Best Of: A family split by race / Eddie Glaude Jr. on America at 250

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. This Juneteenth weekend, two conversations about race in America and how the country remembers it. Journalist Susan Salney grew up in a black family in New Orleans, knowing one piece of Family lore a great uncle had boarded a train to Chicago a century earlier and started his life as a white man.

In a piece for the New York Times, she traces what became of him and the secret that split her family in two. Then scholar Eddie Glaw Jr., ahead of America's 250th, he looks back at the country's other big birthdays and what they reveal. Every anniversary, the nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face. And book critic Maureen Corgan has a few spring releases worth adding to your summer reading list that's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Last spring, when the news broke that the newly elected Pope had Creole roots in New Orleans and his own grandparents had quietly become a white family in Chicago, journalist Susan Salney recognized the story immediately. Her family had lived a version of it. Her grandfather, George, was a black bricklayer who raised his children in New Orleans.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (48 minutes, 7,556 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.