Transcript
Into America
Teach the Truth
Archival Recording: Okay, sorry, let’s go. Buddy system, anybody see anybody that’s not there that was there before? Great.
Trymaine Lee: On a Saturday in early March, roughly 30 middle and high school students loaded onto a large passenger bus in Central Florida.
Archival Recording: Yeah, see, that’s amazing. You should definitely check out that part.
Archival Recording: Okay. Seats, everyone. Let’s go.
Archival Recording: Here we go. Go, guys, take a seat, please.
Lee: It may be the weekend, with no school. But these kids, some with their families, are on this bus to learn.
Marvin Dunn: Get your books. Students, the Willie James Howard story is in your book. Tells what happened there.
Lee: They are on the Teach the Truth Tour, two full days of traveling across the state, visiting sites important to Florida’s history through Black eyes. The man leading the tour is Dr. Marvin Dunn, a retired professor who has made it his mission to make sure this history is known, how Black people in Florida lived and died in the face of white supremacist violence.
Right now, he’s telling the students about where they’re headed next, to the grave of Willie James Howard, a Black boy killed by white vigilantes, who was never brought to justice.
Dunn: Willie James was a 15-year-old Black boy living in Live Oak, Florida in 1944. On a Christmas vacation, he was allowed to work and a five-and-dime store in downtown Live Oak. That was unusual. Blacks were used to work outside cleaning up. But Willie James was smart, handsome, fast-talker, a great singer.
Lee: Dr. Dunn has spent decades uncovering and documenting these tragedies. The students are carrying with them his book, Florida Through Black Eyes.
Dunn: Willie James fell in love with a white girl named Cynthia Goff who also work in that store. She was a high school beauty queen. He wrote her a letter, telling her he, you know how y’all do it, I like you. You like me. if you don’t like me, don’t tell me.
Archival Recording: Check the box.
Dunn: Yeah.
Lee: Dr. Dunn says the boy’s letter ended up in the hands of the girl’s father, who, along with two other white men, took Willie James and his father into their car at gunpoint.
Dunn: From downtown Live Oak where this started, they drive down to the Suwannee River, to a place called Sulpher Springs. That’s where we’re going this afternoon. On the way to the river, they tie up Willie James’s hands and feet. Mr. Goff did that.
When they get to the river, they get out of the car and cocked his pistol to Willie James’s head and tells him, jump or take what’s in this barrel. So Willie James takes out his little wallet, some say he had a little Bible with some verses and gives that to his dad, who’s about to watch his son die. And his father says, well, son, I’m glad for the church. And Willie James jumps into the Suwannee River and drowns.
Lee: The men responsible were never charged with the crime. They claimed that Willie jumped to escape a beating and that his own father wouldn’t save him. For decades, his death was considered a suicide.
Dunn: Once we go to the cemetery, then we’ll go out to the Suwannee River.
Lee: The bus arrives in Live Oak, Willie James’s hometown. Dr. Dunn leads the students into an old cemetery. It’s green and open, surrounded by mighty oaks covered in Spanish moss.
Willie James is buried here. But for 60 years, his body lay in an unmarked grave until a new owner of the funeral home, Douglas Udell Sr. found a book belonging to a Black mortician. The book said Willie James was buried in this plot, and that his cause of death had been lynching.
Douglas Udell Jr., the son of that funeral homeowner, came out to talk with the students.
Douglas Udell Jr.: — here in Suwannee County. And in that book, my father came across the name Willie James Howard. Now, by that name, it said murdered by three racists, and he was unable to find any death —
Lee: In a semicircle surrounding Mr. Udell, the students listened with rapt attention
Udell Jr.: So my father took it upon himself many, many years after a lot of research, a lot of reading, trying to find more information about this young man here, he decided that it was not proper for this young man to not have a funeral service, for no one to, you know, be able to come and pay their respects and honor him in a funeral service.
Dunn: Touch this stone. Man, this is powerful, guys.
Lee: Dr. Dunn invites the students to honor Willie James.
