Best of BackStory

The Time Nathan Had a Close Encounter

04.10.20

As BackStory moves towards the end of its production, we’ve asked our hosts to select memorable moments from the show.

Since joining BackStory in 2017, Nathan Connolly has interviewed a ton of different people about everything from Bruce Lee to Bison. But a handful of conversations are particularly memorable to Nathan because they unpacked issues that he cares deeply about.

So in this best of BackStory, Nathan presents three of his favorite interviews from his time on the show. You’ll learn how we got the “right to remain silent,” and hear about a special poetry project conducted at an unlikely place. Then, you’ll learn about why some African Americans have developed a unique understanding of experiences with UFOs.

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Segments

On the Bench

Nathan talks with legal scholar Risa Goluboff about how “Miranda vs. Arizona” fits into a series of cases, decided by the Warren court, that aimed to reform the criminal justice system.

From “You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A History of the Miranda Warning”

Music:

Wild Ones by Jahzzar

Miranda rights; criminal justice; legal history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Speaker 1:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connolly:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly. Now, if you’re new to the podcast each week, along with my colleagues, Joanne Freeman, Ed Ayers, and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Nathan Connolly:
Since I joined BackStory in 2017, I’ve had the chance to interview a ton of different people. We’ve covered everything from Bruce Lee to bison, but a handful of those conversations have been particularly memorable for me. These are conversations that unpacked issues I care deeply about, and that with people I had a blast in talking to. So in today’s episode, I’m excited to have the chance to share some of my favorite moments. This is part of an ongoing series we’re doing as BackStory starts to wrap up, after more than 12 years. In this episode, you’re going to hear about a very special poetry project conducted at a place you might not expect, and you’ll learn about why some African Americans have developed a unique understanding of experiences with UFOs.

Nathan Connolly:
But first, let’s bring things back to earth. You’ve surely heard of the right to remain silent. It’s known as the Miranda warning, and it’s something people hear when they’re being arrested. But have you heard of the 1963 case from which it came, Miranda v. Arizona? A couple of years ago I spoke with legal scholar, Risa Goluboff about the case and how it fits into a series of cases, aimed at reforming the criminal justice system. Now, what I find so important is Professor Goluboff’s foray into legal history, and the compelling way she links the history of civil rights litigation to the question of civil liberties more broadly. The Warren Courts of the Miranda and Brown decisions rarely get discussed together, but here we effectively get to consider Miranda and Mexican Americans more generally, as central to the course and history of the civil rights movement. Joanne starts us off in this segment. It’s from the show, You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A History of the Miranda Warning.

Joanne Freeman:
In 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright said that every defendant had the right to an attorney, even if they couldn’t afford to hire one. And the next year, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Escobedo v. Illinois that a defendant must be allowed to consult a lawyer if they wanted to, while in police custody. That decision also said that a suspect had an absolute right to remain silent.

Nathan Connolly:
The Miranda case put those new rights into play. Yes, Ernesto Miranda had been informed that he had constitutional rights, but only after he agreed to confess. he wasn’t told he could have a lawyer present. He also had not been told his rights included the right not to speak with the police. The court decided five-four that the police had a responsibility to explicitly tell a suspect these rights. By this new standard, Miranda’s confession wasn’t considered voluntary, and his conviction was overturned.

Joanne Freeman:
Gideon Escobedo and Miranda were part of a series of decisions in the 1960s, focused on reforming the criminal justice system. The court at the time was known as the Warren Court, after its very active chief justice, Earl Warren.

Risa Goluboff:
Two different arcs of history were converging in the Warren Court’s criminal procedure revolution.

Nathan Connolly:
That’s legal scholar, Risa Goluboff. She says that in order to understand the court’s thinking in cases like Miranda, we’ve got to step outside of the court and into two national debates that were in full swing in 1966: one on policing crime, and the other, about civil rights.

Risa Goluboff:
There had been a belief that legislators write laws, and then police officers enforce them, and that there was no gap between the laws on the books and the laws as enforced, and you had major national surveys into policing and the criminal justice system that revealed actually, the police have a lot of discretion. They can decide not to arrest people, they can arrest people who don’t really deserve to be arrested, and that that kind of discretion was really rampant. It’s rampant at the moment of the first interaction, what we would today think of maybe a stop and frisk, and then it exists at the moment of arrest, and then the moment of charging, and for going to trial, or for allowing for plea bargains, and then there is discrimination, and discretion, and abuse in the gathering of evidence. So coerced confessions, things like that, right?

