Fresh Air - Best Of: A family split by race / Eddie Glaude Jr. on America at 250

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

Pope Leo XIV’s Creole family roots inspired New Orleanian journalist Susan Saulny to research her Creole great-uncle who moved to Chicago, identified himself as white and never returned. She describes her journey to reunite her family. Her piece in the New York Times is called "A Family Secret No More."As the United States turns 250, scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. has blunt advice: “America has to grow up.” In ‘America, U.S.A.,’ the Princeton African American Studies professor looks at the country through the lens of its previous anniversaries and centennials. "The divided soul of the nation is in full view," he says.Book critic Maureen Corrigan shares three book recommendations: ‘The Family Man,’ by James Lasdun, ‘The Hill,’ by Harriet Clark and ‘A Beautiful Loan,’ by Mary Costello.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

From W.HY.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. This June Teeth weekend, two conversations about race in America and how the country remembers it. Journalist Susan Salney grew up in a black family in New Orleans, knowing one piece of family lore. A great uncle had boarded a train to Chicago a century earlier and started his life as a white man. In a piece for the New York Times, she traces what became of him. and the secret that split her family in two. Then scholar Eddie Glaw Jr. Ahead of America's 250th,

he looks back at the country's other big birthdays and what they reveal. Every anniversary, the nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face. And book critic Marine Corrigan has a few spring releases worth adding to your summer reading list. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Last spring, when the news broke that the newly elected Pope had creole roots in New Orleans and his own grandparents had quietly become a white family in Chicago, journalist Susan Salney recognized the story immediately. Her family had lived a version of it. Her grandfather, George, was a black bricklayer who raised his children in New Orleans. His brother Edward was black too, but a shade lighter, light enough to leave for Chicago in the early night. 1920s and remake himself as a white man, never coming back. Susan grew up with just one picture of him as a young man, barely 19, propped on her grandfather's china cabinet. Five words in Creel did all the work of explaining, Edward Passa Blanc, white passing. A century later, Susan set out to find the

white family Edward built in Chicago and to see whether what racism had broken could be put back together. Her piece in the New York Times is called A Family Secret No More. Susan Salney, welcome to fresh air. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Take me to the moment you saw the headline about the new Pope. I was at home in Washington, D.C., and I saw this news in, like, a lot of America, I was stunned. And I'm in touch with a lot of people in New Orleans over different social media channels or text threads and immediately I saw an eruption of excitement. And I figured that's completely normal for a city as Catholic as New Orleans, you know. But what I began to see is that, hey, everybody, he's got roots here. He's creole. And I thought, Tanya, you know the amount of misinformation. But that same

night, a historian in New Orleans, a very well-known researcher who helped me on the story, who went on to do that. And the Archdiocese of New Orleans confirmed that news. So it was an amazing feeling. Here's what you also recognized instantly, and I find this really fascinating. The Pope's family, they didn't just have roots in New Orleans. They moved to Chicago. And so did your great Uncle Edward. Why do you think you never went looking before the Pope headline for this particular story about your family? You know, my grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectiveness for him. He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky thing that Edward was doing. And when Edward left, he was just a teenager or a very young man in his 20s.

my grandfather was the oldest and I think felt a real sense of, well, protection toward him. And that's the feeling that he passed down to all of us. We don't want this to get out. We protect Edward because black men who were found to be posing as white could face all sorts of violence, even death in the Jim Crow era. So when I lived in Chicago, I knew about it, but I didn't look into it at the time because I think I had a little bit of my grandfather's voice still in. in my head saying, leave well enough alone. What made this moment different, it's the confluence of a lot of things. It's my mother's age. She's 85 and she's losing her memory and I wanted her to know what happened to her uncle and the Pope's announcement and the fact that this generation

of Chicago cousins, this third generation, they have a new attitude and a new spirit. And I I had a feeling that they might be open to hearing this information. And sure enough, my hunch was right. So you turned your reporter's tools toward this story, this family. You went back generation, starting with one of the early settlers of your family, a French wine merchant who steps off a boat in New Orleans in 1834. Who was that first DeGrange that you found? Shock de Grange came from the alpine region of what is now southeastern France, and he prospered almost immediately selling wine in New Orleans and almost immediately enslaved women and children. And his son went on to be one of the first men to volunteer to fight in the civil war. So what I learned that I hadn't known was that my family on the French. side, they were die-hard defenders of the Confederacy. And the extent of that had never been clear to me.

