Corridor 3 - The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Photo credit: Equal Justice Initiative ∕ Human Pictures)

The BackStory Prize

Our Choice for the Best Public History Project in America

01.11.19

BackStory is ten years old, and to celebrate our birthday we’ve created an important new prize – the BackStory Prize for Public History. Join Ed, Brian, Joanne, Nathan and special guest judges Margot Lee Shetterly (author of Hidden Figures) and actor Chris Jackson (who played George Washington in “Hamilton” on Broadway) as they discuss the exhibitions, books, websites and museums competing to become the winner of the first ever BackStory Prize.

Funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory, change the narrative of race and representation.

public history

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Segments

Ed and Brian look back over 10 glorious years

Ed and Brian look back over a decade of BackStory, to the time when the “Backstory hosts” started entertaining and informing radio listeners.

broadcasting; public history; radio

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

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Ed Ayers: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: Now, the turn of a year is always a time for looking back, as well as looking forward.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, you know, it’s hard to believe, given how young we look Ed, but in 2018 BackStory marked its 10th anniversary on the air.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Brian Balogh: So, in this special show, we’re gonna take a brief look back and a major look forward.

Ed Ayers: Now when BackStory began, it wasn’t even called BackStory. Brian, our friend Peter Onuf, and I were embarrassingly enough-

Brian Balogh: Go ahead, say it, Ed.

Ed Ayers: The Backstory hosts.

Speaker 4: The Backstory hosts is a production of VFH Radio with the essential support of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.

Group: It’s The Backstory hosts.

Ed Ayers: Yup, that’s us, the Backstory hosts. Hi everybody. I’m Ed.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian.

Peter Onuf: And, I’m Peter.

Ed Ayers: Give us a call folks, 877-451-5098.

Brian Balogh: We tried out lots of different theme music. Some of it worked. Some of it not so much.

Ed Ayers: Now, in those early days, we took calls from listeners who had historical queries for us to answer.

Brian Balogh: That’s right, but remember to ask us about US history. Call us about something we actually know, or at least we think we know.

Brian Balogh: Over the years on BackStory, some things have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by new things. When Peter Onuf retired, Ed and I were joined by two wonderful new colleagues, Joanne Freeman and Nathan Connolly. Even though BackStory has evolved, one thing has remained constant-

Ed Ayers: Our devotion to the discipline of history.

Brian Balogh: No, no, Ed. It’s our bad jokes.

Brian Balogh: Well, I can’t blow bubbles. I can’t skate. I can’t swim, but I can do history.

Peter Onuf: Us, not know the answer to a question? Ed, you’ve got to be kidding, kidding around with history that is.

Brian Balogh: What is your fondest memory from the early days of BackStory?

Ed Ayers: Well, I remember the supernova that gave birth to BackStory. Andrew Windham, who was our godfather for the first years of the program who really imagined it and who helped it succeed, came up to Peter and me and said, “Hey, have you guys ever thought of doing a radio show about history kind of like Car Talk?” Peter said, “Now, there’s two problems with that. One, history’s not funny and two, we’re not funny.” Then, we immediately said, “Hm, well, if we did do that, we’ve got to have our friend Brian.”

Brian Balogh: We need someone else who isn’t funny.

Ed Ayers: Exactly. Somebody who is exactly as funny as we are, which is a low standard. Then, I remember coming into this very studio and looking at each other and thinking, “Hey, okay. Now, what do we do?”

Brian Balogh: Well, Ed, speaking of funny, as I recall, when Andrew pitched this idea to you, both of you guys just laughed. You said, “It was the most ridiculous thing.” I remember you pitching it to me and asking if I’d join you and I just laughed and we both said, “Who would want to listen to a bunch of historians for an hour?”

Ed Ayers: Especially if we weren’t talking really about mufflers and brake jobs, things like that.

Brian Balogh: Well, there’s another memory for you. We were not allowed to mention that show, very popular, on Public Radio about automobiles.

Ed Ayers: I know.

Brian Balogh: It was banned.

Ed Ayers: It was forbidden as was the word historiography, but I think after 10 years you and I can say whatever the Hell we want to say.

Brian Balogh: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, you’re right because it was seen as déclassé and also a deep comparative disadvantage to compare ourselves with the most popular shows on radio at the time. It didn’t take long for us to realize this is not going to be like Car Talk. We do have an expertise that people might be curious about and we’ll share it. That’s what was in common and we’re not related, but we were good friends and decided we would embark on this adventure on our own and just take it wherever it went.