Risa Goluboff:
And then that’s what the Warren Court was really embracing in the 1960s, and the Miranda is part of, and the idea there was that guilt or innocence wasn’t the only important aspect of the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system also had to ensure that it was treating people with fairness, with dignity, with equality, and I think forced confessions had been an issue for a long time, making statements without lawyers, so just not having a lawyer. So if you think about Miranda, it only comes a few years after Gideon v. Wainwright, where the court required criminal defendants who couldn’t pay for lawyers to be provided lawyers, in felony cases, so that’s a big change. And so, Miranda is part of putting in place safeguards so that the people who are getting processed through the system, are not only guilty, or likely guilty, or will be adjudged guilty, but are also receiving all of the rights and procedural protections that our constitution gets interpreted to provide.

Nathan Connolly:
But that wasn’t the court’s only concern.

Risa Goluboff:
The civil rights movement happens, and you get massive arrests of civil rights activists and demonstrators, and people seeing the police as the frontline of Jim Crow, seeing the police as oppressors in a way that you think of the G-man in earlier decades who are heroes, and suddenly, they don’t look as much like heroes in certain circumstances, as well as the recognition that policing is a civil rights issue, that African Americans are being policed differently from whites, and that’s something that goes back to the ’40s and beyond, but it really becomes a much bigger issue during the ’60s as well.

Nathan Connolly:
So would you feel comfortable describing the Miranda decision of ’66 as part of the story of civil rights law, that there’s an actual connection between what we more conventionally think about as the civil rights movement and the Miranda decision?

Risa Goluboff:
Absolutely. One, I think the Warren court clearly understood its criminal procedure revolution as part of the civil rights movement. They understood that policing was racialized, they understood that so many criminal defendants were African American or people of color. So I do think that they had a sense and they understood criminal justice in the context of race, and then-

Nathan Connolly:
Even though this was an Arizona decision, you would say?

Risa Goluboff:
Yep, even though, and actually, I mean, when you look at a lot of the criminal procedure cases, they didn’t always have an African American defendant come out in New York or Chicago. That wasn’t how it worked, and that’s often the case with the court. The best example I can give of that is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was bringing cases for sex discrimination to create the sex discrimination doctrines that we know today. Most of those cases had male plaintiffs. They were discrimination against men, and she was using them as ways of getting rights for women. I actually think the court found it useful and attractive to make universal pronouncements that the justices knew would redound to the benefit of African Americans. So they wanted to be making civil rights change, but there were times when they wanted to be able to do it without saying that’s what they were doing.

Nathan Connolly:
Risa Goluboff is Dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. She’s also the author of Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.

Words Between the Bars

For centuries, people have used letters, memoirs, and other personal writings to document the hardships of incarceration. Seth Michelson has led poetry workshops at prisons for years, and recently worked with a group of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant youth at a maximum-security juvenile detention center. He says the words of incarcerated poets and writers throughout history echo the experience of immigrant children behind bars today.

From “Land of the Free? The History of Incarceration in the U.S.”

Music:

Fluorescence by Podington Bear

Evenhanded by Podington Bear

poetry; prisons; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly:
All right, next on the docket, another issue of criminal justice. Seth Michelson is a poet, and when I spoke to him, he recently led a poetry workshop for a group of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant youth. They were being held at a maximum security juvenile detention center. This is actually one of my favorite conversations, because of the way you can access the interior lives of people who otherwise don’t get a chance to speak, in our larger immigration conversation. In my mind, this interview was such a powerful example of the need for the humanities behind bars. Seth offers a discreet, but courageous account of his efforts to help detained youth express themselves via Spanish language poetry.

Nathan Connolly:
In fact, I loved the bit in the way that it steps outside of our usual English language depictions of American life. It offers a great example of the power of teaching. It also illustrates the potential political meaning of poetry, all while providing a largely unknown window into a side of the immigration debate we almost never see. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Seth Michelson from the show Land of the Free: The History of Incarceration in the US.