Dunn: Touch this stone. If anyone else wants to come up and touch the stone, please do. Let him know you’re here. Let him know you came to visit.
Lee: Dr. Dunn brought the students on the Teach the Truth Tour here, to this grave, because he fears stories like this will be buried by the state of Florida.
Archival Recording: Governor Ron DeSantis’s message was clear. He wants to stop woke activism. That’s the name of the new legislative proposal, he announced on Wednesday.
Lee: In 2022, under the leadership of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act. It’s short for the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act. The law is part of a nationwide conservative movement to restrict how schools can talk about race and sexuality. About a dozen other states have similar laws in the books.
The Florida law says issues around race must be taught in a quote, “objective manner.” It goes on to say students should not be instructed to, quote, “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions in which he or she played no part in, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” Educators who violate this law could face termination or loss of state funding.
Dr. Dunn says it’s not his intention to make anyone feel guilty when he teaches history. That’s not the point at all.
Dunn: Correct. Are we here to be angry at anybody?
Archival Recording: No.
Dunn: Are we here to point fingers at anybody?
Archival Recording: No.
Dunn: Or make them feel guilty?
Archival Recording: No.
Dunn: The men who killed Willie James are dead. I’ve seen their graves. There’s no reason to bring any anger towards anybody out here today. But simply to respect this boy and his spirit and what happened to him.
Lee: DeSantis insists the law does not bar schools from teaching Black history. But critics, educators and historians like Dr. Dunn say it’s not what’s spelled out in the Stop WOKE Act that worries them, it’s what’s left unsaid. Because the law is so vague, and the penalties are so steep, Dr. Dunn fears schools will shy away from telling these difficult stories.
Dunn: Well, we don’t want anyone to think that the Teach the Truth Tours are about anger —
Archival Recording: Right.
Dunn: — or about making somebody feel guilty. Your governor does not want you on this bloody ground. He doesn’t want us here. That’s why we’re here. That’s all the more reason to be here, because our history is then swathed , particularly the difficult stories like what happened to this boy.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee and this is Into America.
This week, we go to Florida, where the government is attempting to control how history is taught, especially around issues of race. And I’m on the bus with students who want to learn the state’s history, its whole history, with an educator who is stepping up to teach the truth.
Dunn: I’m Dr. Marvin Dunn. I am a retired professor from Florida International University. I taught psychology there for 35 years, and I retired as chairman of the Psychology Department.
Lee: Marvin Dunn is 82 years old, but you wouldn’t guess it from the way he leads the students from start to stop. I caught up with him during a break in the action.
And how do you spend your time in Florida? What have you focused on?
Dunn: There was a riot in Miami in 1980, and I did a book on that riot. And as a part of doing the book, I look for the history of Miami, Black Miami, and there was nothing. So I decided to write a book about Black Miami in the twentieth century, and that moved —
Lee: As he researched the book, Dr. Dunn began to turn his focus from psychology to history.
Dunn: When I was doing the Black Miami book, I found instances of anti-Black violence in Miami, lynchings in Miami. I began to wonder, well, how many more lynchings do I not know about in Florida?
I started traveling around the state to places that I had heard that there were racial problems, incidents, and collecting data, talking to folks who were descendants of people who were lynched, or who were descendants of people who did it, and trying to put together those stories in a book, which is “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes”.
Dunn: Why don’t most people in Florida in this country know about these stories?
Dunn: Most people in Florida don’t know about these stories because they’re brutal stories. They’re violent stories. They don’t end well, and those are the kinds of stories people push back away from very quickly. You can’t blame them. I mean, these are very, very terrible things that happened. But we’ll never get past them unless we do recognize what happened and reconcile feelings about those things.
Lee: One of those stories that Dr. Dunn has documented and is, in fact, a stop on this tour is Rosewood.
Dunn: Rosewood matters because in 1920, there were not that many independent, fairly wealthy Black towns in this country. Rosewood was one of those.
