Black History Month: Achievements, Change and Justice. Special Episode

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What can Black history teach us about the legacy & future of civil rights? Get insights from past guests.

Black History Month is a celebration of the remarkable contributions of Black Americans to our nation. We share some personal thoughts and stories about the lessons of history, with extracts from past podcasts and a Common Ground Committee public event. We learn about the legacy of the civil rights movement, and recent calls for social change, justice, reform, and respect.

This episode features “Let’s Find Common Ground” podcast guests: Professor Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and the author of the memoir Growing Up X; Dr. Brian Williams, Associate Professor of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center; Hawk Newsome, Cofounder and Chair of Black Lives Matter Greater New York; Errol Toulon, Jr., Ed.D., the first African-American Sheriff of Suffolk County, New York; and Caroline Randall Williams, a poet, author, teacher and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

We also share moving extracts from a remarkable conversation between Donna Brazile and Michael Steele for a Common Ground Committee forum in 2018. As the first Black chairs of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee, respectively, their views represented different ends of the political spectrum. But in tackling essential questions of race and governance, they found many points of agreement.