m going to get our radio going.

adizah eghan

— with another producer, Annie Brown —

radio

— Iberia’s only daily live call-in talk show.

adizah eghan

— to a city just a couple hours outside of New Orleans —

radio

— command he gives them, be fruitful and multiply.

adizah eghan

— where the streets are named after plantations —

radio

It’s harvest time, glory be to God.

adizah eghan

— and the crops that grew during slavery still drive the local economy —

radio

A black male subject wearing a dark hoodie —

adizah eghan

— and where many people can trace their family line back to the enslavers or the enslaved —

angie provost

Hey, hey!

adizah eghan

— like Angie and Wenceslaus Provost Jr.

june provost

My name is Wenceslaus Provost Jr. I go by the name of June Provost.

adizah eghan

Have you ever met a Wenceslaus before?

nikole hannah-jones

How’s it spelled?

adizah eghan

W-E-N-C-E-S-L-A-U-S.

nikole hannah-jones

Yes.

adizah eghan

Oh!

june provost

First day of school was always rough with Wenceslaus.

annie brown

What would happen?

june provost

Oh, “Wenclaus,” “Wensaucelous,” “Winchester.” You name it, I’ve been called it, yes. And then high school, they just started calling me June Provost, because I was a junior. So I was O.K. with that.

angie provost

Junebug, a.k.a. my man.

[laughter]

adizah eghan

So June and Angie descend from a long line of sugar-cane farmers, going back prior to emancipation.

june provost

Charles de Vancier — I don’t —

angie provost

Charles de Vezin Olivier, your great-great-great-grandpa?

june provost

Yes.

angie provost

O.K., all right.

june provost

O.K. Jump in, yes.

angie provost

I might have to tell that story for him, all right?

adizah eghan

And each generation, in June’s case, was able to pass down the livelihood.

angie provost

June’s family is so important historically to the area.

adizah eghan

So his great-great-grandfather taught his great-grandfather, and his great-grandfather taught his grandfather.

angie provost

June’s family was one of the larger farms.

adizah eghan

And his grandfather taught his dad.

june provost

Long as I can remember, my dad, he would always call me his right-hand man. That was his little saying for me. He would take me riding with him, like, all the time.

adizah eghan

So for June, that training started early. He was driving his first tractor when he was 7.

adizah eghan

Like, what did it feel like for you to be driving the truck?

june provost

Oh, I was, like, smiling ear to ear. I thought I was on top of the world. I mean, that was like, I’m driving a tractor at 7 years old. That was a toy for me. That was amazing. And my thing was just to be next to my dad. That was my whole thing, to be next to my dad.

I mean, just those little moments, like — O.K., for instance, now we have tractors that drive themselves. But at the time, when you want to draw a straight row, we had to pick a tree or something very far to make a straight arrow. And I will never forget looking at my dad pointing a tree out — and this might have been three-quarters of a mile, possibly — like, pointing one tree out and making a straight row. And I remember we had land owners who were coming in and saying, how y’all do that so straight? And my dad was the one to do that, and it was like, my dad is a bad man! Like, really. I mean, like, I want to do that one day.

adizah eghan

June saw the connection his dad had to the land, but like a lot of sugar-cane farmers, most of the land his dad farmed was rented from white land owners. And so when June’s dad was finally able to buy a tract of land —

june provost

It was a 60-acre tract.

adizah eghan

— June understood what his father was actually working for.

june provost

That was one of the first big pieces of land that he bought. And I remember we chopped the land up. We cleaned trees. I mean, the land was looking great. And when we started drawing the rows up, you know, we was talking, and then just, like, all of a sudden, something just came over him. He just dropped to his knees, and he just kind of grabbed that dirt. And he said, you know what? This is my land, and nobody can take this.

adizah eghan

When June graduates from high school, his dad gives him 21 acres, basically so he can start his own farm. And so June’s thinking he’s going to be out there with his dad all summer, but then his dad gets sick. He has to go in for heart surgery. So at 18 years old, June is left responsible with one of the most important jobs on the farm: planting cane.

adizah eghan

Was that your first time ever being responsible for planting?

june provost

Yes. Yes. I remember all my workers would ridicule me because I would be on my hands and knees making sure I didn’t put too much dirt when you’re covering. You’re supposed to put —

adizah eghan

June is so neurotic about doing a good job that he’s on his hands and knees making sure that the cane is covered with just the right amount of dirt.

june provost

That following year, I remember telling my dad — I said, you know what? The cane I planted came out better than the ones y’all planted when we was all together! Because we caught a great stand. I mean, it was just beautiful.

angie provost

Is that the year that you guys all won in ‘94?

june provost

I think it was in 1994, yeah.

adizah eghan

So every year the state has this contest, and they award the farmer who produces the most sugar per acre.

june provost

And that year there, I was actually first in the non-quota. Non-quota is when you had a hundred acres or less. So I was actually number one in the state, and my dad was 13th in the state, if I want to say? So that was a great year for us.

annie brown

You’re beating your dad.

june provost

Yeah, I was beating my dad. Exactly, yes, and actually, we talked about that for a long time. Yes, I ragged him. Yes.

adizah eghan

And what also happened is they caught the attention of everybody in the area.

