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 or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the final episode of Reckon Radio’s “Panther,” Woke Vote founder and Birmingham Civil Rights Institute President, DeJuana Thompson, and Tennessee State Rep Justin J. Pearson sit down with hosts Eunice Elliott and Roy S. Johnson. The four discuss the status of the movement for Black Power today—what’s changed, what hasn’t and how the strategies of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LFCO) hold up today. To Pearson and Thompson, the past isn’t the past. It’s our toolkit for tomorrow.

Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.

EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:

Over the last five episodes, we’ve told you the story of Lowndes County, of the inception and evolution of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, of the Birth of the Black Panther. This episode, we decided to flip the script. We’ve brought on a couple of folks doing this sort of work, the work of justice, education and liberation all rolled into one to tell us just how they got here.

ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:

The story of Lowndes County has a beginning and the middle, but the end is still being written. It’s a story that’s ongoing even to this day. We sat down with two leaders from today’s movement for Black power. First DeJuana Thompson, a true force of nature who’s worked for justice everywhere from Birmingham, Alabama, all the way to the White House.

ELLIOTT:

Second, Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you heard it in the news quite a bit in April of 2023.

NEWS ANCHOR:

Let’s go live now to Representative Justin Pearson-

JUSTIN J. PEARSON, GUEST:

… just focusing on that, Representative Jones, Representative Johnson and myself are being expelled from the State House because we said we cannot do business as usual. No one should be wanting to operate as though this is not happening, as though we are not living in a gun violence epidemic in the state of Tennessee, and the solutions that are being offered is actually to reduce the First Amendment rights of people.

ELLIOTT:

He and another Black State Rep, Justin Jones, were expelled from the Tennessee State House for, get this, supporting protestors against gun violence. Now, the third state lawmaker who stood with the protestors, a white woman named Gloria Johnson, Republicans voted to let her keep her seat.

JOHNSON:

But race had nothing to do with it, right, Eunice?

ELLIOTT:

Yeah, right, Roy.

JOHNSON:

On this episode of Panther how Representative Pearson and DeJuana Thompson fight the good fight and get into very, very good trouble.

(THEME MUSIC IN)

ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:

A long anticipated freedom march from Selma to Alabama’s capital of Montgomery finally gets underway.

MARY MAYS JACKSON, GUEST:

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 ReckonRadio.

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?

ELLIOTT:

The one in Oakland started out wanting, they heard about us.

VIOLA BRADFORD, GUEST:

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.

ED MOORE KING, GUEST:

We come a long ways, but we got a long ways to go.

REVEREND 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.

(THEME MUSIC OUT)

DEJUANA THOMPSON, GUEST:

My name is DeJuana Thompson. I’m the president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. I like to say that I am a lifelong activist, though I show up in so many different spaces, particularly for Black liberation and marginalized communities. I’ve worked on every level of political government that you can think. I got my start working in the Birmingham City Council, and I went all the way to working in the White House under Barack Obama, President Obama’s Administration. I’d like to say I’ve seen it from every side including working in international politics. What I’ve realized at the end of that is that we have to create spaces intentionally for our communities to really be able to activate on their own behalf, on the things that they care about. It’s not for me to tell them what to activate around, but it is for me to provide the tools and the resources and the opportunity for them to be activated for their own communities.

PEARSON:

I’m an activist-legislator. I have never put down the roots that were proximate to my community. I come from Westwood, majority Black community in southwest Memphis, and it’s the same community where I went to high school and when I graduated, we had AP courses and we had textbooks. But when I started going to that school, we had neither of those things. The first meetings I ever attended of people in power were school board meetings, demanding that we get access to the same resources that I knew other schools had access to, but they were wealthier. They were whiter, right?

My fight started then, and it’s the same community that I represent now. So I bring the activist background, which is rooted in a deep tradition of people in Memphis who have built and have led and continued movements with the faith and the spirit of God being on the side of the oppressed, in addition to people and a people power movement who want to see justice happen, who want to see fairness happen, and who will give of themselves their energy, their time to make that possible. We have carried that into our work as a state legislator now in the, representing the 86th District in the Tennessee General Assembly.

ELLIOTT:

Tennessee Representative Justin J. Pearson and DeJuana Thompson, welcome to Panther: Blueprint for Black Power. I’m curious, as both of your young people, young activists, a lot of us have heard the stories, we’ve witnessed this, we’ve witnessed these injustices firsthand. What is it about you or your personality or even your upbringing that cause you to be galvanized to be so active in the liberation movement?

THOMPSON:

Representative Pearson, you want to start?

PEARSON:

No, I’m smart enough to know Black women lead. You go ahead, Dee.

THOMPSON:

I will say that I was brought into this primarily by going to Berea College. If you know anything about Berea College, you know that Carter G. Woodson graduated from Berea College who we considered the Father of Black History Month. So I was really baptized, if you will, into this conversation around Black Studies, African-American Studies, and what to do with that really as a discipline, because when I was growing up in Birmingham, even being from a place with a history like Birmingham, I really had no idea, no one had professionalized activism. Nobody professionalized what it was to be an organizer. I knew that I was always an organizer. I don’t think that we had the language, particularly, at least in my immediate community, to say that this is a path that the ancestors before you, leaders before you have done, the Angela Davises, the Harry Belafontes, the Fannie Lou Hamers.

I knew of their names, but I did not understand what they had done. When I first started working for the City of Birmingham, I was recruited to be a part of Harry Belafonte’s organization called The Gathering. At that time Harry Belafonte, he might’ve been 78, 77, but I remember he said to us, when he pulled together a group of young people from across the country who were organizing work, who were working in spaces like government or nonprofit or on the front lines at that time who were activating on behalf of others, but he said that he had gotten reactivated to the movement because he saw a nine-year-old be handcuffed in her classroom and taken out of her classroom by police officers. At 78 he realized that the fight continued and that his job at that point was he felt like that so many people had gotten us our liberties, but they had not teaching us the strategies.

So he felt that he needed to organize a group that would take the elders of movements like CORE and SNCC and SCLC and have them invest and connect with these up-and-coming leaders or leaders who were young in spaces and make sure that we had a lens for liberation in the spaces that we were working in. I was 22 when he told me that, and so that really colored my experience as well as being a person of faith. My father is a pastor, my mom’s an educator. My mom was actually a college student who worked on Richard Arrington’s first campaign to get him elected as the first Black mayor, and I just found that out three days ago. We talk about it all the time. So-

JOHNSON:

Never stop learning, never stop learning.

THOMPSON:

No, I’m like, “You could’ve told me this, Sis, a couple of years ago,” but it never even occurred to her to say it because we do things, we show up as individuals, even as young individuals, and we have these impact moments that we don’t realize sometimes until we see it later on that it was a moment. So that’s what lent or got me initially into this space

PEARSON:

That’s remarkable, and the reality that for our collective liberation, it is going to require an intergenerational movement of people who prioritize and elevate the issues of Black folk. It’s going to require everybody’s input and everybody’s hands on the plow, white, Black, rich, poor, queer, straight, everybody’s hands on the plow, but it’s going to require a particular lens toward Black people’s liberation and especially Black women’s liberation to free everybody. The burden of that cannot exclusively be on Black people to make happen, but the responsibility of creating that blueprint, of creating that agenda, that roadmap for this country to follow, I think is and should be led by Black folks. That’s what I have benefited from, the subversive teachings of the Black church. My parents had kids as teenagers. At 15 and 16 years old, I had three older brothers. By the time they were 20 and 21, they had me, and they had my baby brother five years later.

We grew up financially poor but spiritually rich. We went to church every Sunday. You had this faith that superseded the conditions that you were in but was powerful enough to change the conditions that you were in. so I witnessed my teenage parents growing up, earning a bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees, my mom first, then my dad and my mom is keeping going. She’s earning a doctorate in education right now, and they serve as my role models. I’ll tell you where I got that from, Cornel West, he preached a sermon at Rankin Chapel at Howard University. He said, “Oprah Winfrey can’t be your role model. Your role model got to be somebody you can touch.” I was about 12, changed my life. I was like, “Well, the only people I got is my brothers and they crazy as me, so they won’t work. But I do got these parents who I can touch, who I can see, who are human, but who offer some example, some way, some pathway that I can follow and take the best of and seek to make a meaningful life out of it.”

When I was in sixth grade, I ran for class president. We lived in an apartment complex, so I knew more students at the elementary school in first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade than the people in sixth grade did. They only knew each other. I started learning about people power a long time ago, you got to get a diverse coalition going to begin with. I won the election and some of the sixth graders were upset and they started saying bad things. They told one of the counselors and the counselor sat me down, and she said, “If we keep getting these complaints, we’re going to scratch your name off the plaque from being president.” I start crying, and I leave that meeting. The only thing I know is, “I can’t wait to get home and tell my mama what just happened.” I’m 12, but I’m like, “I’m about to tell ‘cause I know something’s going to happen.”

