[THEME MUSIC]

JACK HITT: I’m Jack Hitt.

CHENJERAI CHENJERAI: And I’m Chenjerai Kumanyika.

JACK: Last week we launched our show in front of a live audience. It was standing room only at the Bell House in Brooklyn.

PJ VOGT: Hello, assembled podcast listeners of the Bell House. My name is PJ Vogt. I co-host this show called Reply All at Gimlet. The reason we’re here is this is a launch party for Uncivil, a podcast that we are so excited about …

[TAPE FADES OUT]

JACK: So we taped the show that night, with some incredible guests. And it was all about Civil War myths, the cranky lies you see on Twitter or the stuff you hear at family get-togethers -- that the war was really about states’ rights, that the Confederate flag is about heritage not hate.

CHENJERAI: Right, there are tons of these lies. And they’re all over the place. Take the biggest one, ‘The war didn’t have anything to do with slavery.’ A few years ago, the Pew Research Center did a survey and found that most Americans think that one’s true. And it’s not just your grandparents. the demographic most likely to say states rights were people under 30 -- Sixty percent.

JACK: These myths are woven deep into our culture. They’re old. They started bubbling up the moment the war ended. Taken together these lies are called the Lost Cause, and they represent the most successful campaign to push fake news in American history. We’re actually going deep on that origin story in an upcoming episode.

CHENJERAI: But the live show was all about tearing the myths down today, in the present. We all see this stuff on Twitter and Facebook. But do you try to engage these people? Do you try to educate them? Challenge them? And if you do want to do this, how?

JACK: So we invited three people who come face-to-face with these lies on a regular basis to help us figure out what to do when we run into them. The conversation was honest, and real, so there’s a couple of cuss words if you’re listening with small kids. Let’s get right to it.

[TAPE FADES IN]

JACK: ...So please welcome Christy Coleman.

CHENJERAI: Yeah!

JACK: Al Letson ... Nikole Hannah-Jones.

CHENJERAI: Yeah!

(Applause)

JACK: So let me introduce our panel, starting from the left, Christy Coleman is the CEO of the American Civil War Museum.

(Applause)

CHENJERAI: Give it up for Christy!

JACK: Yeah now.

CHENJERAI: Al Letson is the host of Reveal, a podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting -- yeah, give it up for Al. (Applause) We're not done with Al. Al does everything. He won the Peabody award for his previous show, State of the Reunion, and because he has to do everything, he also has an Emmy. (Laughter and applause)

JACK: Nikole Hannah Jones, a writer for the New York Times Magazine. (Applause) Does pieces for This American Life, and her story, "Worlds Apart," won the National Magazine Award last year.

NIKOLE HANNAH JONES: I have a Peabody too. (Laughter)

AL LETSON: She does.

CHRISTY COLEMAN: I have an Emmy too.

AL: I'm up for my second Emmy tomorrow night, I’m just saying. I could have two. I could have two by the end of the week. I’m just saying! (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: There you go.

CHENJERAI: You know, I just want to start with you Christy, because you run a Civil War Museum at this moment.

CHRISTY: So I um, yeah, I'm the CEO of the American Civil War Museum and actually we are actually the merger of the American Civil War center, which was actually the first museum to explore the Civil War from Union to Confederate and African American perspectives, and we merged with the Museum of the Confederacy in 2013.

JACK: Oh wow, how did that go?

CHRISTY: So I'm the CEO of that. (Laughter) So it's been fascinating. It's been fascinating, because, you know, the reality is -- like you kicked off with the start of the show -- people are wedded to Lost Cause. It is a part of family, like it's family lore. This is belief. This thing is passed on from generation to generation. Some Southern whites really cling to this, and so any conversation, or any exploration of this war from any perspective other than that is met with all kinds of interesting things. And you can only imagine, I mean, when I came to take this job nine years ago, and I walked in the door they didn’t know what to think. Right then and there, it was over, it was over, it was over.

CHENJERAI: So can you think of like a specific moment or something that stands out for you?

CHRISTY: Sure! I mean, I had a man walk in my office - a major collector walked into my office and decided to tell me that the best thing that ever happened to black people was slavery.

CHENJERAI: Oh wow.

CHRISTY: And that we were incapable of controlling ourselves, and that the lie that has been perpetuated that slavery was somehow a bad thing was just that. So, yeah. (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: He walked into the museum and said that? Oh my god.

CHRISTY: Oh yeah he walked into my office. And said that.

JACK: So what do you say back?

CHRISTY: Well, quite frankly, after just being stunned at the audacity of it - because I don't think anybody would just show up at your museum, and just walk into the president's office at the Met, and want to talk stuff. But we're a small staff, so they didn't catch him before he got to me, right? (Laughter)

CHRISTY: And so, I mean, I said to him, here's the problem, not only are you wrong, you fucking wrong. So let me break it down and let me explain to you everything that is wrong. I said because, yikes, we've got to... And honestly, in most cases like - and that’s an extreme case - in most cases like that, you're not going to change somebody's mind. What I appreciate more, and what has more impact for me in work, and I know for our staff, is that person that comes in that is generally open to learning something that they did not know. And, and seeing a perspective that they had not considered before.

