Time For A New Story
If you’ve heard stories about Reconstruction, you’ve probably heard that it failed. And sure, some parts of Reconstruction did fail—but not because Black people didn’t claim their freedom.
A Powerful Black Hand
How Black men and women fought to participate in the war against slavery, and how the Union’s decision to allow them to enlist shifted the tide of the Civil War.
Interview: Crystal Feimster
The importance of digging into archives and disrupting the myth that the Civil War and Reconstruction are histories that belong to white men.
A Bedrock For Freedom
How freedom wasn’t as clear-cut as wartime refugees from slavery expected, and how—despite terrible conditions in many camps—Black people’s desire for self-determination kept them going.
Interview: Abigail Cooper
How Black people established communities in Civil War refugee camps, celebrating their African traditions and adapting to survive in the American patriarchy.
Reconstructing Family
How freed people sought out their kin following emancipation, and how they worked to establish new lives with their families, pushing for recognition in the eyes of the law.
Interview: Deborah Willis
What photography can reveal to us about the lives Black people led during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and what they wanted future generations to understand about them.
History Podcasts
Highlighting true stories of Black people’s fight for liberation, progress and joy from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Seizing Freedom illustrates the myriad ways Black people have sought and defined their own freedom in spite of the monumental forces at work to keep them from it.
On The World's Stage
The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was an opportunity for the United States to showcase its spectacular growth and signal its arrival as a world power, but it failed to highlight Black Americans’ role in its development, and they took notice.
Interview - Adam Serwer
Kidada speaks with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic who covers race, politics and justice, about the role of the Black press in America, both historically and in the present.
The Fight of the Century
Black southerners and their allies were experiencing the brick and mortar of Jim Crow being installed in real time. Racial terror killings had been climbing, lynchings were becoming more shocking and segregation was gaining traction.
Introducing Season 2 of Seizing Freedom
Coming February 1, 2022. The promises of Reconstruction were left unfulfilled. The violent system of Jim Crow was being built in real time, brick by brick.
Introducing Toxic: The Britney Spears Story
Comedians Tess Barker and Babs Gray, who you might know from Lady to Lady or the now legendary Britney’s Gram podcast, are here to bring you a brand new investigative series about Britney Spears' conservatorship and the court system that's allowed it to persist.
Recommended Listening: 1865
While we work on the next season of Seizing Freedom, we think you'll enjoy listening to the podcast, 1865. In its new season, Ulysses S. Grant takes the White House, intent on rooting out corruption, crushing the KKK and bringing peace to a troubled nation.