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Courage deserves a clear record. We sit down with historian and philanthropist Lloyd Gill to follow a remarkable path from a family’s memorial scholarship to a full‑scale community campaign to honor Corporal Waverly Woodson Jr., the Black medic who worked 30 straight hours on Omaha Beach saving lives while wounded. What began as a student research challenge turned into a mission for Girl Scout Troop 423, who wrote to museums, military commands, and even heads of state to document a story that bureaucracy lost and a warehouse fire tried to erase.

Across the conversation, we unpack the overlooked impact of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the all‑Black unit whose balloons forced enemy aircraft higher and shielded the landings from strafing runs. We trace Woodson’s path from scoring high in training and being blocked from a commission due to segregation, to serving as a medic attached to the 320th on D‑Day. The details are visceral: shrapnel wounds before he reached shore, a makeshift field hospital in the sand, amputations and artery ties under fire, and reviving drowning British soldiers before finally collapsing. Commanders recommended top honors, a three‑star general advanced the case for the Medal of Honor, and yet the trail stalled—downgraded, delayed, and eventually buried under lost records.

What stands out is how everyday people can move history. Lloyd lays out exactly how listeners can help: visit house.gov, find your representative, and ask them to push the Medal of Honor upgrade and accept alternative documentation. Share the story with veterans’ groups, churches, schools, and civic leaders. Tap the network effect of social media and local press to make it impossible to ignore. Along the way, you’ll learn about D‑Day tactics, award protocols, and how a determined troop of Girl Scouts turned research into advocacy.

If this story moved you, help us move Congress. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review with one action you’ll take today to support Corporal Waverly Woodson Jr.’s rightful recognition.

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Four voices. One enduring throughline: language as liberation. We shine a bright, human light on Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—women who transformed American literature and widened the world’s sense of what stories can hold.

We start with Maya Angelou, tracing a path from childhood silence to a global stage. Her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings broke barriers for Black women in nonfiction, while her poem On the Pulse of Morning echoed from a presidential inauguration. Beyond the page, we explore her work as a performer, civil rights organizer, and teacher, and how travel, mentorship, and ceaseless experimentation fueled a life where genre served the truth rather than confined it.

Zora Neale Hurston emerges as the folklorist who made field notes sing. From Harlem salons to Florida porches, Haiti to Jamaica, her ear for vernacular and eye for ritual shaped Their Eyes Were Watching God and a body of work that honored everyday Black life. We unpack the hard years—controversy, poverty, and an unmarked grave—and the later revival led by Alice Walker that returned Hurston to the canon, influencing generations of writers and readers.

Toni Morrison’s arc moves through scholarship, editing, and a breathtaking sequence of novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved—that confront history’s hauntings with lyrical rigor. We talk about her Nobel Prize, her defense of free expression, and how her classrooms and editorial rooms became incubators for voices too often dismissed. Finally, we turn to Alice Walker, whose The Color Purple changed how tenderness and survival could live on the page, then leapt to film and stage. Her essays, poetry, children’s books, and activism reveal a writer committed to empathy and unflinching truth.

If you love literature, cultural history, or simply the kind of story that stays in your bones, this episode offers context, connection, and reasons to read deeper. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a reading spark, and leave a review telling us which book you’re picking up next.

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A hundred years after Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week, we step back and ask a simple question with big consequences: how do we choose what to remember? Educator and former coach Daryl Page charts the living map of Black history—its origins, its overlooked corners, and the practical ways we can study and share it with the next generation.

We begin with the roots: why February, how the month became official in 1976, and the milestones that give it muscle—from the Greensboro sit-ins and Rosa Parks’s catalytic act to Jackie Robinson’s debut and the elections of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Daryl brings it home with a curated reading list for classrooms and book clubs: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man, James Baldwin’s The Rockpile, Langston Hughes’s Cora Unashamed, and Eugenia Collier’s Marigolds. Each piece is grounded in place—Arkansas, Harlem, Iowa, rural Maryland—turning geography into character and history into lived experience.

We also spotlight the backbone of movements: Black women who organized, calculated, invented, and led. From Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker to Katherine Johnson, Marie Van Brittan Brown, and contemporary trailblazers, their work links abolition, civil rights, STEM innovation, and cultural change. And we trace the power of sport to challenge systems, celebrating pioneers like Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, and modern icons such as Serena and Venus Williams, Simone Biles, and Michael Jordan—athletes who turned excellence into advocacy.

This conversation blends story, strategy, and actionable ideas. If you’re a teacher, parent, or lifelong learner, you’ll leave with a reading plan, historical context, and ways to use media to spark curiosity. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves great books and big ideas, and leave a review with the title you’ll read first. What will you study this month?

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