june provost

Word-of-mouth started going around, and land owner after land owner was coming to us, wanting us to farm their property. And that’s how we just started expanding even more.

adizah eghan

And this is how it is for the next decade or so. Business is good. June and his dad are taking on more land leases, farming more property. And in the middle of all this is when he meets Angie.

angie provost

Let’s get crack-a-lacking. All right, so —

adizah eghan

Even though her family had lived in Texas for a number of years, her ancestors were sugar-cane farmers from Louisiana. So when she met June —

angie provost

It was as if I’d known him for centuries, like our past lives were together or something. It’s so, really, deep.

adizah eghan

They clicked immediately.

june provost

We were going to a concert in Baton Rouge.

adizah eghan

They were going to a Keith Sweat concert.

nikole hannah-jones

Oh, nice.

adizah eghan

June’s a huge Keith Sweat fan.

nikole hannah-jones

As am I.

adizah eghan

I was only familiar with Keith Sweat as, like, part of the R&B canon of baby-making music.

nikole hannah-jones

That’s not why I like it. Just playing. It is why I like it. Um —

[laughter]

[music - keith sweat, "make it last forever"]

adizah eghan

And basically —

archived recording (keith sweat)

(SINGING) Make it last —

adizah eghan

— their moment is when they hear “Make It Last Forever.”

archived recording (keith sweat)

(SINGING) Make it last.

june provost

Oh yeah, “Make It Last Forever“? Yeah, that’s when I turned to her, and I started singing to her.

angie provost

Oh yeah, sing.

june provost

(SINGING) Make it last forever. (SPEAKING) That’s how it sounds.

[laughter]

june provost

Y’all better not put that on!

adizah eghan

And so when they get married, they have a farm-themed wedding. They put sugar-cane leaves on the walls, like, as decoration, almost like wreaths. And then after the reception, they rode off in a tractor.

nikole hannah-jones

[LAUGHS] It’s so cutely country.

adizah eghan

It’s very cute.

nikole hannah-jones

So sugar cane is really their lives.

adizah eghan

Yes, sugar cane is 100 percent their lives.

archived recording (keith sweat)

(SINGING) Let’s make it last.

june provost

That’s where the problem really starts.

angie provost

This book here, “Black Farmers in America,” and June’s family was featured in it. So that’s where this picture comes from.

adizah eghan

So who all is in the photo?

angie provost

June’s brother Rodney, June’s father, June’s brother Edward and June. June’s family was so motivating to see, because they were one of the beacons of hope out there of light, farmers that would remain in business, and that is not the story.

adizah eghan

Right around the time when June meets Angie, things start to change. June’s dad’s health has continued to deteriorate.

angie provost

At that time, he was actually almost incapable of working on a farm on a day-to-day basis.

adizah eghan

So June took over the farm.

angie provost

So my production went from a 300-acre operation to close to a 5,000-acre farm. So —

adizah eghan

And at the beginning of the year in 2008 —

june provost

— I went in 2008 to get a crop loan.

adizah eghan

June does what he had seen his father do every year. He goes to the bank and gets a crop loan.

june provost

You need a loan every year to farm sugar cane.

nikole hannah-jones

So why would a successful farmer with a lot of land need to take out a crop loan every year?

adizah eghan

So this is just how farming works. Farmers make their money at the end of the season. And so in order to cover costs like fertilizer, equipment, labor, they take out a loan. And so to run a sugar-cane farm the size of June’s, it costs around $2 million.

june provost

And then when you sell your cane to the sugar mill, that’s how you pay back that amount of money.

adizah eghan

But June can’t go to the bank that his dad went to, because that bank has stopped giving out crop loans, so he has to find another bank.

[phone rings]

adizah eghan

He ends up applying for a crop loan at a place called First Guaranty Bank.

speaker

This is First Guaranty Bank. How can I help you?

adizah eghan

Hi. My name is Adizah Eghan. I’m from The New York Times. I’m recording this call, by the way. How are you?

speaker

O.K. I’m doing good. How about you?

adizah eghan

I’m actually looking to speak to someone about a lawsuit that the bank is involved in. We’re trying to get a response to —

adizah eghan

And what happens between June and the bank is now the subject of a lawsuit currently making its way through the legal system.

speaker

O.K., that’s going to be way over me. Let me get you my branch manager, and —

adizah eghan

We’ve reached out to the bank multiple times, but they haven’t responded to us. They’ve also publicly denied all of June’s allegations, but this is what June says happened.

june provost

I went to First Guaranty Bank to apply for a crop loan.

adizah eghan

He says he goes to the bank, and he shows them how many acres he’s planning to farm. He also shows them his financial history, his taxes, his credit, and June is expecting to receive something that’s similar to what his dad had received all those years before. But after he applies, he doesn’t hear anything back.

june provost

And time is passing. I mean, every day that passed is crucial to the operation.

adizah eghan

So he starts to get a little nervous.

june provost

All my landlords are starting to call and ask for land rent. O.K., now people are starting to spray herbicide. So people’s crops are getting clean. Here I am, not even touching the fields. And you’ve arrived, and you see all your neighbors. All these white farmers are in the fields, have all their tractors running, and I have everything parked at the shop.

adizah eghan

A similar thing had happened to his cousin a couple years before.

june provost

I seen my cousin — we call him Papoose, that’s his nickname — was fertilizing in the end of June. Like, my dad always wanted to fertilize early, like, the earliest we could have fertilized, the better, because your cane gets a good jump-start. And to pass and see him fertilizing at the end of June was like, what was going on? What was happening? And —

adizah eghan

And June had started to hear rumors.

june provost

The word was always, oh, that Olivier guy, he’s not going to be farming long. He don’t like to get up early in the morning, and —

adizah eghan

Were they implying that he didn’t know what he was doing?

june provost

Exactly. They were implying his farming practices were bad, he was lazy, I mean, all of the above.

adizah eghan

And now he was worried people would start saying the same things about him.

