When James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, Sonia Sanchez, and Percival Everett want to tell you something about America's past and its future, you listen.

I'm your guest host, Derey McKesson.

And on this selected shorts, fiction and essays that shake up the American story.

Stay right where you are.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic

of fiction, one short story at a time.

I'm Deraa Kessing, your guest host for this episode of Selected Shorts.

I'm an author, educator, and activist, and someone the producers knew would connect to the material

in this week's program.

In no uncertain ways, being in the street in 2014 and

Ferguson changed my life. And it was reading and seeing people talk about the world around them

and imagining a better world that kept me hopeful and kept me in the street. Americans think a lot

about progress, about how to make things better, how things got the way they are, and what we could do to live in a different world.

Honestly, we can be a little obsessive. Where exactly is the nation heading? And is it truly moving forward? If not, what is the course correction?

Without a doubt, an important conversation. But that kind of

single-mindedness can also cause us to lose sight of how it is we got to where we are. The truth is,

many salient moments of American progress would not have been possible without first looking back.

History has demonstrated time and time again that if you're going to point the way forward,

it's nearly impossible to do so without confronting and recontextualizing the past.

And that's what today's edition of Selected Shorts is about.

People who rethink those narratives we tell ourselves over and over

about who we are and what we stand for as a nation,

...