Panther: Blueprint for Black Power is the story of the unexpected birthplace of the Black Panther, a site that changed the course of the nation. But it’s not where you might expect. Far from Oakland, the Black Panther and its principles came from just outside Selma, Alabama. Lowndes County, Alabama: a county where every single thing Black folks did was an act of rebellion. A county where an all-Black party made it to the ballot in the year 1966. A county that paved the way for revolution. The fourth season of the Murrow Award-winning Reckon Radio examines the first year the Voting Rights Act was put to the test, deep in the heart of the Jim Crow South. Pulitzer Prize finalist Roy S. Johnson and journalist Eunice Elliott tell the story of Lowndes County and the election that shaped politics - and activism - as we know it. Available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon or wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s a story we think we know well. It’s 1965, and the Civil Rights Movement is in full swing. Thousands are marching on Montgomery, protesting the treatment of Black Americans. But what about the people who lived alongside that road? The people who remained after the national cameras and big names left town were the lifeblood of the movement for Black Power.
In this episode you’ll be introduced to organizers like Joann Mants, Lillian McGill, Viola Bradford, Terry Cannon and, of course, Stokely Carmichael.
Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.
(THEME MUSIC STINGER)
EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:
It’s early morning in rural Alabama. Morning fog is burning off on either side of a two-lane highway that stretches out as far as the eye can see.
ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:
There’s someone, maybe a few someones walking along that highway. A few of the walkers wave bits of white fabric at cars coming towards them in the distance. All walk with purpose.
REGINA MOORER, GUEST:
So we told people to take a white towel or a white sheet of paper, go to the nearest intersection in their community, at least walk till you see some cars passing. And if it’s Black passengers or Black drivers in the car, wave your white flag to let them know that you needed a ride.
ELLIOTT:
A passing flatbed stops next to one of the folks waving a bit of white and tells them to hop in the back. They drive off scooping up others all along the way.
Now, the folks who aren’t as lucky, they see the cars full to the brim pass them by. They won’t catch a ride, but they’ll all end up at the same place: the polls.
LILLIAN MCGILL, GUEST:
We’ll be saying goodbye to shacks and bad schools. We’ll be telling everybody, whites in particular, if you stand in our way and don’t move over, we’re going to move on over you.
ELLIOTT:
The date was November 8, 1966. The place, Lowndes County, Alabama.
JOHNSON:
But it was not your normal Election Day in Lowndes, Eunice. This was the first Election Day since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law. Finally, some of the madness like impossible quizzes, counting jelly beans, or simply risking your life to register to vote, all of that is finally illegal. Many argue America wasn’t really a democracy until the passage of the VRA.
This day, November 8, 1966, it’s the first real test to see if a multiracial democracy in America is possible, if we could still feel the pulse of freedom deep in the Jim Crow South. There was just one problem for Black voters in the South: both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, were virtually all white, like lily-white. So the ballots offered no trusted options for Black folks, folks like you and me, Eunice.
CHARLES MAYS GILLARD, GUEST:
Both of them, they talk against each other, but ain’t nobody doing nothing.
ELLIOTT:
To seize political power, Lowndes County’s Black population, 80% of the total population, would have to build their own party, and that’s who was on the ballot this Election Day, a new political party, one formed by the Black majority of Lowndes County, and that’s why so many folks are flocking to the polls up and down that stretch of Highway 80.
VIOLA BRADFORD, GUEST:
This went on from sunrise to sunset. These people wanted to vote. They wanted to pull a lever for the Black Panther and then go on home. And this is what they did.
MARCHERS:
Power to the people! Power to the people!
JOHNSON:
I’m Roy S. Johnson.
ELLIOTT:
And I’m Eunice Elliott and you’re listening to Panther: Blueprint for Black Power, a podcast from Reckon Radio.
Now, you may think you already know the story of the Civil Rights movement, but this is the story of what happened in the wake of all the fanfare. You know, after the usual movies fade to black and roll the credits. This is the story of the birth of the Black Power movement and the moment the Black Panther became its symbol.