Your great-grandfather, the colonel, he was one of the first men to volunteer, as you said, in the Confederacy. And by the end, he had like a house that was 8,000 square feet, right? Back then, it was a big house. Yes. And his hands were kind of in just about everything in New Orleans. That's true. Who was he behind all of that? He was a force in the city. He had. had amassed a lot of wealth and a lot of economic and cultural power. If you name a board or an organization from that point of time, you can almost be sure that he's on it, whether it was the library or the volunteer firefighters or the French opera, different Mardi Gras crews, the people who throw the parades. It seems as though from reading newspapers at the time, he was very well-known

in the city. People followed him socially, wrote about when he went abroad and when he went on business trips. People were very much interested in his life. I think to some of the Confederate sympathizers who were still in New Orleans, they looked up to him in some way. He had a very complicated life, and I'm sure very complicated with a relationship with his son, once he realized his son was having an open relationship with a black woman. And that's your great grandfather, Ned. Yes. He starts a relationship with the black woman, which is almost unthinkable at the time. And what surprising details did you learn about that relationship, that family that he essentially built? I think we know from history that a lot of white

men had secret families or a second family or, you know, perhaps a mistress. But that's not the relationship he had with Minerva based on all of the evidence that I found. He had a very open relationship with her. They were public. That's what was different. And when they had kids, he didn't hide them. He brought them around town in his buggy. He even brought them to places where his father was a patron, like he exposed them to opera. Ned and Minerva had something special that I don't think I can even understand now. They were both Catholic.

They were both French speaking. And I think that having those two things in common might have helped bridge some of the social gulf between them. because, you know, even if she was educated in a woman of some means, they were not on equal social footing just by law in New Orleans. So what they were doing was still somewhat risky and courageous. What did you find out about Minerva? Minerva's father was enslaved on a huge plantation south of New Orleans called Bellevue. It was a sugar plantation.

And after the war, after the civil war, the widow who was running this plantation, I'm guessing it was just too much for her. So she started selling off parcels of the plantation to people who had worked on it, including some of the formerly enslaved. Minerva Davis's dad, smart man, bought a piece, on credit, bought a piece of prime riverfront property. So he became a landowner in 1868, and I have the records to prove it. That is, to me, extraordinary. And imagine if that had happened across the board. Now, imagining he didn't have the cash outright, but the person who owned this plantation sold it to him on credit

and said, I'm sure the land will produce and you'll be able to pay it off. And he did. And so by the time Minerva was born, she grew up in a family that owned its land outright, instead of having to be sharecropping or, you know, or worse. So she had the benefit of some education and a solid foundation, some stability in life when she decided to move to New Orleans where she met Ned DeGrange. Minerva does not live very long.

She dies at the age of 41 of pneumonia. And Ned takes his children after he can't take them to his home of his white father to an orphanage. And what does that set in motion? A terrible turn of events for these children who had been a happy family in Churmey at their mother's cottage on North Robertson Street, knowing their mother and their father. Yeah, Minerva's death caused everything to spiral. Ned was all of a sudden alone with four black children in a city with segregated housing. And his family... And this is around 1912. Mm-hmm. And his family won't open the door to take it.

