I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have somebody who is literally one degree of separation from one of my true heroes but we have

Dr Deborah McDowell and she's with the Julian Bond Papers Project so we'll get in

all of that stuff but first let me ask you how you doing how you feeling

that 2023 is moving rapidly is it not?

2023 is moving quite rapidly and and when you are in your eighth decade as I am, time just seems to be spinning faster and fast.

You ain't in your eighth decade?

I am in my eighth decade. Well the way we tell our ages in Alabama if you're in your

30s you're in your fourth decade. If you're in your 20s you is and so forth. So you don't

You would regardless of how.

With regardless of math and how the math is math and you don't look anywhere near any of them decades.

Well then you're very kind to say because my joints tell me that I am.

Well look we start each one of our decades each one of our episodes by having our guest walk us through the arc of their careers, and you're an academic and author and the director of some very important black archives at the University of Virginia that we'll talk about in a book.

But talk to me about your career art from your first role in teaching at Kobe College to your work now at UVA.

Oh my, yes, that's been a long time. I began my career in the late 70s in 1979 to be exact at Colby College, a liberal arts college in Maine.

I worked there for about eight years.

I was tenured there and then I moved to UVA, where I've been since 1987. I came here as a professor of English.

And then several years later,

I became the director of the Carter G.

Woodson Institute, which is the research institute and an academic department, and I ran that for 13 years.

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