Finally, at the beginning of March, the bank does approve his crop loan.

june provost

But the problem was the crop loan was very underfunded.

adizah eghan

But it’s for less than half of what he expected.

adizah eghan

Did they say why?

june provost

No. I mean, just said, this is what I’m giving you. So you take the loan and you try to farm the best way you can with that loan, but it’s just by the time I pay land rent, spray chemicals, fertilizer, I’m out of funds already.

adizah eghan

June doesn’t have enough money to pay for farming equipment. So by the time it comes to planting season, he needs even more workers.

june provost

I would wake up sometimes at midnight, get back home at 8, 9 o’clock, and just wake up again at midnight trying to do the job of three or four different other guys. It’s not enough money, and time is passing. We are running out of time. You have a small window to plant your cane.

adizah eghan

And by late fall, he’s starting to get desperate.

june provost

The date was November 8 of 2008, and I was planting cane. And that is something, again, I can’t say enough how that is not what should be happening in November. You should be harvesting your crop. You should be through planting cane at the end of September, early October at the latest, and I’m planning cane in November. And it was about 4 o’clock. My dad called and said, well, how it is going? I said, well, Dad, I say I’m trying to chop rows. I’m trying to open rows. I’m trying to cover cane. I’m fixing breakdowns. I’m going to have to shut it down for the day, because I need to try to stay and get some land prepared. So he said, well, you know what? I’m coming to meet you. He said, we are going to stay late, me and you. He said, we’re going to chop land, get everything ready for the next day. I’m like, Dad, no. It’s close to 5 o’clock. I’ll try to get it. I said, just go rest. And he said, O.K. But then 10, 15 minutes later, I watch on the road. He came driving up and say, well, I’m here. He say, let’s roll up tonight, me and you.

adizah eghan

And so that evening, his dad, even though he’s retired and probably shouldn’t be doing this type of work, starts to help June plant the cane.

june provost

He got on a tractor. And I went, hooked up the covering rig, and jump on another tractor. And I was covering cane, and he was opening rows. And when he’s opening the rows, you’re making almost, like, a bed for the cane to sit in and rest. And then here I come with a covering rig, and I throw dirt over it, and then I pack the ground.

adizah eghan

So he’s making the bed, and you’re tucking it in?

june provost

Yes. Pretty much, yes. That’s a good way to explain it, yes. Yes, very much so. And it’s something he loved, and I love doing it. So to have us both in the field, your heart gets full. It’s just like, you know, people don’t have that opportunity, to work with their family like that.

And then he called me up. And he’s like, well, June, you see, I’m almost out of diesel. I’m like, well, Dad, I’m almost out of diesel. So what I did, I was like, Dad, we’re just going to have to start off in the morning. So he left, and he was driving back to the house. And I went, I detoured, because I had to go pick up a few guys on another location, and I drove back, got on the highway, and maybe three miles down the road is when I seen a bunch of taillights were going off. People had flashes on. And the closer I got to it, you know —

I seen my dad laying down on the highway. So when I seen it, I just hurry up. Just threw the truck in park, and I got down, and I went and grabbed my dad. And there was a guy there, and he was a doctor. And I was like, will he be O.K.? Will he be O.K.? And the guy told me, no, sir. He’s gone.

adizah eghan

June says another doctor told him that his dad likely died of a heart attack.

june provost

My dad is gone. That is hard. That is so, so hard, for something — he could have stayed at home, but he come in to help me to try to get ahead.

And I always say this. I say the only thing that made me sane and kept me through that is to farm sugar cane, because I dedicated everything to my dad from that point. He loved it. I loved it, and that’s what kept me going was to get back into the sugar cane and put my all into it.

adizah eghan

So June goes back to work, and he’s falling even further behind.

june provost

Oh, it was a struggle. It’s cold. We have a frost. I’m planting cane. I’m out in the fields, and here these white farmers are riding and looking at me planting fields in December. While all their cane is up in a beautiful stand, here I am, planting in December. They pass, look, and put a smirk on their face, and just, like —

angie provost

They’re laughing.

june provost

— I mean, laughing at me, like, literally, laughing at me. I mean, laughing.

adizah eghan

And the next year in 2009, when he went to the bank, it all started again.

june provost

Poor loan amounts, late loans.

adizah eghan

A loan half as big as he expected.

june provost

A day of that time I would wake up and be in a panic mode.

adizah eghan

He puts up more and more collateral — so his home, his parents’ home, his farming equipment and his farmland.

june provost

You see all the white growers are in their fields spraying and starting to apply fertilizer. Here I am, don’t even have a crop loan yet.