Nathan Connolly:
For some people, a way to cope with incarceration comes with a pen.

Seth Michelson:
“I’ve often heard of prison cells, and dreary things, supposed they were, where gloom and darkness only dwells to fill the prisoner with despair. And such they are to carnal hearts, who have no savior and no God. The day rolls slow, and night departs, and leaves them still a drear abode, but glory to the eternal king who brought me to this little cell. Sweet pleasure, here, I find can spring, for here, my God delights to dwell.”

Nathan Connolly:
That’s an excerpt from the poem My Cell, No. 1. It was written by abolitionist George Thompson in the 1840s, while he was in prison in Missouri. Thompson is one of many throughout history to document the hardships of incarceration through personal writings. The person you heard read that poem is Seth Michelson. He’s led poetry workshops in prisons for two decades. A few years ago, Michelson started going to a maximum security juvenile detention center, and there, he led workshops with undocumented and unaccompanied immigrant children. Michelson recently released a book of poems written by the kids inside the center. He says poetry became a creative outlet for them, and created a unique bond within the group.

Seth Michelson:
Poetry is particularly available to all of the participants, whether illiterate or otherwise, and according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, these young teens are a range in age from to 17 years old, and average a second grade education. Many were orphaned at a young age and grew up on some of the most violent streets of the Hemispheric Americas, and didn’t have the literary, let’s say, or academic self-confidence to think of themselves as poets, but were quickly disabused of that by their peers, and with a little bit of encouragement from me, in realizing like the Mexican aphorism says, “[Spanish 00:12:24],” so “Of the poet and the crazy man, we all have a little bit,” and saying, let’s all access those things. You don’t need to be literate to be a poet, and especially the prison writing histories tell us across the globe that that literacy is not a foundational necessity of partaking in these important, nourishing, transformational communities of writers, in situations of immobilization and incarceration.

Nathan Connolly:
I spoke more with Michelson about the history of prison writing in the US. We discussed some poets who have written about incarceration, and parallels Michelson sees to the words of the immigrant children in detention centers today. We first discussed the poet Etheridge Knight. He was convicted of robbery in 1960, and spent eight years in the Indiana State Prison. Upon his release, he published a collection of works about his time incarcerated. Here, Michelson’s reading Knight’s piece called, To Make a Poem in Prison.

Seth Michelson:
“It’s hard to make a poem in prison. The air lends itself not to the singer. The seasons creep by unseen, and spark no fresh fires. Soft words are rare, and drunk, drunk against the clang of keys. Wide eyes stare fat zeros, and plea only for pity. Pity is not for the poet, yet poems must be primed. Here is not even sadness for singing, not even a beautiful rage, rage. No birds are winging. The air is empty of laughter. And love? Why, love has flown. Love has gone to glitten.”

Nathan Connolly:
So, to what extent does that poem and Knight’s words echo some of what you’ve observed through your workshops?

Seth Michelson:
Well, it speaks to something that I’ve experienced in the workshops, and it also pervades a lot of the writing coming from prisons, and writing of and about prisons, and in the particular case of Dreaming America and the workshops that I had the privilege to enjoy with these very special young writers, some of the best young writers I’ve ever worked with, you can see that despair.

Seth Michelson:
But here’s a poem by a young child in one of the two maximum security detention centers in the United States for undocumented unaccompanied youth, called [Spanish 00:15:08] in Spanish, and translated as I forget. “Without reason to exist, I often forget that I am real, and this makes ache the soul that I don’t have, or that can’t find me, as I wander somewhere else.” So you can see a certain level of existential despair and that despair pervades the poems in the book and in the workshop, and in the oeuvres of so many, are the works of writing by so many incarcerated peoples.

Seth Michelson:
And another one, this one’s called [Spanish 00:15:49], which means marriage. “Yesterday in my cell, my pal asked, ‘Man, don’t you want to marry life forever?” And I answered, ‘Why marry life, if I can’t divorce death?'” So this oppressive sense of mortality and the captivity of the isolation of the captive body, and the suffering.