Lee: In the early 1900s, Rosewood was a tiny Black town of about 200 people, just a few miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and about an hour’s drive from Gainesville.
Archival Recording: Rosewood had been a prosperous place. The families owned the turpentine plant and cut much of the cypress for school pencils in this country.
Dunn: And then it kind of disappeared almost overnight. Four, five days, all gone.
Lee: On January 1st, 1923, a white woman named Fannie Taylor, claims she was assaulted by a Black man. This was a lie, all part of covering up an affair. Hundreds of KKK members descended on the town and white mobs killed two innocent Black men in their quest for a suspect who didn’t exist.
As the two white men among the mob were killed while attacking a Black family’s home, news of a so-called race war began to spread. And even more white vigilantes came to terrorize the Black residents of Rosewood. NBC News did a series of stories about Rosewood in 1994.
Archival Recording: One hundred residents driven into the North Florida swamp, hunted like rabbits. Newspapers at the time reported eight dead. Survivors say many more were killed.
Lee: The violence continued for eight days as Rosewood’s Black residents desperately tried to escape, many of them hid in the house of a single white family, the Wrights. That home was the only building left standing after the massacre. Some were able to escape by train to nearby towns like Gainesville.
Archival Recording: But no one was prosecuted ever. Fear kept Black families from returning even to sell their land.
Lee: Like so many other instances of racial terror in this country, the history of Rosewood was buried for decades. The story resurfaced in the ‘80s as the remaining survivors began to come forward and share their stories. Ten years later, the state government actually took some responsibility for what happened.
Archival Recording: The Florida State Legislature tonight approved the settlement for the survivors of Rosewood, that Black community wiped out 71 years ago. Survivors will get up to $150,000 a piece.
Lee: In 1994, Florida designated $2.1 million to settle with the survivors of Rosewood, a move that made national headlines and elevated the story of what happened. A few years later, filmmaker John Singleton, famous for Boyz n the Hood, made a movie depicting the massacre, starring Ving Rhames and Don Cheadle.
Rosewood (Movie, 1997), Don Cheadle as Sylvester Carrier: Now, we own this dear land. We pay taxes on it. Now, we don’t bother nobody around here. We keep to ourselves. Now colored folk just can’t be running all the time. There comes a time when you got to stand up and defend your rights.
Lee: Rosewood still exists as a town today. But there is almost nothing of the original Black community. There’s a small sign on the side of a two-lane highway, commemorating what happened a century ago. But all the Black homes had been burned, and most of the buildings gone as well.
And until recently, the small unincorporated community had no Black landowners. That was until 2008, when Dr. Dunn bought a five-acre plot there, and that’s where the tour it is headed now.
Dunn: We’re gonna be in Rosewood in just a minute.
Lee: The bus rumbles off the highway, down a hidden dirt road. The land is wooded and brushy. The group files off the bus and follows Dr. Dunn down a path to a clearing in the middle of the property.
Richard Dunn: That’s not that bad thing. They sting your feet a little bit, and you’re good. The bugs aren’t that bad.
Lee: Reverend Richard P. Dunn, no relation to Dr. Marvin Dunn, has traveled with the tour as well, leading prayers and songs at the historical sites.
Rev. Richard Dunn: We’re ready now?
M. Dunn: Let’s hear you.
R. Dunn: One, two, three.
Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson, sung by Reverend Richard P. Dunn and Marvin Dunn: Life every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise above the —
Lee: As they stand together, the pastor sings of struggle.
Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson, sung by Reverend Richard P. Dunn and Marvin Dunn: Let us march on till victory is won.
(CLAPPING)
M. Dunn: All right. Sit down for a minute. Sit down for a minute.
Lee: The students had been reading up on Rosewood ahead of this visit. But Marvin Dunn, their professor for the day, wants them to feel it.
M. Dunn: This is sacred ground. The reason that we purchased this property is because the railroad runs through it. And as you know the story, folks were evacuated on that railroad and several lives were saved because of that.