adizah eghan

And then in 2010 again, 2011 again, 2012 again. And some years the loan would come as late as April or June.

june provost

I mean, I remember the county agent specifically saying, well, June, I passed down Highway 14. I seen a fertilizer truck and trailer. He said, they can’t be fertilizing cane in June. He said, that’s not supposed to happen. And it was me. It was me. I mean, that is crazy. Do you know how humiliating that is?

adizah eghan

As he’s fertilizing late, planting late, harvesting late, he couldn’t stop thinking about his cousin.

june provost

And we started talking. I said, Papoose, I said, I know it might not mean nothing to you now, but, I said, I want to apologize, because you know what? People would always say, oh, your farm didn’t last because you were lazy or your farming practices. And I said, maybe we should have been there more for you, because they say the same thing about me now. I’m sorry I didn’t defend him more, and that haunts me. That really haunts me, because of course he knew what he was doing. Like he told me here — he’s like, June, he said, give me my loan on time. Give me the adequate amount of funding. I can make a 30-ton crop just as well as anybody else, because, he said, I was —

angie provost

Or even better.

june provost

Or even better. I was born into this.

adizah eghan

And by 2014, June’s yield has dropped by more than 50 percent.

june provost

2014 was actually a horrifying year for me, because —

angie provost

That’s when everything came to a head.

june provost

Everything came to a head in 2014. But we’re fighters, and that’s what we decided, that we were going to fight it out.

nikole hannah-jones

Next week, Part 2 of June and Angie’s story.

5. The Land of Our Fathers, Part 2

The Provosts had worked the same land for generations. When it became harder and harder to keep hold of that land, June Provost and his wife, Angie, didn’t know why — and then a phone call changed their understanding of everything. Released on Oct. 11, 2019.
bars
0:00/36:38
-36:38

transcript

5. The Land of Our Fathers, Part 2

The Provosts had worked the same land for generations. When it became harder and harder to keep hold of that land, June Provost and his wife, Angie, didn’t know why — and then a phone call changed their understanding of everything. Released on Oct. 11, 2019.

[birds chirping, footsteps]

angie provost

This is his father’s grave site. You see all the flowers on here? They’ve been here since Father’s Day.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.

june and angie provost

(IN UNISON) Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. And lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil. Amen. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou amongst women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God —

june provost

When we buried my dad, you know, when people was trying to console me, the first thing they would say, look where he’s buried. They’d say, he’s buried right next to the cane field, something that you love, and that really made me feel good at the time. You know, it made me feel better, I guess I can say. But after all this happened, I stopped coming even to see my dad, because I just — I couldn’t —

I just wanted to make him proud. And when all that happened, I felt like I was letting my dad down.

You know, he wanted to pass the farm down to his kids and his grandkids, and I let him down.

angie provost

You didn’t let your dad down. You know that.

[theme music by daoud anthony]

nikole hannah-jones

From The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is “1619.”

adizah eghan

So after this terrible year, did you think about giving up the business?

june provost

Oh, never, never. I mean, I’m a sugar-cane farmer. I mean, I loved it. This is my family’s legacy. This is what I am good at. I’ve been doing it since I was a little boy. I mean, never once would I ever give up farming.

nikole hannah-jones

Adizah Eghan, why don’t you pick up where you left off?

adizah eghan

So June and Angie Provost have been struggling for years to keep their sugar-cane farm going.

june provost

It was a repetitive cycle, pretty much — I mean, late loans, underfunded, over-collateralization.

adizah eghan

And they say it’s because they can’t get enough money from their bank, called First Guaranty, to run their farm.

june provost

It’s a trickle-down effect. If you can’t plant all of your acres that one year, you’re going to feel it the next year and the year after that. If you can’t fertilize your whole crop, what kind of yields are you going to make on that acres?

adizah eghan

And he can’t just go to another bank to get the loan, because he says other banks have told him that he’s in too deep with First Guaranty. He’s put up pretty much all of his assets as collateral.

june provost

So what have I — was supposed to do? So I did go to the U.S.D.A. and asked them to apply some pressure. I need my crop loan. I need to be in the fields.

adizah eghan

And so June turns to the federal government to complain. Basically, when a farmer goes to a bank to apply for a crop loan, the bank then turns to a local branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because even though the loan is provided by the bank, the U.S.D.A. will step in, in the event that the farmer can’t pay back the loan. So the local U.S.D.A. office has to sign off on it. But when June goes to his local U.S.D.A. office, they say there’s nothing they can do.

angie provost

It was almost every year that you would go and complain.

june provost

Yes, every year I would have to complain, because every year the crop loans would be later and later.

adizah eghan

And then on this one day, in May of 2014 —

angie provost

That’s when everything came to a head.

june provost

Everything came to a head in 2014.

adizah eghan

— June finally started to get some answers.

june provost

Well, I was at the shop working — just trying to get equipment ready, trying to set up everything for fertilizer season so when I get the crop loan, everything would be ready to go — and I got a phone call, and it was the U.S.D.A.‘s number.

adizah eghan

He gets a call from a local U.S.D.A. employee named William Husband.

june provost

He said, June, he said, do you have a second? I’m saying, sure, Mr. Will, and I’m like, what is wrong? He said, do you realize that you’re the only farmer in this parish, in this office, that’s going through what you’re going through. He said, no other former is going through this.

adizah eghan

William Husband is named as a whistle-blower in June’s lawsuit against First Guaranty Bank, and the lawsuit claims that Husband, who is white, made it clear that this was about racial discrimination. When we reached out to Husband, he couldn’t comment, and referred us back to the U.S.D.A., where he still works. But this is what June and Angie say happened.

june provost

He said, come to my office, soon as you can.

adizah eghan

At one point after that phone call, William invited June and Angie to come to his office —

angie provost

I can remember that William looking quite disheveled.

june provost

Yeah, he was nervous and red, I remember that.

adizah eghan

— where he showed them June’s files.

june provost

He said, I want y’all to sit in my office. I’m going to close the door. And he had all the files already on his desk from every year. He said, I want you to go through all of your files and pull out what you need to pull out, and I’ll make copies for you.

adizah eghan

And June says that what he saw in those files clarified for him what had been going on with his crop loans.

june provost

He said, do you realize that First Guaranty Bank is photocopying your signatures? And I’m like, wait, say that again? He said, yes. He said, First Guaranty Bank is photocopying your signatures.

angie provost

And this is to U.S.D.A. guaranteed loan applications.

june provost

And not only photocopying my signatures, they were changing the loan amount.

adizah eghan

The lawsuit claims that First Guaranty Bank had been changing June’s loan applications without his consent, reducing the amount he’s asking for, leaving him with less money to run his farm.

june provost

He said, I’m shaking. He said, I’m shaking. That’s all he kept saying. He said, June, I’m shaking. I said, Mr. Will, I’m shaking. This is crazy.

I mean, for me, it was just, like, a shock. But I mean, was I surprised?

angie provost

It almost gave justification to the feelings that we’ve had all that time, too.

june provost

And I think that’s what it did. It pretty much answered my —

angie provost

Question.

june provost

— my questions.

angie provost

And it’s like, here’s the proof, you know?

june provost

Mm-hmm.

angie provost

Yeah.

nikole hannah-jones

So what was the bank’s explanation for why it had lended June so much less than what he had asked for?

adizah eghan

First Guaranty Bank would not speak with us. But in a statement that they made to The Guardian last year, they called these allegations, quote, “completely unfounded and frivolous,” and said that it, quote, “has not and does not engage in discriminatory practices.”

The year after William Husband first told June and Angie about the discrimination, First Guaranty Bank denies June a crop loan altogether.

Without the funds, he couldn’t afford to do anything on the limited number of acres he had left, and he couldn’t pay the landlords he rented from. So he had to give it up. He lost land his grandfather had farmed. He lost the land he learned to drive a tractor on. And he lost the patch of land off Highway 90 where June and his father had opened rows and covered cane for the last time.

And in 2018, the bank foreclosed on their home.

adizah eghan

How far is the home from where we are now?

june provost

It’s actually maybe 50 yards away from my mom’s home. And that’s the reason why I built there, so I can take care of my parents. And to have my home taken like that, it’s unreal. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. And every day, I walk out of my mom’s house, and I have to look at our home. You know, it’s not like where I live a few miles away and you barely pass by it. I get up every single morning, and the first thing I see is my home. I lost the home in September of last year. They have yet to cut the grass. The fence is falling down.

I got to relive that every day, relive it every single day. And I tell you what — I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. It’s, you know.

So those are things that —

you know, that is so hard to take, so hard.

The sugar industry always saying we need young farmers. We need young farmers. What they should be saying is they want young white farmers.

nikole hannah-jones

So how do we know that the bank wasn’t justified in this assessment?

adizah eghan

Well, we don’t know. This is in active litigation, which is in the discovery phase, basically where both sides are gathering evidence — obtaining documents, interviewing witnesses, and taking depositions — and what we know is what June told us and what the bank has denied.

But we also know that this isn’t the first time that a black farmer has accused a lending institution of using a crop loan as a tool of discrimination. In fact, it’s the allegation at the heart of the largest civil rights settlement in the history of this country.

larissa anderson

You need to say his whole name.

nikole hannah-jones

Really? That’s how you want me to introduce him? Khalil.

khalil gibran muhammad

Hi, Nikole.

nikole hannah-jones

Hey. So say your name.

khalil gibran muhammad

Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

nikole hannah-jones

Gibran, O.K.

nikole hannah-jones

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, you’re a history professor at Harvard. Tell me about this lawsuit that led to the largest civil rights settlement in history.

khalil gibran muhammad

Well, it’s pretty remarkable. One day, in the late 1990s, a man named Timothy C. Pigford and a couple of other farmers — black farmers — walk into a lawyer’s office in D.C.

khalil gibran muhammad

And would you introduce yourself to me and pronounce your name, please?

alexander pires

Sure. My name is Alexander Pires, P-I-R-E-S. It doesn’t really rhyme with anything.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K. And could you talk —

khalil gibran muhammad

This man named Alex Pires, who had been suing the U.S.D.A. for various reasons, and they told him their story.

alexander pires

They told me this story, which was very simple, which was, we’re very good farmers, and we can’t get loans. And there’s a pattern, Mr. Pires, and the pattern is that if we do get a loan, we get a lesser amount than a white. If we do get a loan, it’s got more restrictions than a white. If we do get a loan, we get it late in the season. White farmers get it on time. If we do get it and get something going the next year, they’ll have problems, to keep us from building momentum. And I told them that my experience had been that nobody is going to listen to us unless we have numbers — numbers is what they get.