in these children, despite having 8,000 square feet of space, I might add. Once Ned's family rejected the idea of taking in the children and he was a white man alone with four black kids, he turned to an order of Catholic nuns in the French quarter who ran orphanages, and he proposed they take the children as borders. Now, I can't imagine the tears, the trauma, the screaming that must have been involved when these kids who had lived a happy family life with their mother and sometimes their father at a cottage in Tramay were suddenly handed over to an orphanage. And the youngest two were quite little. The youngest, maybe just a little more than two. So to be institutionalized at what was called

an orphan asylum, just the cruelty of it, the awfulness of it. Honestly, once I realized what the place was called, that it was the Lafawn orphan asylum for colored boys, my stomach turned. How did your grandpa, did he ever talk about his childhood when you were a kid? He told me that after his mother died, he went to live with the sisters, and he put it in very gentle terms. And being a kid, I thought, oh, with the sisters like in the sound of music or something like that. That couldn't have been farther from the truth, right? The orphanage was pretty grim. He didn't tell me the full story.

No one did. And I'm guessing that he thought to himself, What good would it do her to know about all the pain I've been through? We're listening to my interview with journalist Susan Salney. Her recent piece in the New York Times is called A Family Secret No More. More of our conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. I now want to talk to you about what is such an interesting step that happened next.

You find Edwards family. and set up a dinner in Chicago, and you write that right up until the last minute, you weren't even sure you could go through with it. You even brought with you to this meeting notes on a piece of paper on how you were going to talk to them. Tell me about what happened when you saw them. Well, I was nervous going into that because I was raised by Grandpa George and that little voice was still in the back of my heads saying, leave well enough alone. But I thought, you know, if I could talk to you, Grandpa, I would tell you that the world is a different place and that this might be the time to do this. I have a feeling it is. So I walked into the restaurant and I looked around.

I asked the hostess if the Granges were there and I see three women who are already like zeroed in on me. They're looking like they recognized me before I recognized them. And once I laid eyes on them, I knew immediately as well. one of the cousins sitting there says, oh, she's with us, and she tells the hostess, because there was something about us that just seemed cousinly, for lack of a better word. Let's break this down a little bit. What's the story, first off, that their dad and granddad, Edward, told them about his origins? He told them that he was from New Orleans, that he was the son of a French doctor who had a relationship with someone,

but then had to leave for France. And different cousins on the Chicago side had different versions of story. None of it fit together to make any kind of sense. They knew there was some connection to New Orleans. And Christine, one of Edwards' grandchildren in my generation, she actually tried to reach out sometime around Hurricane Katrina, but she had an uncle who was disapproving of this connection,

who shut that down. He made it clear that he did not want. want her to do that. The white de Granges have a fascinating story all on their own because your great uncle Edward's wife, Laura, she was also passing. So they were kind of partners in this cover story. Yes, they were bonded by marriage and their cover stories. Now, I don't know if they met in the South or amongst the many considerable number of white passing Creoles in Chicago, but they found other somehow and they didn't let their children know. And when I thought about doing this story, I really wanted to go beyond just saying passing happened because as a historical fact,

we know that, right? It's already been well documented. What I wanted to do was show the psychological toll of that decision on Edwards line and on George's line. And I thought if I could do that and to show the real lived experiences of an actual family, then maybe I'd be adding something to the conversation. It's really astounding to read, especially the fact that the white side of your family in Chicago just always knew that they were not being told a complete story. They may have looked white, but one detail that I thought was actually sort of funny was the cooking told another story. So they're passing, but Laura, one of the sons told you that his mom's gumbo. She was quite a good gumbo cook, apparently.

And it stayed with him, the taste of that gumbo long after she had passed away. He told me that he went from restaurant to restaurant looking for the taste of his mother's gumbo. I mean, doesn't that just hit you? He was unaware. When he was growing up eating that gumbo, he thought his mother was a white woman from Chicago that found a good recipe, I guess. Just happened to know how to... But he said he found the taste of her gumbo

once on a camping trip along the Gulf of Mexico. And he had no way of knowing at the time, but he was very close to where she was actually born. Susan, how do you hold the fact that these people that provided lives for you, and I'm thinking about you and your newfound cousins, they held so many secrets. They held so much back from you while also trying to provide a good life for all of you.