Can you imagine late at night you’re in your house, and now you hear people shooting and running? And what do you do? You grab the kids, and you get out of the house. And that’s what people did. They just left. We are here to save that history.
Lee: Dr. Dunn ushered the group to the old railroad line, up array stretch of dirt, some 10-feet wide.
M. Dunn: Come all the way up onto the railroad track, please, facing me, so we can all walk together.
Lee: The actual tracks themselves had been removed long ago. But it’s easy to see the old path of the railroad lined with trees.
M. Dunn: Don’t trip. I usually have a stick to run the snakes away. But with this many folks, they hear us coming.
Lee: We walked a few minutes along these phantom tracks until we reached the property line, where we can see all the way to where downtown Rosewood once stood.
M. Dunn: That’s where the juke joint was. Some of y’all are too young to know what a juke joint was. That’s where people party. A club, right down here, all of that, right down here, downtown Rosewood.
Lee: Dr. Dunn wants to turn his property into a park, where anyone can visit and learn the history. Some neighbors have pushed back, saying they’re concerned about the traffic. Others, Dr. Dunn says, just want the past to be forgotten.
M. Dunn: So everybody in Rosewood is not racist. Everyone in Rosewood is not out to keep this history hidden. But some people are. And sometimes the smallest group has the loudest voice.
Lee: He’s had personal experience with this loud, angry voice.
M. Dunn: September 5th, I come out here. I was here with four Black men, one of whom was my son. And then my neighbor who lives across the street, who I have not spoken to since I’ve been out here, he rolls out in his truck, and he says, what’s going on out here?
Lee: The neighbor began yelling about people parked on his side of the road.
M. Dunn: He gets in his truck, goes back into his yard and comes out at full speed, leaving skid marks and heading straight for us, and yelling, niggas, niggas out here. Too many niggas, get out of here. Niggas are coming. Rushing through, almost killed my son. If we hadn’t stepped out of the road, we could have been killed.
Lee: The local police charged the man with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. And federal prosecutors are now charging the man with hate crimes. It’s a stark reminder that history, even its most ugly parts, still lives on today.
M. Dunn: No legislature, no governor, no president can take our history away —
R. Dunn: Amen.
Lee: — especially from our young people. And that’s why we’re here to save this history for them. Not to make anybody angry, not to upset anybody. We’re here for our own purposes. The governor says there’s a woke mob in Florida. He’s right. It’s us.
R. Dunn: Amen.
M. Dunn: We are that woke mob.
R. Dunn: Amen. Amen. (CLAPPING)
M. Dunn: All right.
Lee: When we come back, how Florida’s education laws have already begun to impact what’s being taught, and the students reflect on what their history means in this moment.
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Archival Recording: Another bill DeSantis signed today is named the Stop WOKE Act.
Lee: Dr. Marvin Dunn started these Teach the Truth tours in direct response to Florida’s new Stop WOKE law that limits how schools and companies can teach about race and sexuality.
Archival Recording: The bill bans any lessons that could make white students or grown adults feel blamed for historic wrongs.
Lee: The stated purpose of the law is to protect vulnerable children from harmful ideologies that would make them feel responsible or guilty or ashamed for the actions of their ancestors.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL): No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other. (CROWD CHEERING)
Lee: Governor Ron DeSantis is trying to position himself as a national conservative leader and is considered an early front runner for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election. He’s taking a hard stance on immigration policies, transgender rights, and so-called critical race theory.
DeSantis: We are not going to categorize you based on your race. We are not gonna tell some kindergartener that they’re an oppressor based on their race and what may have happened 100 or 200 years ago, and we’re not going to tell other kids that they’re oppressed based on their race.
Lee: For the past several years, conservatives have thrown around this term, critical race theory. CRT is a college level concept, but it has become shorthand and a boogeyman as a kind of catch-all for everything they don’t like about race talk or the idea of systemic racism. CRT, no doubt, has been politicized and weaponized. This, for example, is from a local newscast in Orlando.
Archival Recording: All public school districts in our area say they don’t even teach critical race theory. But if a parent thinks they do, the new proposal would help them sue because their attorney’s fees will be covered if they win.
Lee: The law allows parents to bring legal challenges against a school or teacher if they suspect they’re teaching race or sexuality in a way that violates the guidelines.
DeSantis: It’s an overall worldview that many people are trying to inject into our kids’ education, and that is not a true education, that is indoctrination. These parents are gonna be able to have recourse if the school districts are not following Florida standards.
Lee: It’s this threat of legal action, not to mention job loss, that critics of the law like Dr. Dunn and the students or parents on the tour fear could lead schools to teach a watered-down version of history, or simply not teach it at all.
Just last week, “The New York Times” reported on the confusion tearing through the textbook industry, with publishers scrambling to avoid scrutiny from Florida lawmakers. For example, this one publisher, Studies Weekly, created a pamphlet for elementary students in Florida with a story about Rosa Parks that eliminated any mention of her race, which as we all know is pretty central to her story. They said it was never to comply with the state’s law. That pamphlet simply read, quote, “She was told to move to a different seat,” with no reference to segregation, let alone who was doing the segregating.
Now in this case, Florida’s Education Department pushed back, saying they did have to mention race. Studies Weekly eventually withdrew the pamphlet, but their original decision and all the confusion speaks to the dangerously slippery slope of all this anti-wokeness.
Earlier this year, Governor DeSantis took the law a step further when he took aim at the College Board’s new advanced placement course, AP African American Studies.
Archival Recording: Republican Governor Ron DeSantis banning the pilot AP course in Florida. His latest move, restricting the teaching of race and sexuality in public schools.
Lee: The interdisciplinary course covers topics from the origins of the African diaspora to more contemporary issues. It’s in its first pilot year in about 60 schools across the country, including several in Florida. Next year, it was supposed to hit hundreds more. But in January, the DeSantis administration rejected the course.
Archival Recording: Florida’s Department of Education sending this letter, quote, “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law, and significantly lacks educational value.”
Lee: Governor DeSantis took issue with the course, mentioning topics like Black Lives Matter and sexual orientation, and so the class had a leftist agenda.
DeSantis: When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.
Lee: Within a month of DeSantis’s action, the College Board unveiled an edited curriculum for AP African American Studies for the entire country.
Archival Recording: Tonight, the College Board unveiling a new framework for Advanced Placement African American Studies, after pressure from critics to not include topics like Black Lives Matter and sexual orientation.
Lee: The College Board has maintained they don’t answer to politicians, and the changes were not made because of Florida’s criticism. But the new curriculum does look different, including the removal of several notable authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Bell Hooks. And phrases that were removed from the curriculum included institutional racism, structural racism, systemic racism, Black feminist literary thought, queer theory, and mass incarceration.
What’s happening in Florida is a mess to say the least. And a bit of a backpedal, since 1994, Florida has been one of the few states that actually mandates the study of Black history in public schools, something that DeSantis brings up often.
DeSantis: You must teach about African American history. You teach about the institution and the abolition of slavery. You teach about the failure of the post-Civil War amendments to take hold, and how you needed to fight for civil rights. We teach all of that. But what we will not do is let people distort history to try to serve their current ideological goals. (CROWD CHEERING)
Lee: But there’s no real mechanism to enforce teaching this history. We asked every single one of Florida’s 67 school districts, how they teach African American history. While most didn’t get back to us, some responded with detailed information about their curriculum.
But according to the state’s African American History Task Force, only 11 out of those 67 school districts qualify as exemplary, meaning they meet the state’s criteria.
None of the districts who responded to us say they teach about the lynching of Willie James Howard. Several districts told us they do talk about the massacre in Rosewood, and most say they teach the Ocoee massacre, which is part of the state’s recommended curriculum.
Ocoee is one of the stops on the Teach the Truth Tour. On our trip, Dr. Marvin Dunn gathers the students around the grave of July Perry.
M. Dunn: Mr. Perry decided to vote, and this was a very dangerous thing for Black man to do in Florida in 1920.
Lee: Mr. Perry was killed by a white mob after helping to register other Black men to vote. The mob didn’t stop there. Dozens of other Black libertarians were killed, with some reports claiming as many as 80 people dead. Homes were burned, and hundreds fled.
M. Dunn: You’re supposed to learn about the Ocoee incident, not Rosewood, not anyplace else, Ocoee. But the history books have it wrong.
Lee: As the story goes, July Perry first shot and killed two white men who had come to harass him at his home.
M. Dunn: I need a strong reader. One of you, students, step forward. Would you read?
Archival Recording: The records at the funeral home state that the men were killed accidentally by other whites who were firing into the Perry home.
M. Dunn: Thank you. That’s perfect. The two white men were shot by other white men surrounding the house. They shot each other, shooting through the house. The record is wrong. July Perry didn’t kill anybody.
Lee: If classes don’t get this right, this massacre that schools are supposed to teach, it begs the question, what will they get wrong under these new guidelines, which could leave out even more important facts.
On the Teach the Truth bus, between stops, the students got to talking about why learning their history matters even more in this moment, while history is under attack.
Vanessa Blaze : We need to learn about our history. We need to know where we came from.
Lee: Vanessa Blaze is 17. She’s a senior in high school. To her, all this anti-CRT, anti-woke fervor feels like erasure of Black history.
Blaze : — just because that little white kid in the class might feel some type of guilt, but we’re censoring ourselves in that process, and that’s how history repeats itself, when we don’t stay open to learning the truth, when we just are in denial and we’re not willing to open our minds to it.
Lee: One of the youngest students on the bus, at just 12 years old, is Xavier Watkins . Even though he wouldn’t be old enough to take the AP African American Studies class, the fact that DeSantis tried to ban it, made an impact.
Xavier Watkins : What I think it is, is that they don’t want us to know the history of ourselves so that we are able to not know who we are, or what we could be, and how they rebel against the government. But if we were to have idea, then we would probably know how to fight back against the government if they were doing something wrong.
Lee: Xavier is on this trip with his grandmother. Most students are here with a parent, grandparent, and auntie or uncle. It’s a heavy history tour, no doubt. Like many other students, Marcus Greene from Hialeah, Florida, has felt the gravity of the tour.
Marcus Greene : My eyes have been open to how we’ve been treated; you get what I’m saying? Like, how strong our people really are.
Lee: Marcus was especially moved by the story of Willie James Howard.
Greene : We visited a 15-year-old’s grave site, and I’m 15 years of age and —
Lee: That has to sit with you in some deep way, that you are literally his same age.
Greene : Most definitely. When I touched his headstone, I really felt a sense of serenity and gratitude, you know. That could have been me.
Lee: For 16-year-old Morgan Everett , the tour has given this old history, the breath of new life.
Morgan Everett : Going on this trip, it has changed so much, because being able to go and see these sites and see the graves, it has made it like real.
Lee: You know, one thing that has come up time and again in this debate is that they don’t want things taught in the classroom that might make some people feel uncomfortable. And then we’re on this trip, there are a lot of uncomfortable truths. When you hear that the concern is about the discomfort of some, how does that make y’all feel?
Morgan Everett : It makes me feel like it needs to be brought out. They should feel uncomfortable, because we need to have these uncomfortable conversations about our history, so that it won’t repeat itself.
Lee: Back in Rosewood, I put that same question to Dr. Dunn.
M. Dunn: Teaching about lynchings, mass murder ought to make people uncomfortable. It ought to make people uneasy, but it shouldn’t make them feel guilty. The folks who burned out this town, the white folks who did that, have long been dead.
But there is no way to teach history without having the emotional aspect of it included. And once you try to take that out of it, you don’t have history anymore. You have a whitewashed version of what happened, without any real sense of the depth of the problem and the event.
Lee: Marvin Dunn has seen the way history can be forgotten. He recalls asking a group of high school students about the Miami riots of 1980, the event that got him interested in uncovering Florida’s Black history in the first place.
M. Dunn: I realized when I asked them, how many of y’all remember the 1980 riots, and this was some 10 years later, not a hand went up. It occurred to me that people think that they’re gonna know who George Floyd was 10 years from now, 20 years from now, they will not.
The United States will move as fast as it can away from the George Floyd incident, because it’s painful, because it hurt us, and that’s the way we are. That’s where most people are. But history comes with pain. There is no painless history. It all comes with pain. But to avoid that is to avoid the truth, is to avoid reconciliation, and is to hide and cover up the facts of what happened.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: You can (inaudible).
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: That is (inaudible). So I’m thinking that might be the easiest, is to make the hole –
M. DUNN: Yeah.
Lee: Years ago, Dr. Dunn was out walking around Rosewood, looking for the site of the old AME Church. He found the spot which was surrounded by roses and azaleas.
M. Dunn: It looked as if the woods were ablaze, in fire, because the azaleas were in bloom, in full bloom as they are now. And I found out later that many of the residents of Rosewood had roses and azaleas in their yards. And that’s why we’re gonna put these plants in today.
Lee: And so today, Dr. Dunn has tasked the students with digging their hands into history and its soil, planting roses and azaleas where Black life once blossomed.
Lee: Morgan , have you ever used a shovel before? Just curious. Never?
Morgan Everett : Yes.
Lee: Yeah?
Morgan Everett : Yes. Not like a real shovel, you know, but at the beach, that’s about it.
Lee: Okay. That’s not a —
Morgan Everett : That’s not a shovel, shovel. (LAUGH) I don’t know if it counts.
Lee: Y’all did this?
Morgan Everett : Yes.
Lee: Okay. I talked to your mom, Morgan . Okay. What’s your name?
Megan Everett : My name is Megan .
Lee: Okay. What’s this experience been like for you? All of it, this whole trip.
Megan Everett : It has been mind-blowing for me. Like, I feel like I’m tapping into the left side of my brain, you know —
Lee: Wow.
Megan Everett : — expanding my knowledge.
Lee: Wow.
Megan Everett : And like, being in the dirts of what happened, like as we’re standing here, imagining how many people ran through here, how many souls were lost.
Lee: And to be able to be experiencing this with your family must also —
Megan Everett : Oh, yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s a bonding moment that me and my sister have been needing for a while. I’ve been away at college, so I haven’t been home a lot.
Lee: Okay.
Megan Everett : So, this is very much needed.
Lee: How does it feel to have your little sister now, like her mind is like being sparked?
Megan Everett : It’s amazing. Like, I love to see her grow. I love to see her become more knowledgeable about things. I love to see her talk about things, because she’s very intellectual.
So to see how this can affect her and that she can grow, and then one day, we can both tell our kids and our families about our experience together. It’s just —
Lee: And it may or may not help her learn how to use a shovel, but —
Morgan Everett : I mean, don’t do too much.
Lee: — she’s digging through history, though.
Megan Everett : Don’t do too much.
Lee: She’s digging through history.
Megan Everett : She’s digging through history.
Lee: That’s the important part, digging the ground is a different story.
Morgan Everett : She’s doing way better than I could ever do. I don’t know how to use a shovel.
Lee: You’re doing great, Morgan . You’re doing great.
Morgan Everett : That’s why I’m standing here (inaudible).
Lee: Yeah. (LAUGH)
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, using the handle @intoamericapod. or you can tweet me @trymainelee. That’s at Trymaine Lee, my full name. And if you want to write to us, our email is intoamerica@nbcuni.com. That was intoamerica@nbc and the letters U-N-I dot com.
If you love the show, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing Into America on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now.
Into America is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, and Janmaris Perez. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. Reporting and production help from Stefanie Cargill, Carlos Calvo and Dan and Debbie Huntting. I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday.