This podcast is explicit.

From MPR, this is Invisibilia. I'm Kia Miyakanatees and I'm Yo-A Shah.

You may know Kia and me mainly as Invisibilia producers, mostly working behind the scenes, and now we are stepping to the front as the new host.

We just feel so excited and privileged to bring you more great stories, hopefully help you see the world in new ways.

Beginning with a story from Kia that is quite a banger, if I may say so. It's about a social experiment with money and race that I think is going to make some of our listeners uncomfortable.

So buckle up. Kia, take it away.

Alright, let's go.

Story time.

Sometimes you meet people from the past at very much remind you of the present.

Kali Guy House is one of those people. She is dead, but for me, her story is very much alive.

I found out about Kali when I was researching the idea of reparations. It's probably a word you've been hearing more and more. It's definitely been on my mind.

I wanted to learn the history of this idea. It had always seemed so fringe and impossible.

Kali is one of the people I found. And what sticks with me the most about her story was that she was a black woman doing a bold thing during a dangerous time.

Oddly enough, with something fairly simple. A list and a demand.

Around the early 1900s, Kali formed an organization of X slaves and she wrote a letter to the government.

The association acted on behalf of four and a half million slaves who were turned, loose ignorant, barefooted and naked without a dollar in their pockets.

That's Mary Frances Berry. The former head of the US Civil Rights Commission.

We the X slaves feel that if the government had a right to free us, she had a right to make some provision for us. As she did not make it soon after our emancipation, she ought to make it now.

Kali was trying to get payment for the work these X slaves had done and never been paid for. Basically, reparations.

Mary wrote a book about Kali called My Face is Black is True. She says Kali's story doesn't have a happy ending. The government feared the movement she created.

This woman has to be stopped at all costs. And they came after her.

And so they charged her with trying to get pensions for slavery at a time when she should have known that the government was never going to give pensions to black people for slavery.

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