And I told them if you could go out and get me 50 black farmers who could tell that same story, I’ll file a class action on behalf of you. But what happened was they came back with, I think, 60 or 70 names and addresses. And I said, let’s go on the road and see how widespread it is.

speaker

I grew up on a farm, my dad farmed. It’s just in my blood, I guess.

alexander pires

So we went on a tour —

speaker

355 acres.

alexander pires

— throughout the South.

speaker 1

60, 70 acres of cotton —

speaker 2

Cotton, peanuts.

speaker 3

— 20 acres of corn.

speaker 4

I tried to purchase the land that has been in the family for such a long time.

speaker 5

I applied for this loan, and I didn’t get it.

speaker 6

Just giving him the run-around.

speaker 7

They told me I owe too much.

speaker 8

They tried to discourage me in every way possible.

speaker 9

A message is on my answering machine — nigger, you’re going to get killed.

alexander pires

And, um —

speaker

We were successful.

alexander pires

— when I got whatever it was, 100 and something names —

speaker 1

We were forced out of farming.

speaker 2

Yeah.

speaker 3

And that’s what we love to do.

alexander pires

— I came back here, and I wrote the complaint, and we filed it. We got a judge named Judge Friedman, and that’s how it started.

khalil gibran muhammad

That’s how Pigford and these other farmers came to sue the United States Department of Agriculture.

nikole hannah-jones

So as this lawyer is investigating these farmers’ stories, what is he learning?

khalil gibran muhammad

Well, he’s learning that the process itself is troubling, because the way that crop loans are distributed, even though the money comes from Congress, all of the action happens at a local level and, in agriculture, the really local level — county by county, parish by parish, if you were in a place like Louisiana.

alexander pires

The history had been something like this. Black farmers got really good at specific crops. Year after year after year, they would farm the same crops for white landowners, and they got really good at it. So it was just a matter of time before a younger black farmer would say to himself, what am I doing? I do the same thing over and over again. The white farmer gets rich on my skill. Why don’t I just go down the street and lease 100 acres, 200 acres and do it for myself? You know, very American, very logical. The problem was that was frightening to the white farmer in the South for three reasons. One, there goes my labor and my skill. Two, here comes a new competitor. And three, what about me?

You know, what about me? What about my rights, my interests? I’m going to talk to the county committee about that.

khalil gibran muhammad

The story of Pigford and these claimants is that at the time, when they tried to get a loan, they would go to a U.S.D.A. local county committee and apply.

alexander pires

The system is very simple.

khalil gibran muhammad

There’s a local county committee.

alexander pires

The county committee decides who gets the funds.

khalil gibran muhammad

And —

alexander pires

It was completely white-controlled —

khalil gibran muhammad

— these committees are overwhelmingly white.

alexander pires

— even in Southern states that had lots of black farmers.

khalil gibran muhammad

And what happened is that ultimately, the people making the decision about giving the loan were discriminating, because, in many instances, they knew the farm landowner from whom this person was breaking away.

alexander pires

Five people are there in line, the first four are white, the last one is black. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen 98 percent of the time. The person who’s voting from the county committee, he knows the first four. They fish together. They hunt together. They’re never going to vote against them. Person number five is the black man from the black community for which there is no relationship, usually. And it’s a wild card as to whether he’s going to get that loan.

nikole hannah-jones

So these farmers are claiming that they’re being discriminated against because they’re black, and the mechanism of that discrimination are these farm loans?

khalil gibran muhammad

That’s right, through the size of the loan and the release of the funds.

alexander pires

It started out with a simple complaint on which everybody was saying the same thing, that there was this treatment by whites. And then the second common element was when they complained about it to the Office of Civil Rights, which is how the system works, their complaint never got processed.

khalil gibran muhammad

In fact, Alex tells us that when he started doing his own research into this, he found that going back to the 1980s, the Reagan administration closed the U.S.D.A.‘s Office of Civil Rights. And so complaints were pouring in going back that far, but there was no office to process them.

alexander pires

And I had heard a rumor from a couple of black farmers that there’s a room where they just stuff them all. They’re afraid to destroy them. So we were interviewing one of the deputy secretaries, and I said, you know, did you guys take all those complaints when you closed the Civil Rights Office? Aren’t they all sitting somewhere? Where are they? You didn’t destroy them, did you? Where are they? Where is it all? And very nicely, he said, don’t get me in trouble. You know, this is where I make a living, but yeah, yeah, yeah, the offices are all locked up, and they’re filled. And I said, I don’t need to go down there, and I don’t need to get you in trouble. I’m not one of those people. I believe you. I said, in this building? And basically, I got a nod from him, and then it was a hearing or two later in which I said, your honor, I want to pursue this because I believe that they’ve got boxes and boxes that they never processed, which would be great to present to you at the beginning of trial or however you want to do it. And they never denied it, ever. But I don’t think they needed to go that far. I think they knew that we knew that they knew we knew, and I think that made the difference.

khalil gibran muhammad

So given that you did not see the files, how were you able to build this into an argument with Judge Friedman that this was the smoking gun, essentially, of the black farmers’ case?

alexander pires

It was one of the smoking guns, yeah. I think he believed that if they didn’t have an Office of Civil Rights, did it really matter what they did with the files? They certainly weren’t processing them, right? That’s what made the case unique. It’s really two forms of bias and prejudice. First of all, you’re discriminated against. And then when you complain, your complaint is not processed. That’s another form of discrimination. It’s really double.

