One Family’s Land of Opportunity

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A family’s legend about "40 acres and a mule” takes host Kai Wright on a fact checking mission to the Mississippi Delta. He finds an unexpected solution to wealth inequality in the U.S. We first told the Lester family’s story in February, when we began exploring the unfinished business of Reconstruction. Now, as the country transitions out of the chaos of the Trump administration, we revisit the story and reflect on the effort to bring about economic justice in the Biden era. Elbert Lester has lived his full 94 years in Quitman County, Mississippi, on land he and his family own. That’s exceptional for Black people in this area today, but at one time, Black farmers owned the majority of this land. What happened to change that? Kai’s reporting leads him to a question still at the core of our national political debate: Who are the rightful owners of this country’s staggering wealth? Plus, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a labor economist and the former president of Bennett College, talks about the legacy of anti-Black terrorism in the U.S. and reparations. Companion listening from our archives: “Who Owns the Deed to the American Dream”“A Secret Meeting in South Bend” “The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.
0:08.0	Financial markets are divorced entirely from the main street reality that's going to hurt small business mightily
0:15.1	over the next many months.
0:16.2	The wealth gap is where historic injustice breeds present suffering.
0:20.9	Our relationship to the concept of asset is ownership.
0:24.4	We were owned to make white people money.
0:27.4	I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present.
0:32.5	Frederick Douglass, he says you can have capital sum without land.
0:35.5	Because if you don't have land, you actually don't have freedom.
0:38.5	Whose property is the state protecting and whose property is it not protecting.
0:42.5	So we're not talking about Jeff Bezos' type of wealth.
0:45.5	We're talking about being able to not only get by,
0:49.2	but save and determine your own future. Welcome to the show, I'm Kywright.
0:57.0	As we slowly begin to look forward
1:02.0	and to think about what's coming in our ongoing conversation
1:05.3	over what kind of country we really want to be.
1:08.6	My mind keeps going back to a story we told on this show way back in February. And I want to share it with you
1:14.7	again this week. It's a story about economic justice or how we've tried in the
1:19.6	past to achieve economic justice. It can be hard to remember with all the distractions
1:25.2	and spectacles of the Trump era that economic inequality remains a defining
1:30.8	challenge all over this country.
1:33.0	In this story, it's a reminder that that problem has been with us for a really long time,
	...

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