Brian Balogh: One thing I do remember about the early days is that camaraderie seemed to come through to our listeners, if I can use the word plural and-

Ed Ayers: I’m sure all our spouses were listening to the show. Talking about call-ins reminds us that we were originally a radio show. [crosstalk 00:05:15].

Brian Balogh: History Hotline was one of many names.

Ed Ayers: It was. As a matter of fact, it was very heartening. Early on, some radio stations in Virginia, in particular, sort of took a leap of faith with us. I especially remember WMRA in Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley. Now, this actually sounds pretty good. We’ll run it and people liked it well enough.

Brian Balogh: To get ready for the big time, we auditioned with live radio. Do you remember that?

Ed Ayers: I’m trying to forget it.

Brian Balogh: Specifically, Ed, we’re on a call-in show, I think it was Norfolk Radio Station, and a caller called in with a very understandable question. He wanted to know if William and Mary, the university, was founded on pirate’s booty. All three of us are sitting around the table, we’re each pointing at the other person to answer it.

Ed Ayers: We never did answer that question, but we did come up with another question. What would be a better organizing principle for a radio show rather than a call-in? We decided that, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to come up with a theme each week.” Actually, originally, it was each month because it was too much work to imagine doing this every-

Brian Balogh: That’s when they didn’t have weeks. Those were only invented several years ago.

Ed Ayers: Then, the idea was, “Okay, if we did have a theme, what would hold it together?” Now, people will remember this because somebody mentioned it to me last week. People often say, “Hey, I really liked you on the radio.” Often it’s older listeners who don’t really know about podcasts and they kind of wonder where we went. One said, “You know, I really love your show. I liked it when you did the different centuries.”

Brian Balogh: Yeah.

Ed Ayers: The original idea was that Peter was 18th and 17th and 16th centuries, I was 19th, and you were 20th-

Brian Balogh: Guy.

Ed Ayers: Guy, exactly. That was the idea. We weren’t brothers, but we were dividing things up by the-

Brian Balogh: We all fought over the 21st century.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, that’s right. We pretended to each have the true answers to American history, which invariably lay in our different centuries, when, in fact, we quickly discovered, it always was in the 19th century. I was broad-spirited and allowed you guys to poach on my territory.

Brian Balogh: Some things never die, Ed.

Ed Ayers: I think that actually worked for quite a few years. It built in some narrative tension into the show. How could we-

Brian Balogh: Absolutely.

Ed Ayers: … claim to have been the pivotal moment here or there. I think the thing that’s made the show so interesting for us are the guests that we’ve had.

Brian Balogh: For sure.

Ed Ayers: I don’t know. It’s hundreds of people now who have joined us and have shown their faith in us that we will ask the questions that will kind of reveal the really interesting stuff that they had discovered. You never would have imagined there’s that many people who’ve explored this many topics in American history.

Brian Balogh: I have to confess. There’s one thing I miss very much from the past-

Ed Ayers: What’s that?

Brian Balogh: … even though it lasted every so briefly.

Ed Ayers: Yeah?

Brian Balogh: That is a segment that I invented and did the research for called Gear From Yesteryear.

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah. It’s coming back to me and now.

Ed Ayers: The sound of the harps. That dulcet melody reminds us that Brian, our own 20th-century historian, persists in hatching puzzles to humiliate us.

Peter Onuf: Oh, no. You mean it’s Gear From Yesteryear? He’s back with that?

Ed Ayers: Ah, Peter, don’t worry, man. You with your 18th-century rationalism and me with my 19th-century romanticism, we’re more than a match for our modernist friend over here.

Peter Onuf: Are you kidding? Well, okay. Take it away Brian!

Brian Balogh: Okay, you’ll recall that last week I described not just one but two pieces of gear. We actually had a double gear.

Peter Onuf: A double gear. Wouldn’t that work better on Car Talk?

Brian Balogh: Yeah, a double gear.

Peter Onuf: From yesteryear?

Brian Balogh: You got it, Peter. One item replaced the other. Now, I want you to know, not to put you on the spot, guys, that literally dozens of listeners wrote in and guessed this. They thought it was easy, okay?

Ed Ayers: Brian, I’m glad you’ve kept the faith in your earlier idea, but it’s a funny thing about BackStory, we don’t really fixate on the past very much. We talk about history, but we’re pretty forward-looking really. The one thing that’s remained constant is that we’ll try different strategies to connect with as broad an audience as possible for the best history possible. And, amazingly, there are other people trying to do that in their own way.