I tried to not be judged mental about what they did in the past, right? Different time, different place, harsher, much harsher circumstances than I've ever faced. And what I appreciate that my grandfather did, he modeled a kind of composure and grace and dignity that we don't see enough of these days. He could have been bitter and angry. He could have taught us to hate, but he was just a very humble working class man. He came home tired and dirty with brick dust all over him. But I don't know if you saw the picture of him walking my mother down the aisle in the article in a tuxedo. He looked absolutely regal to me.

So I think the lesson he tried to teach the family was it matters what society takes from you, but they cannot take away your dignity. He lost brothers and sisters, lost his parents. grandfather rejected him. They never took away his spirit, his ability to create a loving family, or his dignity. And that's what I choose to focus on. Now that this story has been out, what have you heard from people as far as how they're thinking about this and their own lineages? It's been incredible to see people encouraged by this to ask their own hard questions and to look at their family trees. at the blank spots or the gaps with critical eyes or more loving eyes, you know, I think our attempt to heal has shown the possibility of it.

I see through my cousin's eyes now, and they're white Midwestern eyes. And when I talk to them, I try to explain the way I look at things through my black southern eyes. And you know what? Everyone is seeing more clearly now. Can you give me an example of that? Yeah. We talked about white privilege one day. And would it meant to have it, would it meant not to have it?

And I think the first generation of kids from George and Edward, you can see the difference most clearly there. Let me explain this. Edward Jr. went to college and law school and became a partner in Chicago, a law partner. George Jr. dropped out of school at 13 to help his father lay bricks to support the family. So look at the different life trajectories between George, who was black and his son, and Edward, who was passing for white and his son. By the third generation, we got together and we look at each other and you're like, well, you know, you're a professional person. I'm a professional person. It seems like we're living really comfortable lives.

What made the difference? And I think my generation had the benefit of things like the Civil Rights Act, of the Voting Rights Act. of programs like affirmative action that were looking for potential and merit in places where they hadn't looked before. And if we gained any ground to be on somewhat equal footing now, I think it's because of a lot of the things that our parents' generation fought for, my parents' generation, black people in the South. And going into this, I didn't see how resonant this story would be with our times right now today, and that we're seeing some of these things that made all the difference to my generation, being picked apart, being diluted, being

attacked, most recently the Voting Rights Act, which was the signature achievement of the civil rights movement. You know, my grandfather was disenfranchised. So there are so many things about the 2020s that look uncomfortably to me, like the 1920s. But I get hope. from the fact that we were able to heal this family and the responses I saw across the internet for other people who cheered it, applauded it, said, we want more conversations like this. We want to do more of this kind of thing over here, where I am, over there, where you are. There was sort of like I got the feeling that people were ready for something like truth and reconciliation, you know, because that's really what we did, the white de Granges and black Granges. We had a moment of truth and reconciliation. And that's something that's something that. that America as a whole has never done, has never done about its racism problem. You end your story with your mother, finally being able to speak to her first cousin, Arthur, in Chicago.

Tell me a little bit about that phone call. So from the moment I discovered that Arthur existed, I knew I wanted to get them together. But we're talking about an 85-year-old and a 95-year-old, right? But it was just so stunning that my mother didn't know she had a first cousin who could have been in her life, you know. She was so happy to hear about him when I said, guess what? I found you have a first cousin. One of Edwards' children is alive in Chicago, and he wants to talk to you.

And, you know, her face just flushed. And she was like, I have a cousin. And similarly, when I visited Arthur in Chicago, arms were just outstretched toward me. and he said, I would love to know your mother. And so we thought about having him come to the reunion in New Orleans, but he wasn't doing well health-wise, so he couldn't make that trip. But we decided let's get them on the phone FaceTime and just let them have a conversation. So that was the moment.