Nathan Connolly:
It’s a testament to the universality of an experience that we tend to treat as particular, right? I mean, the migrant of the so-called refugee experience gets a very small column in the newspaper, or it gets treated as a kind of add-on, or a cognate to more mainstream conversations, and there’s something about one, the brevity and obviously, the power and the themes in the works that you just shared. I mean, [Spanish 00:16:44] for instance, and thinking about forgetting, I mean the prison as designed is meant to make you not see and forget these people. And so, the idea that somebody behind bars is literally forgetting themself as a consequence of the prison’s own makeup, and design, and power, it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary.

Nathan Connolly:
I’d like if we can look at another poem, and maybe do a similar kind of move in terms of this connection. This is a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. Certainly, someone who’s far more known, certainly not forgotten, we’re lucky to say. She wrote a poem in 1981 called To Prisoners. Can you share that with us?

Seth Michelson:
Sure, I love her work. ” I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark. Dark gardening, in the vertigo cold, in the hot paralysis. Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences. Where it is dry. Where it is dry. I call for you, cultivation of victory, over long blows that you want to give, and blows you’re going to get. Over what wants to crumble you down, to sicken you. I call for you , cultivation of strength to heal and enhance in the non-cheering dark, in the many, many mornings-after, in the chalk and choke.”

Nathan Connolly:
What sticks out to you about this? At least one thing?

Seth Michelson:
A deep empathy, a deep love for others, which is what poetry can lead us towards, to discovering Jacques Derrida, a French writer who loved poetry and wrote philosophy, talks about poetry is a way of tracing the heart of the other. And it’ certainly true in our workshop, we have children coming together from multiple nations, countries of origin, right? Converging on a table, maybe having overlapping histories in certain ways socially, politically, or [inaudible 00:19:01] within the carceral system, and coming to seek a better life, pursuing the so-called American dream, and then in a workshop, exhausted, bleary-eyed, terrified often, struggling to endure the conditions of captivity, coming together and connecting deeply, and the poetry is groping for that. She’s reaching out to embrace the incarcerated reader, right? To call for him or her. And then also, like we talked earlier, the specifics of tropes in poetry. So here, there’s repetition that’s so very, very powerful, and we saw it in Etheridge Knight too, in this use of repetition, that arrests while also intensifying. And so, I think it’s the combination of the tropes with that deep love that she’s sharing so courageously.

Nathan Connolly:
So we have an intimate connection with prisons and incarcerated people, even when we don’t always acknowledge it, and it’s no exaggeration to say that some of our most important breakthroughs in the world of letters are actually indebted to the thought work of those behind bars. I’m thinking for instance, of someone like Martin Luther King, who wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which was obviously a scathing critique of liberalism and liberal politics, that had a variety of different effects and consequences in the ways that people thought about racism and its connection to seemingly, political normalcy. I’m very curious to get your sense, as somebody who’s spent a lot of time meditating and in working in this area very deeply, what’s your sense of our appreciation of the prison as a place of knowledge production, as a bibliography that we already are dependent on, and is there some connection between the work that you’re doing now and that tradition of building a world of letters from the cage outward?

Seth Michelson:
It’s inspiring me to think in multiple directions. The first thing though is probably a kind of warning to our listeners against romanticizing prison, and there’s real lived material violence against these bodies that’s excruciating. That said, another important qualifier is to think carefully about the exceptionalism of these fabulous and deeply influential writers that course through our minds, even unknowingly to many, like Dr. King, and that not all people discovering new modes of writing in prison are going to become canonical, influential thinkers in transnational minds, but that doesn’t invalidate the importance of their prison writing experience, nor the significance of its contribution, even though it’s more veiled or less visible, or less known, right? It’s still partaking in this crucial process.

Seth Michelson:
It’s a mode of discovery, and in discovery, one of the things that’s discovered is the transformative power of language itself, and that is to say, that we need to work against rhetorics that normalize the caging of humans. Many of the young poets in the workshop, they’re realizing that through language, you can at least symbolically question the lived violence of captivity and start to work against those discourses that normalize it, where we say, “Ah, yes, these bodies need to have their rights suspended. They need to be removed from the social, relocated to this space that inures them, that captures them within walls, and that incapacitates them,” right? Is incarceration the best answer to migration? And I think poetry can help us to find new language to sort of discover what we might formulate as alternative modes of understanding and being.

