Reckon Interview

If you scroll through the news or turn on the TV, you see endless stories of book bans, teachers on strike, school shootings, legislative wars over curriculum, and, of course, the insane rumors about school children using litter boxes to go to the bathroom. Some of these stories are just copypasta Facebook nonsense, but there’s also a real fight at play here.  There's a fight over the future of pu...

Will the state of Alabama execute a man for a crime he didn’t commit? That’s a question that’s been raised far too many times in the last decade, but right now it’s being raised for Toforest Johnson. And, shockingly, it’s a question being raised by the former attorney who prosecuted Johnson and put him on death row. Birmingham’s current district attorney, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supr...

You may think you know the story of the Tulsa race massacre. Maybe you’ve picked it up in pieces from HBO’s Watchmen or Lovecraft Country. Maybe you saw the documentaries that dropped a couple of years ago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that horrific moment in 1921 when white Tulsans killed hundreds of people and destroyed the neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.  But no one has ever...

Frederick Joseph joins the Reckon Interview to discuss his new bestseller “Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood.” You may know Frederick as the force behind the Black Panther project, the effort that raised over one million dollars to help young Black children see Black Panther in theaters. He led a similar effort for young girls to see Captain Marvel. He raised funds to help people pay their...

Neema Avashia was born and raised in the bedroom suburban community of Cross Lanes, West Virginia. She’s an Appalachian through and through. She can sing Take Me Home Country Roads by heart. She knows the state’s mountains and waterways by heart. In her new collection of essays, “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place,” she describes feeling more hillbilly than hindu. S...

In his book, “All the White Friends I Could Not Keep,” Andre Henry describes what it’s like to live through an apocalypse. And he’s going back to the original roots of that word. A time of revelation. For Andre, the last few years in America have laid deep truths bare.  He grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He had close white friends. People he even considered like a second family. He had a white...

They call Delbert McClinton the Godfather of Americana for a reason.  Across the span of a 60 year career, he’s played with everyone. Little Richard and Jimmy Reed. Muddy Waters. Willy Nelson. Tom Petty. Mavis Staples. BB King. ​​He's written songs performed by Emmylou Harris, Etta James, Vince Gill, George Strait, Martina McBride. He even taught a young John Lennon the finer points of the harmoni...

If you want to know the truth about Appalachia, you won't find it in a certain elegy. You'll find it from people like Chuck Corra and Appodlachia, a podcast committed to examining the region in all its complexity. Corra joins the Reckon Interview to discuss JD Vance, Sen. Joe Manchin, and all the people that have been putting in work to make Appalachia a better place for generations. Learn more ab...

Some of you may not know his story but David J. Dennis Sr. was a titan of the civil rights movement. Born in Louisiana, he joined the movement while at Dillard University in New Orleans. Like many people, he got pulled into the movement reluctantly at first. But by the time he was in his early 20s he was the field director for the Congress of Racial Equality  in Louisiana and Mississippi. He was w...

As the horses take their place in the upcoming Kentucky Derby, thousands of people around the country will join in singing “Our Old Kentucky Home,” the state song of Kentucky and one that also has its roots in minstrel shows. The song was written by Stephen Foster a couple of decades before the Civil War. Foster is sometimes called the father of American popular music. And this song along with oth...

In the middle of making her newest record, Michaela Anne’s life went through a series of life altering changes. She became pregnant with and gave birth to her first child and her mother experienced a major hemorrhagic stroke.  She spent the second half of her pregnancy, sitting by her mom’s bedside in Michigan, playing these new songs for her. They became a source of comfort, introspection and hea...

In his new collection of poetry “The Gleaming of the Blade,” Christian J. Collier examines his world through a cinematic lens. In one poem, he takes on the perspective of one of Jason’s victims in Friday the 13th VIII. In another, he writes from the voice of The Candyman. They’re engaging, subversive poems. But he’s also revealing a deeper truth, the way that American society can turn Black men in...

We are seeing wave after wave after wave of legislation in this country that targets LGBT youth and adults. Especially the trans community. In Texas, an order issued by the governor would allow the state to take children away from their homes if their parents are trans affirming. In Florida and Alabama, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law could penalize teachers that displayed family photos with the...

Danté Stewart is the author of “Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle.” Danté grew up in a Black Pentecostal community in South Carolina, but when he walked on to play football at Clemson University, he suddenly found himself in a very different faith environment. He kept getting drawn into white megachurch communities. The people he met were always nice and welcoming. They made him feel speci...

Where does the South end and the rest of America begin? Is the South being Americanized or are we watching Southern influence spread to the rest of the country? That’s a topic tackled by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker in their new book: The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in Balance. Frye Gaillard is an Emmy award winning journalist and was the longtime Southern editor for the C...

After his father died, Joe Garner found an old suit of his in the attic. His dad, Charlie had played bass at the Grand Ole Opry for decades and when Joe found the suit… he was struck with inspiration. He hadn’t grown up wanting to play country music but when he picked up the suit, he knew there was unfinished business with his dad and that maybe he could figure it out through music. And thus, The...

In her new book of poetry, "White Bull," Elizabeth Hughey turns to an unlikely source: the language of notorious Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor. Words are just building blocks. Tools. The same common language was used by Martin Luther King Jr. to liberate people as was used by Connor to enforce segregation and inspire violence. For a decade, Hughey sifted through his speeches,...

Aunjanue Ellis is nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in the 2021 biopic King Richard. She’s a two time Emmy nominee for her work in When They See Us and Lovecraft Country. Christine Swanson is a two time nominee for the NAACP Image Awards for her films For the Love of Ruth and The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel, which also starred Ellis.  They recently made a short film...

In her new book, “South to America,” Imani Perry dives into the heart of the “changing same” of the American South. Her work fits into a long tradition like W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place, VO Key’s Southern Politics in State and Nation and WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, as books that unlock a deeper understanding of America through an e...

Cassidy Freeman stars as Amber Gemstone on the hit HBO comedy "The Righteous Gemstones." She joins the Reckon Interview to discuss the sources of inspiration for her character, how recent events reshaped the direction of the series, life on set in Charleston, her thoughts on the South and how she's carved a space for herself on such a crowded set. The Righteous Gemstones is now streaming on HBO an...

Bourbon may be America's most popular spirit, but was that always the case? Clay Risen joins the Reckon Interview to discuss his new book: "Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey," and offers tips about tasting, rare finds and the best affordable (and findable) bottles of bourbon to grab as last minute gifts. Learn more at www.clayrisen.com Sign up for our newsletter, The Conversation at ReckonSou...

Adia Victoria's new album "A Southern Gothic" is one of the best records to emerge from the South in several years, deeply rooted in Southern sound and themes. Every song on the album feels like a short story, challenging and remaking the moonlight and magnolia staples of the Southern gothic. Victoria is also the host of the podcast Call & Response, which examines music through a Southern lens. Sh...

Why is the South so obsessed with college football? It’s not a question most of us ever stop to think about. Football has just always been a constant. But this on the Reckon Interview, Ed Southern explains the roots of our football obsession. In a conversation about his new book “Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South,” Ed outlines how the rules of football and Southern cul...

On June 7, 1992 Stacy McCall, Suzie Streeter and Sherrill Levitt went to bed in a small town in the Ozarks. By the next morning, they had vanished without a trace. 30 years later, the mystery remains unsolved. Anne Roderique-Jones is creator and host of "The Springfield Three," a popular podcast examining the case of the disappearance of those three women and how it affected the community as a who...

In his new book, “Dear William,” David Magee shares a heartbreaking account of his son’s addiction and eventual death of opioid overdose. In a period where deaths are calculated by the thousands, stories like David's show us how personal grief and loss is. In this bonus episode of the Reckon Interview, Magee is interviewed by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, John Archibald. See acast.com/privacy...