I'm John Batcher with Daniel Rood.

His new book is In the Shadow of the Great House.

It's a metaphor for the plantation system that has survived four or five hundred years,

and I could only guess that it'll be used on the asteroid mining of the future.

However, right now, we have one more detail that is where Dan teaches.

It's very prestigious and storied University of Georgia, for heaven's sake.

And the University of Georgia has a building called Baldwin Hall, which they constructed some years in the 20th century, and discovered a graveyard there.

And what did they discover about the graveyard, Dan?

It's a revelation for how we've not dealt with our history. Yeah, so Baldwin Hall, to add another

layer of irony, houses the Department of Archaeology. And it is right across the street from my

office window.

And what I didn't know for the first three or four years I was teaching at University of Georgia

is what I was looking at when I looked at Baldwin Hall was the unacknowledged burial ground of enslaved

people from Athens, Georgia.

In 2015, they started a major renovation and expansion project.

The university did.

And in doing the digging, they found a number of interred bodies.

And they first claimed that they were, I don't know what their evidence for this was,

but the university claimed they were, quote, of European descent.

Several members of the black community in Athens differed strongly with that because they had always heard that enslaved people, maybe even their own ancestors, were actually buried there.

The black community had to push very hard for there to be a DNA analysis done, and it was found

indeed that the vast majority of the over 100 people that seemed to have been buried there

...