Nathan Connolly:
Seth Michelson is a poet and a professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University. He’s also editor of the book of poetry called Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention.

Mothership Connection

Aside from Barney Hill, most African-Americans describe close encounters in overwhelmingly positive terms. Historian Stephen C. Finley tells Nathan about a wholly separate and unique UFO tradition.

From “Close Encounters: UFOs in American History”

Music:

Endeavor by Jahzzar

afrofuturism; unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly:
And now, it’s time for something completely different. The last interview I wanted to share with you comes from the show Close Encounters: UFOs in American History. In it, historian Stephen C. Finley explains a unique, the little known UFO tradition. This is one of those segments I almost always talk about when people ask me, “What exactly do you do on BackStory?” Now, I love this segment, because it’s a great example of how black knowledge and black futurism represent an important and little known expression of sci-fi culture in post World War II America. You can hear the energy between us as we talk about the larger question of UFOs and their existence, and really pose big questions about evidence, archive, and how we know what we think we know.

Nathan Connolly:
Ed, Brian, citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to claim the pyramids, partying on the mothership.

Stephen C. Finley:
Party on, Nathan. Thank you.

Nathan Connolly:
Those are actually the lyrics from a 1975 Parliament concept album, Mothership Connection, and according to our next guest, it had some heavenly inspiration.

Stephen C. Finley:
George Clinton said that he and Bootsy Collins were on the way from a concert, when they encountered what he describes as a UFO.

Nathan Connolly:
This is Louisiana State University scholar, Stephen Finley.

Stephen C. Finley:
When they were brought back to themselves, it was several hours later.

Nathan Connolly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephen C. Finley:
Right? And their watches weren’t working, right? They were stuck a few hours early, and knowing that he and Bootsy Collins are musicians, George Clinton is really clear to note that they were not drinking, and they were not under the influence of substances, right? And he’s really clear about that, because he’s serious about this, and he wants to be taken seriously.

Nathan Connolly:
Clinton isn’t the only famous black musician to describe this kind of experience. Charlamagne tha God, Prodigy, and poet and jazz musician Sun Ra, claim to have had close encounters as well.

Stephen C. Finley:
Sun Ra also claims to have made sort of a trip to have been taken somewhere, which for him, was near Saturn. For a Sun Ra, black people are a part of this angel race, which is cosmic. As with many of these groups, blackness sort of is the originary state of the universe.

Nathan Connolly:
Finley says this idea of cosmic blackness is not just found in celebrity narratives. Texas-based twin sisters Earlene and Shurlene Wallace described being taken in the 1990s, by friendly aliens called Galactics.

Stephen C. Finley:
But when you get them to describe the Galactics, they say that the Galactics appeared to them as beautiful black women.

Nathan Connolly:
He says these stories collectively form a distinct and separate African American UFO experience, one that’s often left out of mainstream ufology, or the study of UFOs. Now, most of the narratives share similarities. They’re often tied to religion and spirituality, the aliens are usually black, and evoke Africa or a symbolic homeland.

Stephen C. Finley:
There are certain things that I see that show up in the narratives of African Americans who have claimed to have had UFO experiences, or what others might call abductions, including not using terms like abduction, that’s not an African American UFO tradition term, for example.

Nathan Connolly:
So what are some of the component parts of those narratives? If they’re not talking about abductions for instance, what are some of the words that they are using?

Stephen C. Finley:
So for Earlene and Shurlene, i.e. the UFO Twins, they used the term trip, and they mean that in a positive way because in the African American UFO tradition, these accounts are not seen as adversarial or terrifying. In fact, they’re almost universally described as friendly, and that’s one of the primary differences between the African American accounts and the white ones, which are always, almost always terrifying, right? The scenes of abduction and-

Nathan Connolly:
Experimentation.

Stephen C. Finley:
Experimentation, sexual surgeries, all those kinds of things, you don’t find those in the black accounts.

Nathan Connolly:
Now, I have to ask this, is that perhaps because the African American tradition also includes actual abductions, mass abductions, experimentations, certainly violations of one’s sexual autonomy by way of the Middle Passage and the slave trade, is your sense of these narratives about unidentified flying objects, are in a way, a departure from what’s already a set of dominant themes within African American history?

