Introducing: Monumental - Whispers in Wilmington

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For listeners of Studio 360, we’re featuring an episode from the new PRX podcast Monumental.

The landscape of public memory is shifting. As we re-examine the plaques in our parks and the sculptures on our streets, we grapple with what to do with them. Once we learn the stories these objects tell about who we are, will tearing down statues and renaming schools be enough?

Monumental interrogates the state of American monuments and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, host and author Ashley C Ford and a team of audio journalists from around the country will piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S

In this episode, we uncover the story of the only successful coup d’etat ever to happen on American soil. This act of racial violence was designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That suppression involved racist mobs, as well as historians, city planners, journalists and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community’s onetime prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable.

For more information about Monumental, visit our website at www.prx.org/monumental

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you are a fan of Studio 360, here's another show we think you'll enjoy.
0:12.2	I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Monumental, a podcast series from PRX.
0:18.2	Monumental explores the state of monuments across the country and what their future says about our own.
0:24.6	In this 10-episode series, audio journalists from around the country piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S.
0:38.5	Monumental is produced by PRX productions and made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
0:45.3	We hope you enjoy this episode of the show, and to learn more about the series, go to PRX.org slash monumental.
1:07.5	We talk a lot about learning from history, but there's still so much of it we can't see.
1:14.9	What if the truth was deliberately hidden, erased, covered up? That's a kind of anti-monument, where no matter what the facts are, you can't see an acknowledgement of them.
1:22.3	We're used to recognizing someone powerful with a statue, but what happens when there's no statue or memorial to a traumatic event?
1:33.0	Whoever lives with the impact of that history has to confront the kind of power it takes
1:39.2	to keep it hidden.
1:41.6	People have carried those stories for generations and generations and generations and
1:47.5	generations. That's Elizabeth Alexander. She's a poet and scholar who leads the Mellon Foundation.
1:55.3	Under her leadership, Mellon has committed itself to transforming the commemorative landscape in this country.
2:02.7	She says some stories survive only because the people affected won't forget, can't forget.
2:09.0	And with enough time, those memories often come out into the light.
2:14.5	And so imagine what can happen in a moment of restoration and imagine also how powerful
2:19.9	it is to tell the entire story. Don't act like it never got taken. Tell the entire story.
2:28.7	No monument can tell the entire story and no monument can heal a community whose story was denied.
2:37.5	But can a monument take part in that effort?
2:41.0	This is monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX.
2:46.4	I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford.
	...

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