JOHNSON:
And this is before the Black Panther Party that you’re probably thinking about, the one founded during my youth in 1966 over in Oakland, California, the one I’m sure you’re familiar with, Eunice.
ELLIOTT:
Yes, I am familiar, Roy, but keep in mind, 1966 was not my youth.
JOHNSON:
Hey now, come on. Come on.
ELLIOTT:
I’m just saying.
JOHNSON:
So this Black Panther Party came before the Panthers emerged in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. This Black Panther Party and its iconic symbol inspired that movement in Oakland. It was just as much about Black Power as were those dynamic California revolutionaries.
So just how did this small, rural Alabama county become the cradle of Black Power and inspiration for the Black Panther Party we all know? Well, Eunice, that’s why we’re here. These two movements are more connected than you think.
ELLIOTT:
Now, you may not know a lot of the history we’ll get into, honestly, I didn’t know it before we got into this story and that lack of knowledge, that is by design because these are examples that we can still borrow from to build movements even today. The unsung story of the movement for Black power, the birth of the Black Panther, it’s one that’s flown under the radar for just too long. And instead, it’s been replaced with a false narrative of militancy and antagonism in Oakland.
MCGILL:
The one in Oakland started out wanting... They heard about us when it got all out, how fearful whites were about it because of the characteristics of a Black Panther and they thought we were out to kill and do white folk. That was not it. You just had to have a strong... Huey Newton’s group decided that they wanted to be a part of it.
ELLIOTT:
That’s Lillian McGill, her story and ours happens along that two-lane highway we mentioned in the beginning in 1960s Alabama. Lowndes County, Alabama to be exact.
JOHNSON:
Okay, Eunice, let’s say we’ve got a map of Alabama. Let’s put a pen on Montgomery, the state capitol. Let’s put another on Selma, about 50 miles west. Now bridge the gap between the pens with string. That lazy way the string hangs would just about look like Highway 80, which connects the two cities. It takes a dip southeast from Selma before arching back up to meet Montgomery. At its lowest point, that string hovers right above Lowndes County.
MOORER:
There were some people from Alabama. They would always be like, “Lowndes, where is that?” And I would always say it’s between Selma and Montgomery. And I would always reference the Selma to Montgomery March. I would say, “You don’t walk out of Selma and end up in Montgomery. There’s an entire county in between.”
ELLIOTT:
That’s Regina Moore. She’s a political science professor at Alabama State University, but she’s also from Lowndes County. Her grandmother was an activist there back in the ‘60s.
Highway 80 today is speckled east and west with historical markers commemorating moments from this time, but somehow they make it feel like it’s a different era separate from us today, this place where the Black Panther emerged.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
A long-anticipated freedom march from Selma to Alabama’s capital of Montgomery finally gets underway.
MARY MAYS JACKSON:
If I died, I didn’t care because I was dying for a purpose. We were afraid, but I guess the purpose was greater than the fear.
JOHNSON:
This is Panther: Blueprint for Black Power from Reckon Radio.
ELLIOTT:
This is the seldom-told story of one of the most famous and notorious organizations in the Black Power Movement and its origins in Lowndes County, Alabama.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?
MCGILL:
The one in Oakland started out, they heard about us.
These people wanted to vote. They wanted to pull the lever for the Black Panther and then go on home. And this is what they did.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.:
We come a long ways, but we got a long ways to go.
REV. AL SHARPTON:
Politicians have been trying to roll back the franchise all across the country. Voter ID, early voting, even the number of polling sites have all come under assault.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Because we want to live as decent human beings in America.
JOHNSON:
To know how we got here, how we got to this place to today when political conversations are as divisive as ever, and Black voters still don’t know who on the ballot to trust, you’ve got to know where we came from, Eunice.
Now, this Election Day we’re talking about took place in 1966. Eunice, I was a 10-year-old in Tulsa, a city with its own historic past. Now, you know I’m a bit of a history buff, but true confession: until I moved to Birmingham almost 10 years ago, I really hadn’t heard much about Lowndes County and certainly not this story.
MOORER:
And I’m always surprised at how many people don’t know the legacy of the panther and the use of it as a political symbol starting here in Lowndes County. They have no idea of the genesis of that symbol in the connection to Lowndes County.
ELLIOTT:
Well, Roy, that’s because these are stories we’re not supposed to know. Black history, which is American history, it’s under attack today. But truth be told, much of it has always been omitted, simply left out. We’ve been taught the broad strokes, the victory moments, the major names in the movement, yet all the work, the struggle and sacrifices made by so many others, it’s just not there. Those major names had help, help that stuck around and did the work long after the nightly news cameras had gone and they’ve been left out too, but not here.
Let’s rewind a bit.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
Toward the capitol, from the break of dawn, they filter into the city.
JOHNSON:
Rewind to March 1965. We’re still in Lowndes County now with a population that’s, remember, 80% Black with not a single Black registered voter, a county nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes” for all the racist violence that was carried out within county lines where white public officials stoked the culture of fear to dissuade Black residents from exercising their electoral rights.
ELLIOTT:
But you know, on this day, there was just a different energy in the air. Highway 80, now a bit more than a year earlier, it is jammed with people. And you might know where we’re heading.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
Camp at eight o’clock after getting up about six, carrying nap sacks, bed rolls, and air mattresses, they streamed onto Highway 80 walking briskly. Their day’s journey, 17.5 miles, putting them halfway from Selma to Montgomery. Setting the pace, Dr. Martin Luther King, who will leave tomorrow for an appearance in Cleveland.
ELLIOTT:
You may have heard of Bloody Sunday, and maybe you’ve even seen that horrible footage of the Alabama State Troopers beating marchers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge just outside of Selma.
JOHNSON:
It was March 7, 1965. Marchers set out from Selma headed east on Highway 80. Just days before, Black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson had been murdered. Marchers were simply planning to protest the denial of full voting rights to Black Americans, but after Jackson’s murder, the march became about so much more. Now, the marchers were hell-bent on getting to Montgomery, 54 miles away.
ELLIOTT:
About 600 of them came together that day. And among those attacked was a 25-year-old activist in training, Alabama native John Lewis. Lewis was the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and one of the main organizers of the march.
JOHNSON:
Eunice, just a few years ago, I was fortunate enough to march across that same bridge not too far from John Lewis as part of the commemoration that takes place in Selma every year. As the line of marchers reached that point on the bridge when Lewis and others in the front saw the state troopers awaiting them, we all stopped, and Lewis shared memories of what he saw that day.
REP. JOHN LEWIS:
And I want to thank each and every one of you who marched across the bridge on Bloody Sunday.
People often ask me, why do you come back? What purpose does it serve? We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.
JOHNSON:
I marched with Lewis on three occasions, Eunice, before he was unable to make the walk before he died in 2020. Hearing him speak from that place on that bridge never got old.
ELLIOTT:
I’m sure it didn’t, Roy. That’s a pretty amazing memory.
JOHNSON:
Now, back to that day in 1965. He and hundreds of others made it to the bridge and saw those state troopers waiting on the far side of the Alabama River.
ELLIOTT:
Governor George Wallace had told the highway patrol chief to use whatever measures were necessary to prevent a march. And believe me, they did much, much more.
ALABAMA STATE TROOPER:
You are good. But first, you are ordered to disperse, go home or go to your church.
ELLIOTT:
After a cursory warning to the marchers to turn back, the cops, many of them on horseback, they just barreled over the first protestors, pummeling them with night sticks, tear gas, and just other cruel and simply unnecessary weapons, and news footage of this attack, it just ricocheted all around the country.
Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led 2,500 folks back to that bridge intending to march, but seeing again what Lewis and hundreds of others had already seen, the marchers stopped and they turned back to avoid bloodshed. Nearly two weeks later, after protesters were guaranteed that they would be allowed to safely pass the state troopers, the marchers finally reached Montgomery 54 miles away. That day was March 21, 1965.
Among them was a girl named Mary Mays Jackson.
MARY MAYS JACKSON, GUEST:
We heard about the march from Selma to Montgomery, and I was 14, but I was interested in joining the march.
GILLARD:
I knew my mama wasn’t going to let... She really didn’t want my sister and my brother, but they said, “We going.” So they left. And the only thing I could do was just come out because we lived on a house on a hill, like on the side of the road. And I could look down, but I could hardly see to Highway 80.
JOHNSON:
And that’s Charles Mays Gillard, Mary’s brother. They grew up just off Highway 80 and watched those marchers move on by. Now, he was too little to join them, but mama couldn’t stop her two older children. Listen.
JACKSON:
My mother did not want us to go because she was fearful for our lives and she was pregnant with my baby sister, but I guess we were selfish because we didn’t care. We told her that we was going to walk. We didn’t care if we died. We was going to walk because we wanted to be a part of that movement and we wanted to have the right to vote.
So we told our parents that we wanted to join. We joined that night. We camped out that night. We had sandwiches, believe it or not. We had peanut butter sandwiches, we had bologna sandwiches. We had sandwiches to eat, but it filled us up because it wasn’t about food. It was just about the fact that we were walking for freedom. We were walking so we had the right to vote. I was just excitement, and my cousin, about just being in the group.
They had an activity to make us laugh. They would do things to entertain us and put up a nightlight on the pole so we could see before we would go to sleep at night.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
The first day, the marches tramp a little over seven miles. Those who have been assigned to complete the 54-mile walk hope to present a petition to Governor George Wallace. The first night is spent in a field near New Sister Springs Baptist Church. Their host, a negro farmer.
JACKSON:
We got up early that next morning so we could proceed down to the Capitol.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
Just inside Lowndes County, the marchers entered the two-lane stretch of Highway 80. The traffic waited its turn with cars and trucks backed up for some distance. The leader, Dr. King, still kept up a good pace.
Any blisters yet?
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.:
Well, no blisters yet, but my legs are a little tired, but I can follow that up by saying that my soul is rested.
JACKSON:
Yes, my feet was tired. Yeah, we were tired. And I have to be honest, sometimes I cheated. We got on there, me and my cousin, sometime we got on the truck because they had an open bed truck that sometimes if you got tired, they would pick you up and you could cheat a little bit, ride a little bit, and then get out. So by the time we got to the Capitol, I was very, very tired.
I got a chance to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King. I got a chance to shake his hand. He had very soft hands. I remember that distinctively about him. His hand was soft. But I was just thrilled to be able to walk with him and to hear his voice. And he had the most melodious voice that I’ve ever heard in my life. I never heard anybody talk like him before.
ELLIOTT:
But there was a real danger in what Mary, her cousins, and everybody in the march had chosen to do. Her mother’s warning, it wasn’t just paranoia. It was truth. Other Lowndes residents, they felt it too, and a lot of folks watched the marchers pass from their porches, but even that was risky.
Mary knew this, but she marched anyway.
JACKSON:
If I died, I didn’t care because I was dying for a purpose. We were afraid but I guess the purpose was greater than the fear. Sometimes we had scary moments, you’d get a report where they said some of the white people, some of the cars would drive by and slow down, and we were afraid that maybe they would shoot us any minute, but we just kept pushing forward.
ELLIOTT:
Mary Mays never saw a gun, but sometimes they did point weapons at marchers and sometimes they pulled the trigger. This will become all too clear to her as she returned home later that night.
JACKSON:
After we went down to the Capitol, we all had to get a way to come back home on our own. So the only way we could come home was to come back home on one of the trucks that had the portable toilets on. And so the man that drove the truck was supposed to stop off 80 at 23 so we can get off because our home was not far from 23.
JOHNSON:
What should have been a smooth ride home though, a chance to rest in the glow of a powerful day, was sullied, sullied by violence.
JACKSON:
On our way home, a man flagged us down. And when he got on the truck, he said that somebody had just shot Ms. Viola Liuzzo and he believed she was dead. And he said, “They shot her and the bullet grazed my head.” So when he got on the back of the truck with us, he fell out and we was afraid thinking that he was dead, but he wasn’t.
So what had happened, she had taken a load of people to Selma and she was coming back to get some more people. And somebody from Selma followed her and shot her. You know where the monument is on 80? Somebody followed her and shot up her car right there and killed her.
JOHNSON:
You can just imagine, Eunice, how relieved Mary’s mother was when her children returned home safe.
JACKSON:
She was so glad, yeah. When we got home that morning, oh my goodness. You could see the relief on her face, especially after the incident happened with Ms. Liuzzo. That could have been us. We could have got shot up too. But thank God for Jesus, nobody messed with us.
ELLIOTT:
Panther will be back right after the break.
JOHNSON:
The march from Selma to Montgomery was truly a moment that elevated the tide rising against racism that too long permeated and dominated the South. There was a clear before and after. Those marchers mattered.
ELLIOTT:
Bloody Sunday is what allowed President Lyndon Johnson to rally enough support to even bring a voting rights bill into Congress.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON:
At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord, so it was a century ago at Appomattox, so it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
JOHNSON:
That pivotal piece of legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was a direct result of those 54 miles walked by the thousands who made the journey.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
The Freedom March has been an historical venture, a nonviolent protest.
JOHNSON:
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, ensuring the right to vote was accessible to all Americans finally. It outlawed literacy tests, poll taxes, jelly bean counting, and all the other BS attempts to keep us out of the voting booth.
ELLIOTT:
For disenfranchised Black Lowndes County residents like Mary Mays and Regina Moore’s grandmother, there couldn’t possibly be better news, right?
JOHNSON:
I wish, Eunice, but to entrenched racists in Lowndes, the new law was just words on paper. Good words, necessary words, but still, to them, just words. They were words though that launched, that ignited the fight for full unencumbered voting rights in Lowndes.
ELLIOTT:
Exactly. The Voting Rights Act was not a final victory. It might have knocked a dent in the institutionalized racism in some places, but in Lowndes, it just put a chip on its racists’ shoulder.
Though the VRA enshrined protections for the voting booth, it also motivated vindictive white landlords to kick out Black tenants who dared to even register to vote. White public officials sat back as their neighbors threatened Black lives over the vote.
Now, part of the reason why white officials in Lowndes, I mean they felt safe to just let Black voter intimidation run wild, well, it’s because the VRA didn’t cover the entire voting process.
JOHNSON:
Really?
ELLIOTT:
Primary elections were just outside of its scope. So even though Black voters could, in theory, get a ballot on election day, they still couldn’t have a say on whose name was on that ballot.
JOHNSON:
And so many public officials and law enforcement officers at that time were card-carrying Klan members. History books might say that the Voting Rights Act handed power to Blacks in Lowndes County. But please, we know better. They would have to claim that power, claim it for themselves by any means necessary. And they had a plan. They had a plan to do just that.
ELLIOTT:
Oh, there was a plan, and it was born as those marchers passed through Lowndes County on Highway 80 on their way to Montgomery. Something else was happening there. Something just on the fringes. Beneath all the fanfare, the bravado, the speeches, there was a quiet plan, a plan to create a new political party, a Black political party.
JOHNSON:
That’s what I’m talking about, Eunice.
Now, this might be hard to believe or maybe not. I know you said it already, but I’m going to say it again. In Lowndes County in 1965, in a county where eight out of 10 folks are Black, not one of them is a registered voter, not a single one. Sit with that for a second.
Here’s Regina Moore again.
MOORER:
So as we had the Selma to Montgomery March and organizers are traveling through Lowndes County, they see some of the residents gather near Highway 80 to kind of cheer them on, but there weren’t many of them who were willing to join in. So they recognized that there’s this level of fear in this county, but there’s also this potential for political power.
JOHNSON:
So one of those willing to join is this skinny kid from New York. His name? You ready for this, Eunice? Stokely Carmichael.
ELLIOTT:
Hm, I may have heard of him.
JOHNSON:
Amen, amen. Now, Stokely was born in Trinidad, but he spent much of his childhood in New York. He joined movements early on, protesting at Woolworth stores in New York for its segregationist policies in the South. Stokely was a firsthand witness to racist violence all over the country, yet it didn’t stop him one bit, didn’t deter him, didn’t scare him.