The judge, very early on, got it. He understood the pattern. And what we would do is we would tell the black community when the hearings were, and they would all come to Washington. And I don’t mean 20 or 30 or 50 of them. I mean hundreds and hundreds of them would come. So you have 300, 400, 500 black farmers in the courtroom. We had them in the aisles and in front, and then there’s side seats, and we had them in the jury box. And I think it bothered Judge Friedman that it had come down to this, that our judicial system was not working well, and he was going to do something about it.

khalil gibran muhammad

And so two years after Timothy Pigford and that group of farmers first came into his office, Alex gets a call.

alexander pires

One day I got a phone call from a senior associate attorney general.

khalil gibran muhammad

It’s the Department of Justice, ready to negotiate.

alexander pires

And my requirement was that they actually give real money, not credit, not maybes, not promises.

khalil gibran muhammad

So the deal they basically hammer out is that each farmer who meets the requirements of the complaint is able to receive $50,000 —

alexander pires

I asked for $50,000 per black farmer, tax-free.

khalil gibran muhammad

— and have their debt forgiven.

alexander pires

I’ll tell you, the government, in the initial discussions, were having a heart attack over it. You would think I was raiding the Treasury. It was the closest I could get to the government to say, I’m sorry, with something meaningful. But it’s not a perfect world. I felt like $50,000 was respectful. Was it perfect? No, no.

nikole hannah-jones

I mean, when I think of $50,000, it doesn’t seem to repair much. That’s not going to buy back the land that you lost. It’s not going to put you in a position to be in a place that you would have been if you had been treated the same as white farmers. I mean, it’s clearly better than nothing, but it doesn’t repair the damage.

khalil gibran muhammad

No, it’s true. I mean, a lot of these people had been experiencing generations of discrimination by these local U.S.D.A. committees. But maybe the loudest criticisms came from people who thought the entire thing was a big shakedown of the federal government, that this was all a reparations scam and white people and the federal government didn’t owe these folks anything, that the complainants were frauds, that they were making this up, that they were terrible, horrible farmers who were masking these complaints of racism to hide their own incompetence as farmers.

alexander pires

And my answer to that always was, they’ve been doing the farming in the South for years. Who do you think picks cotton? White people? What a coincidence that the black farmer is qualified to farm millions of acres in America and make white America rich, but when he wants to do it on his own, he’s not competent. Black farmers were doing the farming. They were doing the actual work.

khalil gibran muhammad

So even though the government did not publicly admit wrongdoing, it ended up paying out nearly a billion dollars to nearly 16,000 farmers — the largest amount of money the government has ever paid to settle a discrimination case. But it’s still an unresolved issue. More black farmers came forward who met the conditions of the original complaint and formed Pigford II. And ultimately, the underlying problem of discrimination remains.

alexander pires

Now, there are people who are going to listen to this, and they’re going to say, I don’t believe that story. And my answer to that is, well, you don’t live in the South, and you’re not a farmer, and you don’t understand how the system works. Where you live, you’re probably listening to this, and you’re probably in the suburbs of Philadelphia, or you live in Brooklyn or something, and your life is totally different, but that’s how it worked. That’s how it worked for decades. And the black farmer was abused in a way that was unheard of, and the preliminary culprit was his own government, her own government. So for example, you all sent me a case involving a sugar matter down South.

khalil gibran muhammad

The case of June and Angie Provost.

alexander pires

Yeah. I mean, I read it. I think it’s the same story. It involves a bank, and most of ours didn’t, but the point’s the same. What’s the difference between that story and thousands of Pigford stories? What’s the difference? The fact pattern is very similar. A very qualified farmer who understands everything there is to know about sugar can’t get a loan.

nikole hannah-jones

So Khalil, I know you’ve been reporting on June and Angie Provost as well, and their story is so similar to the stories of the farmers in the Pigford lawsuit, which was settled almost 20 years ago. So how much has actually changed for black farmers in this country?

khalil gibran muhammad

Well, the one thing we know about American history is that two steps forward are often met with one step back, or sometimes two or three steps back. If we just look at black sugar-cane farmers in Louisiana, they once numbered in the thousands, and now the number is most likely in the single digits. And that doesn’t even include June and Angie, because after the experience that June had with the bank, he lost his leases. And even though there’s a lawsuit, and the facts will be determined, I know from my reporting that there is a white farmer in Louisiana right now who has some of June and Angie’s land. I talked to him while working on this story.

khalil gibran muhammad

You were featured in a news story —

khalil gibran muhammad

His name is Ryan Doré.

khalil gibran muhammad

— on your success as a newcomer to the industry.

ryan doré

That’s correct.

khalil gibran muhammad

And I wanted to know what he thought about the allegations that June was making about losing the land.

