Listener supported WNYC Studios.

I'm Kai Wright, and I met a listener recently, one of you who showed up at a live event we held and asked a great question.

They asked me, as a professional storyteller, what do I do with the knowledge that some stories are lost to history?

Because they've been blotted out of the record are just overlooked by those of us in the media who write history's rough draft.

Once that form of erasure happens, it's really tough to reverse.

It's also consequential because very, those are the stories that present

the greatest challenges to the status quo. I didn't have an immediate answer for that listener,

but the question reminded me of one of my absolute favorite conversations on this show.

Coming up on Notes from America, we revisit the lyrical work of cultural historians Saidea Hartman and her book

Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments. We'll hear the stories she has reclaimed from history's dustbit.

Just ahead on Notes from America right after this.

History isn't cut and dry.

There was not some, you know,

tom of facts that has been handed down in generations to generations,

and we all read off the same book.

If history is cut and dry, someone's got to cut it.

Someone's got to dry it, right?

Black studies are really efforts to capture the ways that the history experiences,

culture, lives of black people, African Americans, what our lives are about, what constitutes them

historically, culturally, politically, over time.

And you can kind of walk through the history of Black America in this way,

that black people were emancipated because it was in the interests of the country to preserve the union.

...