ELLIOTT:
He was heavily involved in the national organizing scene and was fast on the ascent with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Now, you’re going to start hearing more acronyms as we keep going, and these are real important to our story. So let’s just pause for a bit. Now, when we think of this era of the Civil Rights movement, we tend to think of it as a bunch of local movements and actions that then snowballed into change but it really was so much more than that. These were massive coordinated campaigns that helped to strategize throughout the entire south, and really, the entire country. But like any collaboration, groups within the movement had disagreements, basically different ideas of what change would actually look like. But for our story, we’re going to focus on two of these groups.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the SNCC, but we’ll call it “Snick,” this is the committee that we mentioned earlier, the one that John Lewis led back in 1965. Just remember, when we say SNCC, we mean the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or Student Organizers. Got it?
JOHNSON:
When we say SNCC, you say... Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Got it, got it.
ELLIOTT:
Got it, got it, got it, got it.
JOHNSON:
The other acronyms you need to tuck in your back pocket is SCLC. That’s the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That’s Dr. King’s organization created to help protest movements throughout the South coordinate and collaborate. Here’s a little bit more about how those two go together.
JOANN MANTS, GUEST:
SNCC came out of a need for the youth in this country to become a part of the changes that are now occurring. Ella Baker saw that the youth had a part to play, and in that she wanted to help bring their ideas into this whole movement setting.
ELLIOTT:
That was Joann Mants, she was married to Bob Mants, another SNCC organizer who worked with Stokely in Lowndes County. He played a key role in the election of 1966 and in the years after that.
JOHNSON:
She mentioned Ella Baker. Now, Ella ran the SCLC. She saw the incredible power of student activists and wanted to nurture that power to bring it into the fold. That’s how SNCC was born.
MANTS:
These youth that came through this whole process started to see there was a need for commitment to a community in order for things to actually change. And as I think about it, we were just wide-eyed, not understanding the dangers coming with this whole changing process.
ELLIOTT:
Now, SNCC might have come out of the SCLC, but the two did have some organizational differences. Well, first of all, there’s age. They were different generations, but there were also different tactics.
MANTS:
One organization would do one thing and the other organization would do the other. And SCLC would come and bring the media coverage, but it was not an organization that stayed within the community, whereas to where SNCC would come and stay within communities and those communities would determine what changes they wanted to happen.
ELLIOTT:
But the common thread, a commitment to crush barriers to voting.
MANTS:
And some of the things that we decided to work on included registering people to vote. And in doing so, all these other things started to happen.
JOHNSON:
So many of the issues confronting Blacks in Lowndes were caused by those whites in power, whites in elected positions of power, but positions they could be voted out of in time. That’s why Stokely came to Lowndes County.
ELLIOTT:
And as he moved through Lowndes County in those days, following the march, he and other SNCC organizers, they noted the bravery of those who supported the marchers. So they made their way back to those creaky front steps and wood-plank porches, where those who lived in Lowndes had watched the marchers.
SNCC organizers knocked on doors, chatted, but most importantly, they listened. They listened to see if folks were ready to push back, ready to take a stand. Stokely, Mants and SNCC started to assemble a roster of residents, not only ready for change, but ready to work for it, ready to risk their lives for it.
JOHNSON:
Ready to die for it, Eunice. That’s next time on Panther.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
MANTS:
Somebody’s telling them, “If you register to vote, you can change something.” But in doing so, a lot of those folks are losing home, livelihood, and life.
JOHNSON:
Panther is produced by Reckon Radio in partnership with Pod People. It’s hosted by me, Roy S. Johnson.
ELLIOTT:
And me, Eunice Elliot. Our executive producer is John Hammontree with additional writing, reporting, and production for Reckon by Isaiah Murtaugh, Sarah Whites-Koditshek, and R.L. Nave. Special thanks to Kelly Scott, Katie Johnson, Minda Honey, Abby Crain and Tom Bates.
JOHNSON:
And at Pod People, Anne Feuss, Alex Vikmanis, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Rebecca Chaisson, John Asante, and Carter Wogahn. Our theme music is composed by Jelani Akil Bauman.
ELLIOTT:
Head to Reckon.news to learn more about the events featured in today’s episode, and please make sure to rate, review, and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
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