ryan doré

So if the accusation was made that I took the land? No, the landowner took the land, and then they came and found a farmer, and they gave it to me.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K. Now, one aspect of your story — and I appreciate your strong and —

ryan doré

And all I’m gonna ask you is make damn sure you’re writing what I’m putting and don’t put it in your own words and change the story.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K., great. So the question that I wanted to follow up with you on this —

khalil gibran muhammad

Essentially, he says that, in terms of the Provosts and other black farmers down there in particular that he named, that they lost their farms not because of any kind of racism.

ryan doré

They’re trying to make it a black-white situation. But it doesn’t have anything to do with black-white, O.K.? They simply lost their acreage for one reason, and one reason only. They are horrible farmers. They are the worst farmers that we have in the area.

khalil gibran muhammad

He flat out says they’re simply horrible farmers.

ryan doré

June Provost grew up on a farm. That’s all he did, but that doesn’t make him a better farmer than me. Some people got it, and some people don’t. He might have — he must have missed the boat, I guess. I don’t know.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K. Is there anything else you’d want me to know that I didn’t ask with regard to these allegations and your role as a farmer in the New Iberia region?

ryan doré

I’m just a successful farmer in Iberia Parish. That’s all I can tell you, you know? And it’s just, you’ve got to put on a uniform every day and get out and turn the wrench and go look at the land, you know? And they want to get mad at the white man for taking the black man’s land. That don’t work around here. Like I told you — like I told you, because I’ve got your phone number now, and I’ve got your name, make damn sure whatever you publish is what I just said. Don’t spin it on me, because this could go the opposite way. Them boys live around here, so don’t be changing my shit up.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K., well, Mr. Doré, I absolutely appreciate you calling me back, so thank you very much.

ryan doré

Yeah, thank you.

khalil gibran muhammad

O.K., have a good evening.

ryan doré

Yeah.

[music]

[door creaking]

june provost

This is our home, and it’s been almost a year since the sheriff’s sale, since the foreclosure. And when we actually lost the home, I mean, I literally didn’t want to go outside. I mean, I stayed in the house. The blinds were closed. And I went months — months. I remember Angie fussing and saying, June, that’s enough. She started opening up the blinds and putting some light in the house because I wanted it dark as could be. I wasn’t answering the phone for anybody. I was just depressed. I mean, it’s just until recently, probably maybe beginning of this year, that I really started going out and just making a garden, which was the best time for me to make a garden like that. I mean, I never thought I would say that — a garden. You know, I used to farm close to 5,000 acres, but just to get my hands dirty, just back into the dirt, is unbelievable.

This is my baby here. That’s what I call it. Because in the fields, we would always call sugar cane — I always say, that’s my kids, because you have to take care of it. But here’s eggplants. And look, a cantaloupe — watch this little big one here. Look how big! That row right there is sweet potatoes. And the watermelon and cantaloupe — look. Yeah, they’re just growing like wild.

And it’s a beautiful evening now.

nikole hannah-jones

Yeah, you see all those minnows down there? Swimming?

adizah eghan

Oh, yeah.

nikole hannah-jones

Today, the water is like a blue-green, the sun shimmering off of it. It’s beautiful.

adizah eghan

So when you came here the first time, what were you expecting or hoping for?

nikole hannah-jones

I can’t say I had any particular expectation. I just felt it was important to actually look out into the spot where those first Africans came.

I definitely tried to think of what it must’ve felt like for them. I mean, by the time they would have gotten here, it would have been weeks since they saw any land whatsoever. I just think about that, to be kidnapped and crossed across this ocean. And then when you see land, the land looks nothing like anything you had ever seen before. And the people on that land look nothing like anything you had ever seen before. So I’m thinking about all of that now when I see this water. And it’s just water, but it feels very sad right now.

I think the one thing I didn’t realize when I started this project was how raw —

how raw everything still is when you’re black in this country. And people always — white people always want to tell you to get over it and to move on, but there’s never been a reckoning for what was done, and it’s hard to move on. And just spending so much time thinking about it constantly, I just realized that the wounds are still very raw. They’re still there.

So that’s what I feel.

[waves lapping]

[theme music by daoud anthony]

adizah eghan

“1619” was produced by Annie Brown, Kelly Prime, Andy Mills and me, Adizah Eghan. It was edited by Larissa Anderson, Lisa Chow, Lisa Tobin and Wendy Dorr. The technical director is Brad Fisher. The managing producer is Larissa Anderson. Mixed by Brad Fisher and Dan Powell. Music by Daoud Anthony.

Additional music by Brad Fisher and Dan Powell. Thanks to Michelle Harris, Graham Hacia, Alex Carp, Julia Simon, Stella Tan, Clare Toeniskoetter, Austin Mitchell and Jazmín Aguilera. Special thanks to Jake Silverstein and Ilena Silverman.

adizah eghan

All right.

nikole hannah-jones

O.K.

adizah eghan

Shall we?

nikole hannah-jones

Shall we?

adizah eghan

You’re like, yes.

nikole hannah-jones

Before my neck turns into bacon out here. Are you sure you don’t want to catch a crab before we go?

adizah eghan

[LAUGHS] I’m good.

nikole hannah-jones

O.K.

Image
A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.Credit...Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

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