Stephen C. Finley:
You’re making the same connection that some scholars, including myself, make. Think about Africa during the slave trade and all of a sudden, here come these beings from these ships who have come across the ocean, and all of a sudden, they capture you and whisk you away to a new land where you become the alien other. And so, it could be that that’s one of the reasons why these narratives get described the way they do, but the other reason is because these UFO traditions are also closely related to black supernatural traditions.

Nathan Connolly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephen C. Finley:
For African Americans, generally, the supernatural isn’t spooky, right? Ancestors hang around, they help us, they participate and break into this reality in sort of a regular way.

Nathan Connolly:
So it’s possible then what you have are a set of ideas about paranormal activity that African Americans, that African descended people, certainly different peoples on the continent itself already have a language for describing, and that by the time you get to the 20th century, the language about becomes part of that tradition. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Stephen C. Finley:
Well, yeah, that’s part of what I’m suggesting. I mean, this is how traditionally African Americans and Africans engage the world. I mean, the supernatural isn’t something so holy other and spooky, it’s a part of the sort of natural metaphysics. I mean, it is part of the real world, right? And so, there’s not this, again to use the term holy other, that the supernatural is this realm that’s so distinctly different from this one, it’s all part of the world in which we live.

Nathan Connolly:
Well, give me an example of an early account of an African American encounter with a UFO.

Stephen C. Finley:
Well, what I’ll give you is what I think is the most famous one. So the Nation of Islam starts around 1930. It’s unclear that they’re talking about UFOs that early, but by the early 1950s, they clearly are. One of ways then that UFO show up in one of the present iterations of the Nation of Islam under Minister Louis Farrakhan, is that on September 17th, 1985, he claims to have been taken into what he calls the Mother Wheel, an identified flying object, and those are his words. This vehicle came down and there were three lights from it, and took him into that particular vehicle, where he says he encountered his former leader, Elijah Muhammad, inside the craft. And so, that account is really important for the Nation of Islam. One cannot properly understand the Nation of Islam without giving serious theoretical attention to the role that UFOs play in the religion.

Nathan Connolly:
And part of the power of these narratives is that they’re actually based in religious texts and holy texts, correct? It’s not just about science fiction literature, or even Cold War era science fiction television, but that there is actually a biblical basis for many of these narratives that African Americans are sharing.

Stephen C. Finley:
There is, but I also think it’s all of that. I also do think that it’s science, it’s science fiction, it’s biblical texts, and then I would say that they’re either used to sort of inaugurate what I call a sense of transcendent blackness, or to deconstruct notions of race.

Nathan Connolly:
Right, right. Now, this is really an important point because so much of what in the mainstream society gives blackness meaning is of course, people of African descent encounter with the institution of slavery, with Jim Crow, with different forms of racism, that there’s a relationship between the way that African Americans form their identities as human beings and as communities, and the realities of discrimination. And by using the phrase transcendent blackness, you’re actually talking about a kind of blackness that derives its meaning outside of the parameters of white racism. Is that correct?

Stephen C. Finley:
You got it. I mean, I don’t even have to explain it. You’ve clearly said it.

Nathan Connolly:
Okay.

Stephen C. Finley:
And so, it seems to me that part of why that’s so significant is because the world is seen as so completely and almost totalizingly anti-black, that the structures here cannot support anything but anti-blackness. And so what do they do? They look out into the heavens to give them a sense of meaning in the concrete world, right? In a way that allows them to reenvision who they are, to empower themselves in a world that they see as against them, as negating, as anti-black, and so on. So it’s all about this world, but the other world, and the imagination, and the narratives, and the symbols gives them the strength and power to live in this world.

Nathan Connolly:
Stephen C. Finley is a religious scholar in African and African American studies at Louisiana State University.

Nathan Connolly:
That’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me in this look back at some of my favorite moments from BackStory. I’d love to know what you thought of these segments, or what some of your favorite BackStory moments have been. You’ll find us at backstoryradiodot.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio.

Nathan Connolly:
Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 10:
Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities, and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.