Black Life Resuscitated from the Ocean Floor
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts’s mission: To recover her ancestry as a Black American. Her destination: The bottom of the Atlantic.
Tara Roberts walked through the National Museum of African American History when one photo stopped her in place. A group of divers – all Black women – preparing to search for the wreckage of slave ships. A short time later, Tara would find herself searching for those ships and discovering her own past.
She chronicled what she found in “Into the Depths.” She tells Kai how deep our histories go.
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“Notes from America” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. Tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on notesfromamerica.org or on WNYC’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I didn't grow up near a coastline so I was an adult before I began to even think about |
| 0:12.8 | the ocean and maybe that's why I've got such a funny relationship to it or maybe this |
| 0:17.2 | is common I don't know but I am so deeply drawn to the water and its enormity the mysteries |
| 0:23.3 | that lurk underneath it while also terrified of those mysteries and that's just the sharks |
| 0:29.2 | and jellyfish and undercurrents and all that those physical dangers do shake me trust but |
| 0:34.6 | I'm talking about something spookier there's so much history in that water so much lost |
| 0:40.3 | memory a podcast and reporting project from National Geographic called Into the Depths invites |
| 0:47.3 | us to rediscover some of those memories it's hosted by National Geographic Storyteller |
| 0:52.5 | and explore Tara Roberts and I spoke with Tara back in 2022 when the show first aired Tara |
| 1:00.7 | welcome to the show thank you for having me so this project was actually two years in |
| 1:08.2 | the making and it all started at the National Museum of African American History in DC when |
| 1:13.6 | you saw an image on the wall of these black scuba divers mostly women I believe tell |
| 1:19.8 | us about that image and why it struck you so much it's a little crazy guy because it's a great |
| 1:29.0 | picture but some kind of way that picture like it went up a level in my imagination and I actually |
| 1:38.2 | thought I saw something that wasn't there like in my imagination when I saw that picture it was |
| 1:44.4 | like the women were standing up on the boat they had keeps on their hair was flowing in the wind |
| 1:50.3 | and wow for whatever reasons there's women capes it was literally like the capes were blowing |
| 1:57.9 | in the wind and they were standing up there looking like superheroes that's how I remembered |
| 2:05.0 | the photo and then a couple of years later I was like oh let me go look at that picture again |
| 2:10.7 | and I was like it looks nothing like what it did in my imagination and it's still a great picture |
| 2:17.5 | that there was something about seeing these black women participating in an activity that I'd |
| 2:25.0 | never really seen a group of black women do before and then when I read the placard about who |
... |
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