So my parents, they go back up to the school with their… my mom has her two degrees in her hand, my dad has his one. They’re like, “We come from somewhere. I don’t know what you think this is, but we come from somewhere, and we are someone and we deserve a certain level of respect and a certain level of treatment.” This was a Black woman in particular, that we are going to demand, “Just Because we don’t got all the pedigrees that some people have or the big houses and things, doesn’t mean that you get to devalue our child.” So the first activist I got to know were my parents. The imagery that I have in my head is there’s this shadow that’s behind us. There’s this beautiful powerful shadow that is God, and however people see God is up to them, that makes even what small acts a person does so much bigger. That is what I believe movements, that’s what they do for people. They make us taller. They make all of us stand a little bigger than maybe our human bodies are.

ELLIOTT:

Most of our parents didn’t have a choice but to be activists, just to live, just to go to the grocery store, just to have any semblance of a life. Then our generations have more choices and more options. There are so many options for you in other venues that aren’t as heavy, still fighting the fights that we’re talking about in Panther and that have been going on obviously for hundreds of years. Why is it that you said, “I want to take that baton?” And why do you think more young people of our generation feel like, “Oh, well we’ve arrived and so we don’t have to be a part of that fight anymore?”

THOMPSON:

I think consciousness creates a heaviness all in itself. It’s like, I won’t say that I just want to be out here every day, if I can be transparent. I am a person who loves to travel. I consider myself to be a global citizen. I literally have my passport on me right now just in case one of y’all say, “Let’s go,” which I learned from elders like Angela Davis and James Baldwin, folk who said, “We got to get out of here for our sanity,” and there is revolution and rest. I remember very vividly that one of the things that Harry Belafonte told us was that different things move different people. So what may move me or spur me to action may not spur you, the next person, to action right now.

I think in terms of taking the responsibility to then take your passion and move it into action, that requires environment. I think that the environment has been created sometimes by necessity. You see somebody get shot down in your neighborhood, the environment changes and it becomes a necessity to say something. But once the environment changes, typically, the impact or the way in which you exist or approximate to a thing shifts. I think that our jobs, or at least I see my job, is consistently creating an environment that doesn’t make people comfortable or that pushes them to have to ask a question, that asks the question of, “What is my responsibility?”

PEARSON:

There was something you said, De, there that just matters so much, which is proximity. A kid who grows up in Boxtown to Westwood, down where I’m from, who went to an underfunded school, doesn’t have the same choices as somebody who went to an elite private school where everybody’s going to the Ivy League. Yes, you might have the choice of you go do something post secondarily, but it isn’t between going to Bowden and Harvard. It’s going to TCAT, Tennessee College of Applied Technology and Southwest Community College. All of these issues that we care about are intersectional. No issue lives in and of itself. The design of our predicaments are determining the choices that we get to make. To be an activist I have found for me personally is not because that is something I woke up and wanted to be or this is something I woke up and wanted to do.

It is because the built environment around me, the conditions that I was forced into due to racism, due to patriarchy, due to exploitative capitalism and the privileges that I had been afforded due to the exposure that I had, the parents that I had, the grandmothers, that I had created a kairos moment. It was ultimately up to me to answer the question, as many folks like De and others have answered, and you all have answered, and what am I to do? What am I to do in this moment? What am I to do to bring all of my gifts, all of my talents, all of the resources, all that I have in to this moment to make a change? For some folks, that’s sharing a social media post.

For other folks that’s contributing thousands of dollars into different campaigns, and we want to meet people where they are because our tent has to be broad enough and wide enough and open enough for everybody to be in it and to be able to contribute in it. What is it that I can do to uplift my community? What is it that I can do to uplift those who didn’t get the same access that I had? I believe some folks have sought to refrain from asking that question to distance themselves from the very people that made them into who they are, and that’s deep-seated, anti-Black racism that is going to take a long, long time for us to heal from. There are a lot of people in our community who need healing from that because we live in a society that privileges it.

If you’re Black and you’re against Black people, you can become a senator. You can become a governor, like our white folk in this country will create positions and roles and give you power. But to be a Black person who’s for the uplift of Black people and for the uplift of marginalized and oppressed people, it’s a much, much harder road to hoe. But I think for them, there’s some healing that has to happen. There’s a recognition just from me, and I’m just going to speak on behalf of me at this point, that there’s very little time to expend trying to go and fix some folk because we’ve got so many problems. We’ve got so many people who are ready to be in the fight, ready to be in the movement, ready to do the work, they just didn’t know where to go yet. See, those are some disciples we need to be going after.

JOHNSON:

All that Representative Pearson was saying, it reminded me of a sermon I heard not too long ago. My pastor said, “Part of our challenge today is to discern between what is dead and what is dormant, that we need to focus on those things that can be restored and revived and lifted, not those things that are dead and gone.” That’s exactly what these two leaders are doing.

ELLIOTT:

More with Representative Pearson and DeJuana Thompson after the break.

JOHNSON:

For this, our final episode of Panther, we sat down with Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson and DeJuana Thompson, the creator of Woke Vote.

ELLIOTT:

And they talked to us about what their work, the work of organizing a movement looks like today. I’m curious for both of you, what does a trip to the ballot box, what does representation mean to you, and what are your earliest recollections of voting or going to the polls with your parents?

PEARSON:

I remember going to see my parents vote for President Barack Obama, about what, 8:00 in the morning we got up and my mama told us to put on our suit and ties, “Get dressed, get ready ‘cause we’re going to do a thing.” All my brothers got ready. It was my brothers’ first time they would ever vote was in ‘O8 for President Obama. I remember that moment, and I remember going to the polls with them because we were doing something that was special and momentous for that election, yes, but it was special and momentous for our people, period. The fact that we were exercising our right and staking our claim in our democracy too was important. Every election that I have ever voted in, I have always voted in a suit and tie or a dashiki in representation and in honor of the ancestors. So listen, voting is extremely important, and civic engagement is equally as important.

JOHNSON:

So break those down. Tell us what the difference is.

PEARSON:

Going to the ballot box is electing a candidate to represent you in this representative democracy, very important job that folks fought for, were beaten for, brutalized for a lot of folks lynched and died for, but that’s only one part of it. After they get elected, we have a responsibility to hold them accountable and to continue to show up and be persistent and actively and civically engaged people to get the results that we want from the people we elect to better our communities, whether that be the streets being paved, healthcare access being given, wages being increased, whatever it is, it requires us to be more actively engaged throughout the year, not just once a year or once every four years.

You mentioned Lowndes County, and so I have to talk about Catherine Coleman Flowers, who is just a mother of the environmental justice movement, who is being proximate in demanding that people who have been systematically oppressed by the state and by the federal government, by ignoring their access to clean water and sanitation, be elevated to the issue for the Department of Justice to investigate, took 25 years to do it. But she remained active, persistent, and engaged to the point that she demanded a president and the Department of Justice to do something. It wasn’t one election, wasn’t one president, wasn’t one governor, we’ve got to stay on this committing our sales for a lifetime. If anybody wants to see change tomorrow or the visions that we want to be a reality that quickly, that’s just not how it works.

THOMPSON:

I so agree with that, and in my organization, Woke Vote, we call it a culture of organizing, a culture of engagement, because the vote is a tool in the toolkit. It’s not the only tool. We really talk about really the conversation around a power analysis, because it’s really important to understand that voting is power, but if you don’t really understand or give your vote a power analysis or have a strategy for how your voting is actually impacting the things that you care about, then when the candidate that you may have voted for doesn’t win, your power feels diminished. Your courage and your spirit feels deflated. So we have to teach a different power analysis around a continued engagement strategy that says, “Okay, voting is a tool. It is one of the things that we do, but what are the other ways in which we show up for our communities that are just as important?”

‘Cause I always remind people that yes, there are elected officials, but what about all of these appointed positions, particularly on the city level, the county level, the state level that has quite a bit of power that impacts how we exist from day to day? When I worked for the City of Birmingham, I did an assessment of all of the boards and agencies that we have for the City of Birmingham. At that time, it was over 400 boards and agencies. When you think about the waterworks or you think about parks and rec and different places that have an actual budget, transportation, you don’t get elected into those roles. So if you don’t have a power analysis that includes roles like those, school board, that includes usher board, all the different ways in which power exists in our communities, then you are absolutely missing the opportunity to really live in an expanded version of democracy. If you relegate democracy, if you relegate everything just to that moment at the polls, it can be deflating when you don’t see what you want.

If you remember in 2017, we had an opportunity in Alabama to seat a new senator here, and the language that kept coming out was, “You should vote for this person because he brought to justice the people that bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church.” Well, when you have a culture of students who haven’t even been taught about 16th Street Baptist Church, they can’t connect to that. Their power analysis is not connected to that, so we could not use that language. In fact, we could not use language about the candidate at all. We had to talk about building their power, building their voice, creating a space where no one could say that they didn’t impact the trajectory of that election. That is really what pushed those 100,000 African American voters to turn out. You saw the impact of Black communities, Black women, Black young adults, the power of the Black church, because they had a power analysis around what could be done with that particular moment, and I think that’s really where we have to focus.

JOHNSON:

That sort of power analysis is just the thing that SNCC and the LCFO did back in the day. I wanted to know just how important that history is and just how they keep it alive in their work.

THOMPSON:

I dare say that times are more critical than I think many may even imagine. So where there was a physical threat of attack during some of our elders’ and ancestors’ time, that same attack and the spirit of that attack is still very present because let’s be clear, police brutality is still there, the Klan still there, white supremacy still there. But the way in which it exists and the way it has been legislated, we have to unpack and sometimes really expose it for individuals so they understand the real threat that’s in front of them. It’s easy to be comfortable when you are in ignorance, and not an ignorance stat of not wanting to know, but just not knowing.

We have to challenge every generation to realize that the threat to liberation is still very present. It just looks different in different ways and also that the strategies, though, that were implemented still work. Now, that’s the exciting thing. We not really reinventing the wheel around here. We might have a few new tools in a toolkit, social media, but let’s be clear, the way they used newspaper back then and letter writing campaigns, and once they got access to TV and radio, these were the tools of their time. So we’re using the tools of our time with social media, but it’s the same strategy: talk fast, talk repetitive, have a clear message. It’s the same thing.

PEARSON:

Our history is how we win because it is the greatest tool, I would argue, in our organizing toolkit because it’s worked many times before. In fact, in America, all of the progressive movements have had the hand prints and the feet prints of Black folk. Black people are the ones with the experience in making the reality of justice and freedom and liberty come into fruition.

ELLIOTT:

I would love for you to share, if it’s not specific to Lowndes County and the story of the Black Panther that we’ve told on this series, what is a Black history fact, a story that you like to share when people say, “Oh, but did you know this?” What is your Black history story?

THOMPSON:

I think quite frankly, and because I’m here at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the story of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth hasn’t even been told the way it should be told. This is a man whose house was bombed on Christmas, and the next day he got right on the bus and was still advocating. This is a man who basically told Dr. King, “I get what you standing for, and I get the way your prism and your view of the way we should be doing this, but here at Birmingham, we doing this thing a little different. So you can come help, but you can’t come take over.” I think that that’s important to talk about, and the children’s march has happened. It has gotten the attention of the president. It has gotten the attention of Congress to the point now they have to respond.

So they are sending delegates down to Birmingham from the White House to meet with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abernathy and others. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth is attacked the day before this meeting is supposed to happen. So much so he is in the hospital with broken ribs. So he tells them, “Well, we can’t have this meeting. I need to be in the room.” But of course, Dr. King says, “Well, listen, we’ve worked so hard to get these people in the room, we got to have this conversation. Brother, we got to move forward.” Now what’s happening in Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth feared that Dr. King would be too much of a pacifist and not go strongly in there with their demands. He gets up out the bed and there is a photo of him sitting linked in with his hand in the face of the White House leadership. Next to him is Dr. King, on the other side of him Abernathy.

What people do not realize is he had broken ribs and he sat there, and he led the meeting to make sure that the intentional things that the folks in Birmingham knew that they needed, that he was able to have a distinct voice and to not back down. I don’t think I have get up out the hospital bed with broke ribs, I don’t think I have that in me. That’s a different level of accountability. But when you hear that story, you can get up and go vote. When you hear that story, it makes you think, “Well, I guess I could be doing a little bit more.” You know what I’m saying? So that is one of my favorite stories about him, because when you look at the picture, you will never know that he was truly broken in that moment. But the power of his assignment is all you see in that photo.

PEARSON:

That’s an amazing story. Thank you for that, De. You know Dr. King was assassinated here in Memphis, but I remind people there was a movement happening before he got there. Dr. King always helped to catalyze what was going on. That was his ultimately what his gift became. But there were always these people in Birmingham, in Montgomery, in Memphis who were organizing, who were building, and were working for years in Selma and things before Dr. King comes. In Memphis, one of the core leaders was a Black woman whose name is too often lost to people’s memory, not even to history books, Cornelia Crenshaw. She organized for the sanitation workers fund, ensured their families got necessities when they went on strike and had food and had clothes, and they had money. Because another thing about strikes, you’re not getting paid. You need somebody who’s going to help take on that burden.

So she organized the sanitation workers. She organized some of the women as well who weren’t sanitation workers ‘cause that was strictly men, but who were in other service industries to be on strike as well, and she coordinated that effort. When Dr. King visited Memphis, he would stay with Cornelia Crenshaw. He would use her car when he traveled around and she stays engaged and active in Memphis politics and in Memphis history the rest of her life. She starts to protest high utility rates at Memphis Light, Gas and Water. She refuses to pay her bill for 10 years because they wouldn’t accept partial payment. She gets kicked out of her house because of it, transforms MLG an W, Memphis Light, Gas and Water to where they then started to accept partial payments on bills, and they do until this day. She was always talking about poor folk going to city council meetings, yelling about it.

Now a few people who are still living remember her. I met one guy who said, “I didn’t know any of the things about the sanitation worker’s strike. I just knew she would come to a city council meeting, she’d make all types of noise.” It’s like people always come from somewhere, but she has such a rich legacy in the civil rights struggle, such a rich legacy in Memphis history that I love to have the opportunity to share. Cornelia Crenshaw deserves a lot of credit for the movement in Memphis that connected the environmental justice and the civil rights struggle together in a really meaningful and powerful way. She stayed on that battlefield the rest of her life for us in Memphis.

JOHNSON:

There is a Cornelia Crenshaw in every city, and it is vital that we uplift their names, that we remind people that they more than mattered, that they moved movements, that they elevated movements.

THOMPSON:

When we invest in our folk, when we invest in our communities, when we invest in the brilliance of young Black people, when we invest in our power, you don’t know, and we may never know how far that’s going to go. It’s a teaching moment that allows us to teach folk again in Alabama that when you’ve got party structure that’s completely failed, when you’ve got definitely racist redistricting, when you’ve got all kinds of other systemic issues, there is still a process that can work. You still have power. There’s still some opportunity for us to change our state for the better, and the response remains the same. We still got to organize. We still got work to do.

(MUSIC IN)

JOHNSON:

One of the things that really, really lifted me in doing this was not only shining a light on a generation that built this foundation, but discovering this new generation. There’s so many young, smart, dynamic people that have picked up the mantle of the Lowndes County founders and those people who risked their lives just in order to register to vote, who are still doing the work today to ensure that Black voters, Brown voters, other disenfranchised groups have the opportunity to go to the ballot and exercise one of the most important things we can do in this nation. We often talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, but we also stand on the shoulders of regular people too. I hope that this podcast has done a great honor to those that did the work in Lowndes County, particularly those we spoke to, some of whom have moved on.

ELLIOTT:

Roy, the beautiful thing about a podcast with this subject matter is it’s honestly American history, and it’ll start new conversations of things that people didn’t know, and that’s by design that most of us did not know this history. So I’m extremely hopeful that people will listen to the podcast. It will encourage conversation, and it will encourage folks to do their own research, and like you said, stand on those shoulders of people who came before us and continue the fight today.

JOHNSON:

We talk about this movement that went all the way to the West coast and evolved into something that remains controversial today, and that’s of course, the Black Panther-led Black power movement.

ELLIOTT:

It really makes you think, what could we do today if we just got organized?

JOHNSON:

Yo, just pull out the blueprint. Look at your local neighborhood, look at your school district, look at your county and see what needs to be done. See who’s being overlooked. There’s a real foundation here, a solid one, a blueprint for change that was created more than half a century ago. It’s been an honor to shine a light on it.

ELLIOTT:

It really has, and it’s been an honor to do it with you, Roy.

JOHNSON:

Oh, absolutely, Eunice. Thank you to those who tuned in for all six episodes, who supported us through this journey. Thank you for joining us on Panther: Blueprint for Black Power. Panther is produced by Reckon Radio in partnership with Pod People. It’s hosted by me, Roy S. Johnson.

ELLIOTT:

And me, Eunice Elliott. 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 podcasts.

(MUSIC OUT)

Pod People transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Pod People contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of Pod People’s programming is the audio record.