JACK: How many out of a hundred are that person? One?

CHRISTY: One.

JACK: Yeah.

CHRISTY: At least one, and I might be being overly generous to the one. (Laughs) I have not had anybody else step to me like that. I think the word go t out pretty quickly.

JACK: Can I ask a question of any of y'all? I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say I came to know the Lost Cause story a little differently than anybody else on the stage, I grew up in Charleston South Carolina. (Laughs) It's on every plaque, it's on every wall, it's on every building, it's in the air - or at least in the white air. And I'm just wondering, like, how did you, how did you come to know the Civil War?

AL: I grew up not far from Charleston. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, which, I know a lot of people when I say I grew up in Florida, tend to think of Florida as the sunshine state, but Jacksonville is actually much more the Old South. It's much more South Georgia than anything else. Now, I grew up in Jacksonville, but I’m originally from New Jersey, so when I moved from New Jersey I was about 12 years old. And I had the education from being in the North that, when I came down to the South, that none of it made sense to me.

The school I was supposed to go to was Nathan Bedford Forrest High School.

JACK: Get out. Tell everyone who Nathan Bedford Forrest was.

AL: So Nathan Bedford Forrest was actually the man who perpetrated the worst mass killing in American history. Like right now, when we talk about mass killings, obviously we're talking about Las Vegas. And not to take anything away from that tragedy, but Nathan Bedford Forrest killed like 200 African Americans, like right at the beginning of the Civil War, who were prisoners. They were already captured and he just killed them all. I have heard people in Jacksonville make such ridiculous claims about how that was ok.

JACK: He also founded the Klan.

AL: Yeah, exactly, that was his major thing. His major thing. (Laughter) Literally in my senior year in high school, a white guy took a picture of all the black kids in the year book - except me, he didn't use me, which I was always offended by, but he used all these other black kids - and it was a hit list of black kids that he was going to kill.

CHENJERAI: Oh wow.

AL: So like that's the South that I grew up in, so I basically learned it the same way you did, but being from when I was from up North, when I moved down, I had a consciousness of it. Like this was all some serious bullshit.

CHENJERAI: Right, so Nicole, I just wanted to ask, in addition to all the incredible things you do, you're also very influential on Twitter, I follow you, and as you know, Twitter is the ...

NIKOLE: That's how I know I made it. (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: Twitter is the greatest home for misinformation ever invented by human beings.

So what's the biggest, what’s the Civil War myth that you see out there that bothers you the most?

NIKOLE: I would say some of the biggest myths that I hear on Twitter, is One: that the North was not implicated in slavery. That somehow if your ancestors lived in the North, you have clean hands. Which we know, again, the economic driver of this country -- the reason we become a superpower -- is because of slave labor, mostly cotton, which aided in the Industrial Revolution. Because you have the cotton produced, which then goes in the factories in the North.

But every industry - insurance industry, right, shipbuilding, I mean, banking -- you can just go down the line. Every part of our country is implicated in slavery, but what I hear on Twitter all the time is, "My family was’t in the South. We never owned slaves. So therefore we have nothing to do with slavery. And in fact, we fought to free you," which is also the thing that hear. One, knowing that most people in the Civil War, fighting for the North, were not fighting to end slavery. They were fighting to preserve the Union, which is not the same thing. And had we been able to preserve the Union and preserve slavery, we would have done that. It just, it ended up being a political tactic.

CHENJERAI & JACK: Lincoln said it!

JACK: All the time.

NIKOLE: Yes, of course. I mean the Emancipation Proclamation only freed those that were enslaved in places that left the Union.

CHENJERAI: That’s right.

NIKOLE: If you were a slaveholding state that remained in the Union, you could keep your slaves. So I think that that myth is probably one of the most pernicious. And then also the myth that somehow slavery was not a profitable institution.

CHRISTY: That it would eventually die out, right?

NIKOLE: We imported millions of black folks, and fought a war -- the deadliest war in the history of our country -- over an institution that somehow didn’t make any fucking money. Does that make sense?

CHENJERAI: Oh yeah. Let me just say that, you had an incredible Twitter exchange about this topic. and I got to go into that for just a minute, can we go on to Twitter for a minute? I want to look at this. So you were in a Twitter conversation, right?

NIKOLE: This was not my best moment. Let's just say.

CHENJERAI: It was a good moment.

NIKOLE: You sometimes forget that people can see what you write on Twitter. (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: So somebody named Fluffy jumped in, and they were like, "Ironically, it was pretty unprofitable, as slave labor tends to be less productive than paid labor. It was about racism." And then you responded.

[TWEET IS PROJECTED]

(Laughter)

CHENJERAI: "Dude, no, that is in a word, asinine. Do not jump into a discussion with zero facts. Let me school you." And let me just tell you all, this is as good as it got for Fluffy.

(Laughter)

CHENJERAI: From there, