PART 5: In this episode, we turn our mics to the elected officials who ran the House committee. We speak with Chairman Bennie Thompson, who endured racial terrorism as he grew up in a small town in Mississippi; Rep. Jamie Raskin, who has logged 25 years as a law professor at American University to give him a deep Constitutional framing of the investigation, and finally, former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger, who has endured death threats as a result of joining the January 6th committee. We learn from all these legislators what it took to meet this moment in history.
By now, the story of what happened on January 6 2021 is seared into the public psyche. But there is still an untold story.
Many of the investigators and team leads on the January 6th Committee were people of color. In this podcast, we bring you the story of their leadership, and why their mix of lived experience as descendents of enslaved people; children of immigrants; or immigrants themselves deeply shaped the committee’s quest to protect and uphold a multiracial pluralistic democracy.
The story they tell about the inner workings of the committee also reveal deep rifts over the role of race and Christian Nationalism in the insurrection, and how much of that inquiry should be told while proving former President Trump’s role in the insurrection.
As America winds up with endless court cases over the former President and his alleged co-conspirators, it is also, arguably winding up for an increase in domestic violent extremism. In “January 6th: An American Story,” we show – through the investigators of color and lawmakers helping lead the committee – that January 6th is not over, and the ways we continue to make sense of its reverberations could save – or imperil – us all.
The story of January 6 is an American Story.
It just might be different from the one you thought you knew.
Adam Kinzinger: Look, there's really one thing on the ballot this year. Do you like democracy or don't you? Do you want democracy or don't you? Do you want a party that believes in democracy or do you want authoritarianism?
Farai Chideya: That is former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger talking about what is at stake in the upcoming presidential election. He's ringing an alarm – an alarm that went off on January 6, 2021 and has not stopped.
It's been a year since the January 6th report was published, but there’s been an avalanche of political agitation since then. In so many ways, January 6th is at the core of a living public debate, one where different factions are re-litigating the impact of the insurrection with renewed vigor.
For example: Former President Donald Trump was charged with 91 felony counts across four separate indictments.
Then, there were a series of court cases testing whether the Constitution itself could be used to bar former President Trump from appearing on state ballots in this year’s presidential election.
And in December, the Colorado State Supreme Court became the first in the nation to come out to disqualify the former president to appear on Colorado's Republican primary ballot. It cited the 14th amendment.
(News reports on Speaker of the House voting)
Farai: And who can forget the unprecedented battle for Speaker of the House with Trump apologist Kevin McCarthy lasting a mere 9 months. It took a chaotic three weeks before Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana was voted in. Speaker Johnson, who has long crusaded against abortion access and LGBTQ rights – and against laws making it easier for citizens to vote – repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election.
Until now, we’ve focused on the legal eagles of the January 6th Committee.
In this episode, we turn our mic towards key lawmakers leading the committee: former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, and current representatives Bennie Thompson and Jamie Raskin. Liz Cheney declined to talk to us.
Their backstories are quite different. One is from a conservative Christian family in the Corn Belt. One grew up in a tiny town in the segregated South. And the third grew up in a Jewish family and was raised in Washington D.C. amid the buzz of politics. One was a Republican but no longer feels he belongs in large part due to the failure of the GOP to decry the insurrection. The other two are staunch Democrats.
Yet, despite their differences, they joined to defend democracy at one of the nation’s most important inflection points.
This is “An American Story.”
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Farai: We begin with Adam Kinzinger, a former GOP congressman from Illinois. In his new book, “Renegade,” Kinzinger reveals what it was like to take a moral stand and break with party orthodoxy to join the January 6th Committee. The two lone Republicans – Kinzinger and Cheney – provided the January 6th Committee with the gravitas of bipartisanship.
They paid a steep price. Cheney was defeated at the ballot box after vice-chairing the committee. Kinzinger says he decided not to run for re-election, partly as a result of redistricting. He became an outcast with the GOP.
Let’s begin with Kinzinger, an Air Force pilot who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The congressman went to work at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and took his gun. Yes, his gun.
He says he knew there would be trouble.
Adam Kinzinger: Twitter said, you know, the threats against me, people that were talking about taking guns to the Capitol. And I also knew how the Republican base thinks, and I know how patriotism can be abused. And when the leader of the free world convinces them – this is a guy that they trust – that an election was stolen, I just knew that given how they were thinking, given the threats I was seeing there was going to be violence that day.
Farai: Kinzinger goes farther and says the so-called Big Lie – that the election was stolen – was a call-to-arms. And the people who shouted the call-to-arms know that uprising is in our nation’s civic DNA.
Adam Kinzinger: Well, if you think about 1776, that was basically our cry against oppression by the British Empire. We said, “Look, if we're going to be taxed, we want to be represented.” And so when you convince a group of people that, in essence, the government is not representing them, an election was stolen, this was being taken from them, you know, their family's lives are at risk. They saw this because they were told this, that this is basically a second revolution. And I frankly would've been surprised if many of them didn't take that as a call to insurrection or a call to revolution.
Farai: How did we get here?
Adam Kinzinger: So there's a whole history of misinformation, and you can go back to really the ‘90s and the start of radio. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, making a ton of money just on keeping people hooked on adrenaline. That dopamine hit, and that dopamine comes sometimes by good things and sometimes by fear. And fear is like the most – the drug you can get hooked on the most. So for decades we've had people hooked on fear. And of course the big enemy that you can hook people on is the faceless government. And in many cases a lot of these people feel like they don't serve a purpose. And then somebody comes along and puts their arm around 'em and says, “I got a purpose for you. And that purpose is this country, which is so great that we learned about is being destroyed from the inside. And you can fight to protect it.” It’s what’s so attractive about the Oath-Keepers to many people because all they tell you is, “We're just about keeping that oath that you took to the Constitution.” It's a very compelling case if you believe the misinformation. And that's the problem is in this siloed moment where information comes from different sources, you can consume only what you want to believe and you can live in your own echo chamber. If somebody wants to tell you the government's corrupt, you can find plenty of information to show that. And so I think over decades, people's minds have been abused for profit, they've been abused for political fundraising and they've been abused for nefarious purposes – power, like Donald Trump did.
Kinzinger’s own personal reckoning came in stages. He voted not to impeach former President Donald Trump the first time around. He says he wasn’t ready to get out of the game.
Adam Kinzinger: I was searching for desperately for a reason not to vote for it, because in my own conscience it's like, well, what Donald Trump did was impeachable. What he did was wrong. In a way, like I said, I'm ashamed that I voted against it, but I'm also glad in a way, because it allowed me to survive for the January 6th stuff, which I think was important, but that doesn't excuse it.
And I think, you can find things like the impeachment was rushed or you can find things like, “Well, if it's not Donald Trump, I get it, but if I don't get reelected, somebody worse is going to come along.” There's always a way to justify it. And with every person, you've got to just come in – when you come into contact with your own moral conscience, you just have to say no more.
Farai: After January 6th, Kinzinger said no more. When Trump was impeached a second time, he voted “yes” – one of only 10 Republicans to do so.
(Sound from second Trump impeachment)
Farai: Then he was asked to join the January 6th Committee. This time, he says, his conscience would not allow him to say no.
He became a target. He received death threats and his former colleagues and constituents called him a traitor. He became a man without a party.
What does it feel like to be politically homeless – to have no party really embrace you for who you are and what you believe?
Adam Kinzinger: Well, I’ve been through the divorce, so the divorce is very hard, because your cell phone blows up with people you thought were friends that you realize aren't friends; they were only interested in you for whatever reason, or they were only willing to be your friend as long as you shared a certain worldview or went along with a certain worldview. So that part is hard. Being politically homeless now, for the country, I fear it, because I know there's a lot of people like me, and I don't know what that leads to. Does that lead to the birth of something new? Does that lead to the moderation of the parties? What is that? I don't know. But it also, in a way, feels good to be politically homeless, just personally, because there's so many things that just need to be said and talked about that you always, that was a pretty clear spoken member of Congress, but you always have to run everything through a filter of like, “Okay, what's the impact of this? What's this mean?” And now to not have to worry about that's great, but that process of getting there is really difficult. And so whether it's somebody that's in Congress or whether it's just a family, right? You're used to going to Thanksgiving dinner with your family, and now they're all going to talk about some crazy stuff that you don't want to talk about. You know, it makes it hard. You feel like you're not part of that crew anymore. And a lot of people fear that so much that they just avoid that pain.
Farai: After sitting down and talking with each of these three lawmakers, I came to think of each one as a pillar supporting a vision of functional democracy. They each contributed mightily.
Chairman Bennie Thompson’s pillar was to think about how to keep Civil Society – with a big C – working. It makes sense once you understand a bit more about the man, his origin story and the challenges he has met along the way.
Bennie Thompson: I think one of the – the anomalies, if you please, is that somebody who's from the South, been a victim of discrimination of all sort, could chair a committee of this importance is…could only happen in a democracy.
Farai: Chair Bennie Thompson is the first to acknowledge that he came a long way from the tiny town he still calls home – Bolton, Mississippi, population shy of 500 people.
Thompson gave a nod to his past in his opening statement of the January 6th Committee.
Bennie Thompson: I'm Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6th, 2021 committee. I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching.
Farai: But there is a lot more to his past that helps define how he governs.
Bennie Thompson: I lived on a segregated side of Bolton. I lived where you didn't have to ask where people lived or the address. You could see the conditions around them. Gravel roads was in the Black community. Obviously no sidewalks, no recreational facilities, just things that the other side of Bolton had. And, if you please, what you call the other side of the tracks.
And so, for me, all my education was at the colored school. No running water, no library, no counselor, obviously no gymnasium or anything of that nature, no science lab. And so this was how Black kids of that time got an education. My church was segregated. Head Start came into being, and all of a sudden, the Klan burned the Head Start Center down.
Farai: Chairman Thompson went to Tougaloo College in Mississippi, known for its civil rights activities.
Bennie Thompson: I met Martin Luther King Jr. on campus, had a number of opportunities to pick his brain.
Farai: His political career started small. He was voted to Town Alderman. But even that was a struggle.
Bennie Thompson: We ultimately had to go to the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans. And so we put in office by the Fifth Circuit. I can remember my first day going to the meeting. Now, you have to understand, this is my hometown. There are three of us out of five on the council. The one suit I owned, I had it on. My mama gave me what we call a briefcase. You know, city folk call in attaché case and all that fancy stuff. I spent that four years back and forth trying to get basic things for this little community, and it just didn't work.
Farai: Nothing deterred Thompson. He ran for mayor… and won.
Bennie Thompson: Our police chief, who had been police chief ever since I could remember, who was white, decent guy, he said, “You know, I can't work for you.” I said, “Why?” He said, “The community will not allow me to work for you.”
Farai: Structural racism intruded again.
Still, Thompson climbed the rungs of the political ladder to congressman, an office he has held for three decades now, and became known as a diplomatic dealmaker on Capitol Hill. He possessed just the right skills for leading the January 6th Committee.
You said that you chose Liz Cheney over party when picking a vice chair. Can you explain that a bit?
Bennie Thompson: Well, I heard the echo chamber saying it was a partisan witch-hunt, and so I wanted to put as much of that conversation aside as I could. So I picked somebody that I had never had a conversation with. I picked somebody whose daddy’s politics that I vehemently disagree with, but it was more about country and democracy than it was political party. And so I could think of no other person who fit the bill than Liz Cheney. She was in leadership. She's a female. Daughter of a former vice president. I mean, all the credentials that I thought would bring credibility to our select committee. And so for that, I chose her. And I look back and, apart from picking good staff, I think picking her might have been the second-greatest point of the select committee's work.
Farai: There were certainly tense moments among the committee members, recalls Adam Kinzinger. He tells us how the chairman decided that the lawmakers needed a day offsite to calm nerves and refocus energy.
Adam Kinzinger: Of course there were moments of tension, and particularly in that time period from between the first hearing. And then when we went into the series of hearings, the public was under the impression we weren't doing anything, because we didn't have any public-facing stuff. So there was a lot of pressure on us. Every time you're in the hallway, you're asked, “Well, when are you guys going to do this? When are you going to do that?” So there was tension brewing.
Farai: So Thompson sequestered them in the Member Reading Room of the Library of Congress with artifacts from the National Archives.... including the Gettysburg Address.
Adam Kinzinger: Benny Thompson put the meeting together and Liz Cheney had the archives bring in just some interesting events in history, you know, things that meant something about democracy. And so we sat down, we had lunch, we started talking about where these hearings were going to go, and then we took a break and all went in together and had some of the historians explain these documents and the importance to us. And it was important just to kind of recenter this moment, because when you're doing something, when you're in the middle of this, like, war that we were in, it never feels historic, because you're just, like, doing it right? It's humanity, it's a job, it's life. And sometimes you have to step back and be like, “Wow, this is something that people are going to read about in history books, because literally the future of self-governance in this country relies on whether we get this right.”
Farai: Getting things right for the history books is an obsession of Representative Jamie Raskin, Democratic congressman from Maryland. His pillar is supporting the Constitution – that’s his expertise and his first love.
Jamie Raskin: I think of myself more as a teacher than a politician.
Farai: Raskin was a law professor for more than 25 years before stepping into the national political arena.
Jamie Raskin: Sometimes my colleagues around here will say, “Well, as Professor Raskin just said,” and sometimes people will say to me, you know, “They called you professor, are you mad about that?” I'm like, “No, that's like the highest compliment in the world.”
Farai: Let me ask you about two of the investigators specifically.
Jamie Raskin: Yes.
Farai: Marcus Childress raved about your legal class and he said he would go home every night after your lectures and redeliver them to his wife because she needed to get the secondary shine from Professor Raskin.
Jamie Raskin: He never told me that.
Farai: In putting together the final January 6th report, the three lawmakers came at it from different angles.
Jamie Raskin: People think that our January 6th Committee, because we were bipartisan and truly bipartisan, didn't have political differences, but there were tons of political differences.
Farai: For example, Raskin wanted recommendations from the January 6th report to include how to get rid of the electoral college.
Jamie Raskin: Think about the way we elect the president, and it's the 21st century. We should be electing the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins. So there were lots of things that don't appear in the final report. It was like all reports – a consensus product. But all of those other dimensions of what took place on January 6th are essential to understanding it.
Adam Kinzinger: We had to come up with what were going to be our recommendations, right? Out of this, not just our findings. And so there was going to be a little tension there. You know, Jamie Raskin, for instance, wanted to go into abolishing the electoral college. And while I'm sympathetic to that, I also knew that that's a much bigger issue that can sidetrack people from this moment.
Farai: As we discussed in episode 4, a decision was made to sideline The Book of Purple – a tome of testimonies that illustrated how white supremacy was at the core of the insurrection.
One of the things I think about, because I’m that kind of person, is that the only independence to win electoral-college votes in the modern era had been segregationists. That’s a little depressing. Do you believe – having served on the committee – that race was part of the accelerant for January 6th? How do you put race into the mix and particularly the structural understanding of race and status in America, which privileges whiteness over other races and, specifically, over Blackness?
Adam Kinzinger: I'll say that I think it played a role, and maybe not consciously to most of these folks, but, like, a resentment, right? There's this resentment in, let's just call it middle white America, so like kind of the Midwest – really anywhere – but just we'll call it kind of the forgotten that feel like their factories have gone away, government's forgotten 'em, you know, they don't care about 'em, and that's created a lot of resentment. Now, they'll tell you they're not racist, and they believe it, and you can always see it because whenever there's a Black person in their group, they'll point it out, and they'll have this person front and center to try to pretend. But racial – that racial animosity really drives, I think, a lot of this.
Farai: Kinzinger supported the decision for the report and hearings to zero in on the former president.
Adam Kinzinger: I think the concern was to go into white supremacy with relation to January 6th can be a bit of a distraction. Like, January 6th, yes, there were elements of racism that could drive it, but what this was was people that thought they were doing the patriotic duty and overthrowing the government. And I think there were some decisions that were made that we don't want to take the focus off what really matters, which is Donald Trump launched an insurrection. And we had to bring that together so that it wouldn't fall apart, because it could have easily, if you think about it, could have fallen into disagreement and disarray, and this is to Benny Thompson's credit is he was able to bring all these folks together. Sometimes when there would be a fight between a couple people or a battle or a disagreement, give 'em time to think on it, and then eventually it would naturally work itself out. ‘Cause we all knew that, regardless of where we came from and where we were going, we needed to pull in the same direction.
Farai: And that was the chair’s job: Get the team rowing in the same direction. Remember, Thompson spent three decades in Congress figuring out how to get political power for Black voices in the South. He grew up out of a long-standing set of experiences pushing against hostile institutional voices to emerge victorious.
When he compromised, it was from a position of strength, not weakness.
Bennie Thompson: I told you about compromise, right? Now if left up to me – and I try not to be the heavy-handed chair. I wanted people to feel that they were part of the process and not excluded. So the person I normally am, I set aside and became the chair to get the product produced.
Farai: And that compromise was necessary to point to former President Trump’s culpability. Congressman Raskin, who always leans on his knowledge of the Constitution, has particular thoughts about the former president running for office again.
Jamie Raskin: I think we should follow every part of the Constitution and especially one that keeps traitors to the Constitution from holding public office.
Farai: And …
Jamie Raskin: Democracy to me means two things. One is the existing framework within which we elect people to office and have a judiciary and so on. But democracy is also a dynamic thing. It's an unfinished project that's moving forward. So we clearly have endured outrageous assaults on the framework of democratic institutions. And, you know, January 6th was the epitome of that.
Farai: If anyone understands the assault against democratic institutions, it’s Adam Kinzinger. He placed his position and life on the line to fight for a vision of the GOP that has faded into the horizon.
Adam Kinzinger: It's weird because it's like every off-road that the party should have taken, they missed. It's like they were drinking, it's like a Friday night drinking session, right? And we're just waiting for the day they wake up Saturday morning and kind of look around and go, “What did we do last night?” The problem is they start drinking Bloody Marys again, and they're just back into it. I think I can look at every one of those moments we had an offroad, and point to somebody that caused that offroad to not happen specifically after January 6th. Now, I can't promise that, you know, we'd be done with Trump, but I know that the thing that accelerated his reunification with the party was Kevin McCarthy going to Mar-a-Lago. That wasn't just because it was in the press, it wasn't just because I feel like saying it. I was in these meetings where all of a sudden after he met with Trump, everybody would say out loud, “I guess we got to support Donald Trump again.”
Farai: The continuing disarray of the GOP played out in real-time during my interview with Chair Bennie Thompson.
Over the course of a one-hour interview, we were interrupted three times by political breaking-news alerts, as the chair’s aides had to keep him informed.
Aide: So they're going to have to have another round. I don't think he's going to automatically get it.
Bennie Thompson: You know, we had a committee here in council today. We had full committee last week, full committee now, tomorrow.
Farai: One alert was about former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows agreeing to cooperate with prosecutor Jack Smith, who is investigating the attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The other two were over the battle for GOP Speaker of the House.
Bennie Thompson: So we're not doing any business and, and I don't think Johnson’s going to get it, because that means number one and number two would be from Louisiana. ‘Cause Scalise is from Louisiana.
Farai: Yeah.
Bennie Thompson: They're not going to give that much juice to one state.
Farai: Yeah. Wow. It’s fascinating. I mean, you know it's, it's I – I've never seen anything like this. I mean, I guess because there hasn't been anything like this. So.
Bennie Thompson: Which is kind of indicative of the mindset that brought January 6th about is still here.
Farai: Hours after this interview, Mike Johnson, representative from Louisiana's 4th district and apologist for The Big Lie, won the mantle of speakership. Many consider this to be the second most powerful position in government. The Speaker of the House, for example, is second in line for succession to the president in case of death or incapacity, after the vice president.
So what does this say about the future of the GOP? Adam Kinzinger has thought about it. A lot.
At this point, looking into whatever crystal ball we can conjure up between us. Do you think in 20 years the Republican party will be thriving or there will be an insurgent party? Which would you – in a coin flip– take?
Adam Kinzinger: If I had to take a coin flip, I'd say there will be a thriving Republican party. Cause sometimes it's out of the ashes that – to use the phoenix rises – but it's sometimes out of disaster. And you can just see in public now how divided the GOP is. It's not, people talk about it as one party. It's not. I mean, there are so many factions that don't even get along anymore. I don't know how that's sustainable. So if I actually had to bet all my money, and I wouldn't voluntarily do this, ‘cause I'm not that confident. I would say that this party eventually, once Trumpism is pushed out, once that cancer is treated, once the chemotherapy runs its course, chemotherapy does damage to a body, but hopefully it saves it. And this is what, when Trumpism is pushed out, hopefully the party can recognize the damage it did and bring new ideas and a new generation in with a whole new way of looking at things, bringing patriotism back and not letting that word be fouled up, not letting the word “patriot” be fouled up, but actually understanding that a diversity of ideas in this country is actually what's made us great.
We're not great because the Democrats were in charge at any point or the Republicans were. We are a great country because both have been in charge and because ideas are welcome. Not at the moment though.
I think in the long-term, you're going to see when Trumpism is rejected, and it could be a year, it could be 10 years away, I don't know when that is. But then you'll see a party that has to be forced to moderate or die. You need a conservative movement, and you need a progressive movement, because you have to have that push and pull between the two forces to actually proceed at the right pace. And right now, one party, one movement is completely sick and out of order, and it either has to get fixed as the party institution, or something will come to replace it, because Americans don't like to be unrepresented, and people like me, if you feel unrepresented long enough, you're going to do something about that.
Look, the country has two parties. As much as we want to fantasize about a third party, and I'd love to have a third centrist party, I would be a member of it tomorrow, just not this election cycle.
Farai: Pretend I'm an 18-year-old standing at a bus stop and waving a third-party sign, and you come up to me and say…?
Adam Kinzinger: The idea of a third party sounds great, but all you have to do is look at how presidential elections work to know that during presidential elections is not when you start a third party. Because even if a third party wins a state or two, all that does is deny somebody from getting the 270 electoral votes. That doesn't mean you revote. It doesn't mean the person with the most votes wins. It means that since nobody got the 270 votes, the president of the United States is picked by the House of Representatives. That will be Donald Trump, because Republicans control more state houses or more state delegations than the Democrats do. It's not a total vote of Congress. That would do more damage to democracy than Donald Trump winning outright and certainly more damage to democracy than, you know, Joe Biden winning reelection.
Farai: So you wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “Watching the Jenna Ellis tapes, holy katz, Trump is done.” We are in the era of multiple indictments and charges of the president, 91 counts and counting. Do you think things will change from the work of the committee into the flow of democracy and the 2024 election?
Adam Kinzinger: I think things will change, whether it's in the next year or not, I don't know. When I think Trump is done, I can almost see no way – I got to knock on wood – in which he can stand trial with what's been said and survive that, because I still believe in the jury system. And so I look at that and I'm like, “He's done.” If this stuff gets in front of a jury, and the question is, will this happen before the election or not? That's what I think the big question is. But look, I'm not sitting here optimistic that this is all going to be fixed in the next year. And I'm not optimistic that when Donald Trump goes away, this problem's going to go away.Because a lot of people learned his tricks. They learned populism. They learned how fear works. But I just look at history as a guide and say people, everybody, you could talk to the left and the right and in the middle. Everybody feels like something is wrong when everybody has that feeling, there is an undercurrent of desire for something, whatever that is, but they all feel like something's missing. I think that thing is bringing people together. It's unity, it's healing, and I think there's going to be a moment when that comes along. We're going to realize it when it's over, not while it's happening. And then we'll be able to look back kind of fairly in a couple of 10, maybe 20 years and say, that was a moment that began that process of holding people accountable. None of this stuff would be out without the committee.
Farai: One thing has become clear: January 6th and its reverberations are not only with us, but arguably getting stronger. James Baldwin wrote, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
Coming up in our next and final episode:
Dr. Erroll Southers:: We're at a very dangerous time. And I would have to say it's certainly unprecedented as we speak about domestic threats, probably in our nation's history. We have been in denial about the homegrown threat we have here and now it's on our doorstep.
Farai: So how do we create a shared future of pluralism, strong national security, prosperity and purpose in a time of acrimony and division? We will hear from domestic violent extremism experts and even some of the journalists who worked on “An American Story.”
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Credits
Thanks for listening to "January 6th: An American Story,” a special series from Our Body Politic.
I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. For this series, Joanne Levine is our executive producer. Morgan Givens is our senior producer.
The series was written by Joanne Levine, Morgan Givens, and Farai Chideya.
Mary Mathis, Nicole Bode are our fact checkers. The series was sound designed by Rococo Punch. Jordan Greene is our researcher.
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Our technical director is Mike Garth.
Special thanks to Telecam Films; WWNO; and the folks at Clean Cuts, including Carter Martin, Emma Shannon, Harry Evans, Archie Moore, Mike Goehler, Adam Rooner, Molly Mountain and Aliza Jafri.
This series is produced with the support of Ruth Ann Harnisch.
This program is produced with support from the Surdna Foundation, Ford Foundation, Katie McGrath and JJ Abrams Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Meadow Fund, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations, The Henry L. Luce Foundation, Compton Foundation, Harnisch Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, the BMe Community, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.