Brian Balogh: Thank goodness.

Ed Ayers: In fact, we decided this year that we would give the BackStory Prize For Public History.

How we drew up the longlist

Monica Blair, BackStory’s researcher was in charge of compiling the long-list of contenders for the BackStory Prize, which consisted of 100 books, websites, exhibitions, movies and institutions which made a great contribution to public history in 2018. Here Brian quizzes her on what made it in, and why.

public history

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Brian Balogh: I’m here with our executive editor, David Stenhouse, and our researcher, Monica Blair, and it’s a rare opportunity to dig into really the behind the scenes, the backstory of BackStory. David, I’ll start with you. We managed to survive for almost 10 years without a BackStory Prize, why a BackStory Prize in the first place?

David Stenhouse: Well, I joined the show this year, in BackStory’s 10th year, which is a big achievement for a show to start off as a Public Radio show, to make that successful transition to a podcast. One of the things I did was I sat down with my colleagues and the producers to say, “How do we mark this? What do we do?” We had a lot of conversations about the best way to mark 10 years. What we concluded after that meeting was, “Well, what does BackStory do well?” I think what BackStory does is great history and we communicate that with a big audience.

Monica Blair: Yes.

David Stenhouse: Then, the idea came, why don’t we set up a prize to recognize the people who are doing the same kind of great work that we try to do?

Monica Blair: Yes.

David Stenhouse: Who are doing great researcher, new, groundbreaking discoveries, and are helping focus that to a wide audience outside the academy, so drawing on the strength of the academy but communicating to a wider [inaudible 00:11:17]. It was a short little jump to come up with the idea that we should create the BackStory Prize to mark great public history that reaches a wide audience.

Brian Balogh: How’d you narrow it down?

David Stenhouse: Well, I think that was the challenge. Monica does wonderful research for us in the show week by week, so it was a task that I passed on to her and said, “I would really like you to come up with a long list.” You came up with a great long list, 100, I think on that one.

Monica Blair: Yeah, just over 100 entries.

Brian Balogh: He’s looking at you, Monica.

Monica Blair: I’m Monica. I’m the researcher here at BackStory and what I do is a lot of the research before the shows come out. I write long 10-page preps about the directions that history is moving on a particular subject. This is really a new kind of prep for me in that I wasn’t just thinking about the history of a particular subject, but I was thinking about the history of public history. How do we put history out into the world? How do we make it seen and known? Certainly, I think BackStory itself is an effort at this to try and move what we learn and know outside of the classroom into people’s cars and houses and gyms as you workout and listen.

Brian Balogh: Wherever they’re trapped.

Monica Blair: Yeah, wherever they’re trapped and looking for something else to listen to.

Monica Blair: What I really did for this is I started thinking about what is public history? What kind of forms can it take? Certainly, podcasts we’re on my list, but I also thought about movies, museums exhibits, plays, all sorts of different kinds of ways of reaching the public in ways that are really engaging and novel. Once I had a broad list of categories, I started really digging into things that have been produced in the last year in that particular mode.

Monica Blair: For instance, with museum exhibits, I started out thinking about some big names, the Smithsonian exhibits, museums in California, and Chicago, and big cities. Then, I also tried to capture some of the smaller, more grass-roots work as well. Some of these exhibits get a lot of press, so they get reviewed in academic journals of public history or they get reviewed in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but some of these smaller exhibits don’t necessarily get that kind of press. I think that both levels do really important work on the ground and in the world at large for enhancing our understanding of history and of our world today.

Brian Balogh: Monica, you got a close look at roughly 100 projects. Give us a sense of the range and which ones really stood out to you.

Monica Blair: Well, the range was quite large and so with films, you have things like Mudbound, for a podcast you have Nicki Hemmer’s A12, which spoke to me on a really personal level being from Charlottesville and UVA. In terms of exhibits, of course, we highlighted big national projects, but I also really loved a project by the students at the University of Missouri Kansas. They had a public history class that made a project on the making of LGBTQ history in Kansas City. I thought this was a wonderful example of the way that students themselves can also be producers of really great public history.

Brian Balogh: I agree with that. They sure pulled off a professional product.

Monica Blair: They really did and they had a traveling exhibit and a great website that you can check out yourself.

That’s almost as many judges as the Supreme Court.

It’s time for the judges to meet. Ed, Brian, Nathan and Joanne are joined by Chris Jackson, George Washington in the award winning musical “Hamilton” and Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the acclaimed “Hidden Figures.” The panel is chaired by David Stenhouse, Executive Editor of BackStory. Listen in as the judges debate!

