Alvin Hall's other America

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Writer Alvin Hall returns to the world he grew up in, to shed light on the political present and share a haunting portrait of a disappearing way of life. This is Wakulla County, Florida and it is an America most people do not know. It has long been deeply rural, a place of unspoilt wilderness and incredible natural beauty. But it has also been a place with a violent history of racial segregation and oppression. The security Alvin experienced as a child growing up in one of the county's self-sufficient Black “village” communities contrasts with horrific racial violence he has only gained knowledge of as an adult. But change is coming. Since Alvin’s last visit almost 10 years ago unprecedented development has swept the county and it seems as if decades of racial division might really be starting to wear away. Is this really the beginning of the end?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Alvin Hall.
0:05.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:10.0	This is Alvin Hall's Other America.
0:15.0	We're entering Wachala County, Florida, the place where I was born, where I grew up and that I left in 1969 at age 16 for Yale Summer High School in New Haven,
0:31.2	Connecticut. My life would never be the same.
0:35.0	You are going to see number one, a lot of trees.
0:41.0	You don't feel a lot of love and you're going to feel that you are welcome.
0:50.0	When you cross that kind of line and you get in Wokk on the kind?
0:55.0	Oh yeah, you're gonna feel free.
0:58.0	This is Dolores Harvey Gainis, who is approaching 80.
1:02.0	Like me, she grew up in a poor black rural community of
1:07.6	self-sufficient families who owned their own land and who cared for each other.
1:14.0	You're going to say, oh yes, this is really the country.
1:21.0	In a pivotal election year in a divided country, I've come home to Wachala County, to see
1:29.0	family and friends and to share their America, one you won't hear much about in the news.
1:37.5	This is a place where America's history is close to the surface, where the past is very far from being the past.
1:47.0	I believe that if you don't know about places like Waukala County,
1:51.0	you can't hope to understand what's happening in America.
1:57.0	Don't nobody have to tell you you are wet?
2:01.0	You're gonna say,. I can breathe and you can sit on the front porch and like we used to do
2:10.7	push our feet swing our feet. Oh oh you do? What's your other feet? Swing y'all feet?
2:14.0	Oh, you're gonna feel free.
	...

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