Hello, hello, Linda. Hello, Arthur. and just like little kids who were meeting for the first time, you know, they had just the cutest conversation. And I heard the tone of regret almost immediately from Arthur when he said something along the lines of, I'm sorry this is happening so late in life, and I wish we had done this a long time ago.

And I know she felt the same way, But, you know, that catchphrase that was very popular in the family. I guess that's what came to mind when she said, you know, I would have liked that too. But say la vie. Beautiful but bittersweet. Yes. Susan Salney, thank you so much for this remarkable story. And thank you for your time.

Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you, Tanya. Susan Salney's piece in the New York Times is called A Family Secret No More. For our book critic Marine Corrigan, summer reading, sometimes means catching up on the books she missed earlier in the year. Here's her short roundup of some spring books. I love reviewing books, but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the Chocolate Factory. The conveyor belt speeds up, and the books keep coming along faster than they can be wrapped in a review. summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring.

James Lazzden, the family man, came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This non-fiction book, which grew out of a piece Lazzden wrote for the New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer, Alec Murdoch, for the 2021 murders of his wife. and adult son. Then came the real-life plot twist. A little over a week after Lasden's book was published, Murdoch's conviction was overturned because of jury tampering. A retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering the family man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdoch case, including suspicious deaths and embezzlement.

Lasden is a true crime writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague, Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lazzden is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery, the mystery of evil. Harriet Clark's debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark's own background. Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the Radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men.

Clark's maternal grandparents got custody, and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years before she was paroled in 2019. Clark's main character, Susanna, is eight when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week Susanna is taken, first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own, to visit her mother in the Children's Center in Hillcrest Prison. Susanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence. Listen. Each week, my mother fixed and refixed my hair. I slept and didn't sleep. Around us, women counted down to release. but my mother and I had been released from countdowns.

No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back. We were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day, the holidays followed their own lelting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life. All the while I was reading The Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. Doctoro's The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but like Doctoro, Clark interrogates the cost of parents' radical commitment on their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically from generation to generation. Sometimes I put aside a good

book for a bad reason. Mary Costello's slim novel, a beautiful loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. No, I thought back then, not another Erzat's Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick's Day. But one empty afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present tense narration of the main character Anna struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here's 19-year-old Anna, summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man shall eventually marry, keeps her enthrall to what she calls this oscillating life. In the middle of the night, he rises on one,

elbow in the bed beside me, and in an urgent, desperate voice says, I love you. In the morning, he makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words. A beautiful loan spans 25 years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Young, and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal beach read, but it would be perfect for a washout of a summer weekend. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed The Family Man by James Laston, The Hill by Harriet Clark,

and A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello. Coming up, we hear from Eddie Glaude Jr., historian scholar, an author of a new book called America USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. My guest is Eddie Glaude Jr. He's a historian and professor at Princeton University and a familiar voice on the country's hardest conversations about race and democracy.

He's the author of Begin Again, Lessons from the Late James Baldwin, and we are the leaders we've been looking for. Those books look clearly at this country's failures, but still held onto something hopeful. But his latest book sets sentimentality aside. It's called America, USA, how race shadows the nation's anniversaries. In it, Glaw, it takes us to the country's big birthdays,

1876, 1926, and now the 250th, and shows us the same ritual each time. The nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face. He goes back to 1876, the centennial, with Frederick Douglass watching the promise of emancipation come undone. And he argues that what happened then is happening again now. It's a book written in grief and rage, and underneath both, a stubborn kind of love of country. We spoke earlier this month in Seattle on stage at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, a day-long gathering of journalists and thinkers hosted by Seattle's Public Media Station. Here's our conversation.