Backstory; Hamilton (musical); broadcasting

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Brian Balogh: Earlier this year, all of us BackStory hosts sat down with a long, and I mean long, list that Monica had created for a morning-long judging meeting here in Charlottesville. We were chaired by our executive editor, David Stenhouse, and joined by two special guests who are both fans of BackStory, Chris Jackson, most famous as George Washington in the musical Hamilton, and Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the best-selling history book, ‘Hidden Figures’. Before we sat down, I grabbed a word with them.

Brian Balogh: I’m delighted to be here with Margot Lee Shetterly and Chris Jackson, who I want to thank for serving on our panel of judges, but I have to ask both of you, why did you do this? Are you crazy?

Margot Lee S.: Well, I was really intrigued by this idea of a prize that is dedicated to public history. So often we think of history, you think of history books, textbooks, classrooms, but public history, history’s something that’s relevant to all of us and it’s part of our daily lives even though we don’t necessarily know how it’s shaping that. I think pulling the curtain back on history and really telling the public this is something you need to know, I think that’s a unique proposition, so I was really excited to participate.

Brian Balogh: Well, we’re certainly glad you did. Hey, Chris, why did you get entangled in this?

Chris Jackson: Everywhere you turn, history’s living and breathing. As we shine a light on the moments that have shaped our times, it empowers us to move through this space and it defines our relationships in a way that creates new history by acknowledging where we’ve been, the hold that it has on us, and how it’s shaped and affected us, and how we can continue to move the conversation forward, further our understanding, and change our today. I think that’s the times that we’re in. Anytime you get to participate in something like this that further spotlights the work that these folks in the world are doing, I think that it makes everything better around us.

Brian Balogh: We asked you to make your way through dozens of entries for this prize, films, museum exhibitions, websites, plays, books. How’d you do it? What was your strategy?

Chris Jackson: I look for the things that I recognized first, that I already-

Brian Balogh: You’re not his fan, Chris.

Chris Jackson: I did. I examined why they affected me the way that they did and then I took every opportunity to look into the things that I didn’t know, much like my experience with BackStory. I’m constantly amazed by the number of things that are illuminated that I thought I knew something about and really didn’t. That’s what the most interesting to me, that’s what I pursue. As I said earlier, this list has given me enough material to last for the next year.

Brian Balogh: Wow. Wow. Well, we’ll check back with you soon.

Chris Jackson: Okay.

Brian Balogh: They’ll be a quiz by the way.

Chris Jackson: Oh, okay.

Brian Balogh: Margot?

Margot Lee S.: My strategy was similar. There were a number of the items on the list that I immediately recognized, but I was really curious about the ones that I didn’t, the ones that I hadn’t heard about that were on a list that for some reason had been selected as important public history. I’m with Chris. I’ve got a Netflix queue and museums to visit from now until 2020 or whatever. That was part of the exciting thing. I think that’s really one of the wonderful things about BackStory and about this award is there’s a sense of discovery.

Brian Balogh: But, it was time for the meeting to begin.

David Stenhouse: I’ll just make some introductory remarks. Thank you so much for setting aside the time to go through this list. This is the first time we’ve done this and I think it’s a great way to mark BackStory’s 10th anniversary. What has BackStory done so well for the last decade is make great history available to a broad audience and what’s the best way to mark that? To reward other people who are doing that same kind of stuff. I hope today we’re going to finish up with an agreed winner who will represent the best aspect of that, so something based on real research, solid history, but also reaches a big audience. Of course, because we are multidisciplinary, it’s going to make chairing this meeting a challenge because we’re looking at how does he compare a podcast to a book.

David Stenhouse: What I propose to do is go around the table and to ask you whether you can let me know, just in headline form and a few introductory remarks, what your top three or four or five would be. The ones you would be happy for us to walk into this room with them having won. Ed, do you want to start with that?

Ed Ayers: I would. The three that I propose are the National Monument to Peace and Justice, Mudbound, and Tower. The rest, they’re all [inaudible 00:20:17] for those three other than intrinsic excellence and civic value, is that they seem to think about form more than some of the others which are relatively straightforward representations.

David Stenhouse: Thank you. Brian.

Brian Balogh: I agree with Peace and Justice and with Mudbound. Simply because I think it would be odd if we didn’t have a podcast in the discussion I have long been a huge fan of the BBC podcast, Witness.