I am so honored to be in conversation with you for so many reasons. I've had the pleasure of talking with you many times. our first time, though, in person with each other. And I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book. And let's start with the very first page. Sure. But before I started reading, I want to just say how honored I am to have an opportunity to talk about this book and this moment with you is so meaningful to me. So here it is.

Bitterness at the bottom of the cup. I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground, and the life lived in a particular place in time and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect love of country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are, things that happen in the place we call home,

no matter how complicated that place may be. James Baldwin was right. Whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it. And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place and of what it might become.

But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color, that somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one's skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself, not because you are obsessed with white people,

but because you want to live, that you are not an inward. Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, We elected a black president and vice president. Look how far we've come. Stop complaining, I hear them say,

you teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country. And I trust what I know, what I've seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach. One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading from the same man who wrote Begin Again.

Because in Begin Again, which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair. And in this book in particular, I felt that optimism of a truth teller, of a freedom fighter, it was gone. Yeah, yeah. Am I right in that feeling in the same way that Langston Hughes, we felt in his later writings and in James Baldwin? Yeah, so in so many ways I'm arguing with Jimmy.

In notes of a native son, Baldwin says, you know, I love my country more than anything. And because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly, to paraphrasing. I never begin there. I didn't begin there. Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi. You know? But I'm rageful. There are moments when I'm battling depression.

because the country has done this again. At the end of beginning again, I said, well, you know, we have to make a choice, right? Will we do this or that? And we have a choice to put this moment behind us and look what we did. And now people have to raise their children in the midst of this. They've gutted the Voting Rights Act, the redrawing districts. We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption a second lost cause.

And, you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion. And so what I was trying to do with this book was kind of right some security underneath my feet. Right. So that I could actually get this rage under control to get my sadness, my melancholia under control. Why anniversaries is a way to look at this country's relationship with race? You could have chosen court cases. You could have chosen lots of different ways. What is it about our nation's anniversaries

that allow us to see the problem so clearly? So at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself. And so here we are in the 250th, and look at the kinds of the contours of the story. Just don't look at the UFC arena. Or the Great American Fair. Or the Garden of Statues of Heroes,

but they're going to tell a story. It's going to be a particular story about the saintliness of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. In each of these anniversaries, the country is struggling and grappling with its contradiction. In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view.

Du Bois in 1903, wrote the souls of black folk. And in the souls of black folk, he says that black folk see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. This is what he called double consciousness. But I believe that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation, that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.

And to hold those two things together with, you can't really without contradiction. And it deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country. And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary, 1876, 1926, and by God, 250 years later, 2026. I want to spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other. So 1876 and 1976, because the dismembering of the two, I feel like is so potent. It tells us so much. So 1876 is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy. Yeah.

It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed. Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas? Yeah. Well, I'm trying to figure out this cycle. Why is it that we're always returning to this? What's going on? And one of the ways I've resolved it is that, or I haven't resolved the cycle of the way in which I describe it,

is, okay, if America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it? Well, you finesse it by assuming that white people possess freedom to give and to take away. Oh, let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable. When I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality. This is my reading of James Baldwin. Baldwin will say, I happen to love, and I say this, I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, and then they're white people.

The point is that we all bear the burden of racialization. We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves, right? So those people believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. And so what we see is anti-slavery movement, right? Folk are fighting against slavery and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality and liberty and democracy and the like. And then once the Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that ends slavery the 13th Amendment, what do we get this debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship?

So you see folk who were once, right, anti-slavery, suddenly become, right? Folk who are arguing against extending citizenship to black folk. So 1876 is this moment. Douglas is, Frederick Douglass is grappling with this. He's an example of these freedom snatches, these people who believe that they can give freedom and to take away. He was born in slavery. He escaped.

He witnessed Lincoln signed the emancipation. Proclamation, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and he lived long enough to see Jim Crow. He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness. And then he would say it, he said in 1875, I don't want your alms, I want justice. He's skeptical of people who want to do something for us as opposed to with us.

And so 1876 is this extraordinary moment, Tanya, when the country, engages for the first time after the carnage of the Civil War in a national remembrance of his founding, and it engages in this horrific act at scale of disremembering. Frederick Douglass was actually invited to be on the dais with President Grant. He's trying to get in.

This is in Philadelphia, not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He's trying to get in. He shows the Philadelphia Police Office his ticket, which puts him on the dais. The officer says there's no way an inward should be on the dais with President Grant. He would not allow him in.

If it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conklin, I believe, who sees him and then escorts him in, Frederick Douglass would not have been able to even enter the exposition. Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time, they sit him on the stage and he cannot say a word. He's just there silent. silent. So there's this disremembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the

19th century. With the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place in Mississippi, in Alabama, and Georgia, against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over 53,000 black people dead by the end of the 19th century, the country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project. My, my, my. I want to take us now to 1976, because this is a time period where you and I are alive, we're coming of age. How old were you in 1976? Eight. You were eight years old. Yeah, it's the bicentennial. And the question has shifted by then. This is the apex of white flight. the thick of desegregation fights.

And it's the first time, as you write in your book, that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history. But the question isn't whether black freedom should be retracted. It's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial. Can you talk briefly about that? Sure. You know, it's just, I remember as, well, I have a photo. I have a vague memory of me being in red, white, and blue pants.

how kitsied the 76 bicentennial celebration was, you know, from red, white, and blue whoopee cushions to a range of things. But this is a celebration really of white ethnics in 1976. Remember 1926, there is this real intense debate around immigration. And this is such an interesting point in history because this is where immigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make.

Yes. And as black people, we sit very squarely in that because we're representative of what? The journey of the country itself. Yes. But, you know, 1926, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the asshole countries of Europe, right? The clan can't stand. They are as much against Irish Catholic Catholicism in particular as they are against black people in the 1920s. But by 1976, their children are claiming the revolution as their own.

Black folk are still arguing we're in this moment of deep dissenses, Tanya. Watergate, Vietnam, Black Power, the Black SDS, there's all of this deep suspicion and skepticism about the country. And so the Bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's going to bring us together over and against all of this conflict. and discord that's defined the decade of the 60s and the early part of the 70s. And it's this the first year, because in 1926, it's the first time Negro History Week is celebrated in 1926.

1976, Negro History Week becomes Black History Month. President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week and then Black History Month. But there's this debate because black folk are still struggling. ought we to celebrate this? Because what's happening is that instead of disappearing black history, black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness.

You call this book an elegy. It's pitched in the note of the blues. But I want to know very quickly why the blues is the right form of the story of America at this 250th anniversary. And I'm going to double this question as well to ask you what you will be doing on July 4th or July 5th. America has to grow up. It can't, it can no longer hide in its adolescence.

You know, when grown folk act like kids, they're monstrous, more often than not. And so it keeps telling itself this story that affirms its inner. and what the blues does. The blues takes you to the heart of the problem. It offers a tragic sense of the world, right? We don't have to be all angels.

The devil and the angel is in us. So all we need to do is to look in the mirror. So we need to grow up. Because if you don't grow up, you can bomb Iran and then tell somebody else to fix it. If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites, and not hold anybody responsible, right?

You can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent. So the country has to sing the blues. And you know what? We've deposited it there since we got here. That's the thing you talk about too is like we aren't just a part of American history. We are interwoven into the very meaning

of what this country is. It's on our tongue. It's in our food. We have met your country, no, no, we in the fullness of our diversity, make this place swing. So on July 4th and July 5th, we need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own. Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. When you say, I do not love this country, actually this book is a love letter to America.

Oh, you've got me. Yes, thank you. Absolutely. Eddie Glawd is the author of America, USA, how race shadows the nation's anniversaries. Fresh Air Weekend was produced this week by Susan Yacundi. Fresh Year's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorak, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thee Challoner, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.