David Stenhouse: Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: One of the things that I brought to the exercise was thinking about what a role for BackStory might be to increase the visibility of a project that might not be widely discussed and talked about. As much as impact and existing impact was part of our assessment, I also was thinking for what kinds of publication work, what would an award from BackStory actually help to elevate its stature, bring it to a wider audience. It was actually on that axis alone that I decided not to support the Equal Justice Initiative Memorial because I know it’s getting a lot of great attention. It’s a brilliant project. It’s a brilliant solution. I’m happy to have much more specific conversations about it.

Nathan Connolly: When I was looking at the Durham website, for instance, the Uneven Ground website, as somebody who has worked on websites and the challenges of conveying important information via the web, I was really impressed at the breadth of the Durham site. Basically, it goes from the indigenous period to North Carolina all the way to the present. I thought it did a really good job as a user-friendly platform in conveying really thorny issues like tenant activism and landlord exploitation.

David Stenhouse: Joanne?

Joanne Freeman: Okay, the few that I picked, I think I was partly picking things that I thought obviously were really history of substance, but also that I felt that they … They certainly grabbed me on an emotional level and in that way, a powerful way that I think gives them a public power as well. That was where the National Memorial of Peace and Justice came from. Nathan, you totally gave me permission to include ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor’, which was actually one of the initial things that I agreed with. Then, I was like, “Can I put Mister Rogers on this?”

Joanne Freeman: The thing about that, I watched that on a plane, one of my recent meanderings. The things that grabbed me about it actually, in addition to the fact that … And, I agree with what Nathan said, that it really shows you the power of public television. It also put Mister Rogers in a very contemporary mode. It brings him up very close to the present in a way that made his project look different and made the present look different in a way that I think good public history does. So, I put that there too and also, as I said, because I was one of, I think, many idiots on an airplane crying at all of the things that that implied.

Joanne Freeman: I have not seen Mudbound the film. I’ve heard much about it.

Chris Jackson: The first one on my list is the Vietnam documentary by Ken Burns. I’m 43 now, so for me, it … I’ve watched it twice. It took me forever to actually get to it. The thing that struck me was, a conflict that spanned so many years, my generation was defined … My parents were living it while they were having my generation. I found that, as a kid growing up in Southern Illinois, we played war every day. I could tell you just about every plane that flew in World War II. We built the models. We played soldier in the back yard. As I was struck by the fact that we were playing those war games as eight, nine, 10-year-olds, it’s at the age of my daughter now, and had no idea that the conflict was so incredibly fresh.

Chris Jackson: I have an uncle who was my mom’s cousin who was a Green Beret. Every year, as my family spoke about how affected he was, I always thought he was the best guy in the world, the most fun.

Margot Lee S.: I have to say, when I first saw the list, the problem that I had was what criteria to use. For example, is it fair to compare a small documentary film to a fictional film, one that’s not actual history but represents history? I think that if we separated it out, it might be easier to apply criteria to each and not have people say, “Well, you have Ken Burns versus the museum versus … How the heck did you guys make that choice?”

Nathan Connolly: I was thinking as we were trying to determine what makes a BackStory award a BackStory award? One of them that we really do mull over as a group around every single show and as we even think about topics are things that are either or sometimes both topical and evergreen, so the thing about the history behind the headlines tagline. Is there something about the Vietnam War that strikes as both as extraordinarily necessary for thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq and that will be evergreen? I guess there’s something about Mudbound that taps into universal evergreen and yet, at the same time, we need to really revisit the interdependency of the black and white experience right now more than ever. I want to know if there’s a way for us to think about the character of the show as a way to get at and sharpen our own criteria.

And the winner is...

Ed and Brian announce the judges’ unanimous verdict.

National Memorial for Peace and Justice; public history

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Ed Ayers: In that spirit, thinking about what defines BackStory. In some ways, it is the discovery of people and stories and perspectives that are not otherwise heard. If we were making that sort of criteria, what’s in the spirit of the 10 years of the work that we’ve done? It is surprise and for rubbing against the grain with these [inaudible 00:26:51].

Brian Balogh: In the end, after a four-hour, that’s four-hour, meeting, it was the unanimous decision of the BackStory Prize jury that the winner of the first BackStory Prize should be the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ed Ayers: You know, Brian? This is so immediately powerful. It’s a monument to lynching, to the hidden, obscured history of men who were taken and illegally hanged from trees and light poles and street lamps, all these terrible things. The monument evokes the horror of that in a symbolic way. For every lynching victim, there is a heavy stone monolith hanging from the ceiling of the building with the name of the place where it happened inscribed like a tombstone on it. Then, outside of that building, they have the slabs with the same inscriptions laying on the ground waiting, people from those counties to come claim them, to take them back home, and to acknowledge their counties complicity in these crimes.

Ed Ayers: The project began by collecting dirt in jars from all the places where the lynchings had taken place. So, not only were we impressed by the bravery of acknowledging this history, which is deeply researched, which has years of historical examination behind it, but also by the vision that America could be better by acknowledging this history.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, it’s that interactive nature, Ed, that I was so struck by. In this digital age, this is a way of taking the concrete, mingling it with our historical memory, and pretty much shouting out to much of America, “You need to own this. You need to take responsibility for this. You need to take these slabs back to your own community to remember them forever.”

Ed Ayers: You can start seeing the impact of this. Here in Charlottesville, really just a few hundred yards from where we record, a lynching from the early 20th century was discovered, and there’s an effort here to acknowledge, to memorialize that lynching. This is not merely a monument that’s in one place that does the work of one place but radiates out across the country. It seems that as much as we admired all the acts of history this last year, this one emerging in April of 2018 seemed to be a landmark in the ways that we might think about parts of history that we thought could never be memorialized. Now, we see that they can.

Brian Balogh: In fact, Ed, a group from Charlottesville visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018. While they were there, they heard from Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the equal justice initiative.

Bryan Stevenson: We’re not free in America. We’re burdened by a history of racial bigotry and bias that’s created a kind of smog that’s in the air. It doesn’t matter where you live, whether you live in Charlottesville or Montgomery or New York or Los Angeles and Oakland, it’s in the air and we’ve all been infected and compromised and contaminated by this legacy, this history, of racial inequality that our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents should have done more. I’m not blaming anybody. Should have done more. You deal with it. Because of that, we have inherited this legacy.

Bryan Stevenson: What’s exciting to me about what you’re doing is that a year ago, Charlottesville was a sight of something ugly and painful. It was the place where that legacy, that history showed itself in some difficult ways. What you’re doing this week is modeling what every community in America needs to do, which is to talk more honestly about what this history has to do. That’s where this begins. We’re going to have to talk about some things in this country that we haven’t talked about before.

Bryan Stevenson: We have to talk about the fact that we are a post-genocide society. What happened to native people when Europeans came to this continent was a genocide. We slaughtered millions of native people. Half the states in America are native words. We don’t ever talk about that. Native words, but we made the people leave and we killed them by the millions but we didn’t call it genocide. We said, “No, those native people, they’re savages.” We came up with this narrative of racial difference to justify the violence that we perpetrated on those souls. We didn’t even feel bad about what we did.

Bryan Stevenson: That narrative of racial difference was cooked into the very culture, the economy, the social systems, the political systems that formed our nation. We, from the very beginning, got indifferent to what racial bigotry can do to other people. It’s that narrative of racial difference that I believe made us comfortable with two and a half centuries of slavery. I really don’t think that the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude and forced labor. I am persuaded that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we perpetuated. It was the ideology of white supremacy.

Bryan Stevenson: We created this idea that somehow black people aren’t like other people. They’re not fully human. The courts said that they’re three-fifths human. It said, “Black people can’t do this. They’re not evolved. They can’t do that. They can’t do this,” and that ideology, that narrative of racial difference, that was the true evil of American slavery. If you read the 13th amendment it talks about ending involuntary servitude, ending forced labor, but it doesn’t say anything about ending this narrative of racial differences, this ideology of white supremacy.

Bryan Stevenson: Because of that, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865. I don’t. I think it just evolved. It turned into decades where we had lynchings and violence and terrorism. That’s how this man in Charlottesville could be pulled from a train and hanged and then brutalized and shot and no one was ever held accountable. It had to do with this reign of terror that we were tolerating in this country. We haven’t talked about what that did to us.

Ed Ayers: That was Bryan Stevenson, founder at the Equal Justice Initiative and creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, winner of the first annual BackStory Prize.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today. If you’re interested in looking at the long list for the BackStory Prize, it’s on our website, backstoryradio.org. You can keep the conversation going online by sending an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @backstoryradio.

Brian Balogh: Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: Funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory change the narrative of race and representation.

Nathan Connolly: 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, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

David Stenhouse: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is a Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

David Stenhouse: BackStory was created by Andrew Windham of Virginia Humanities.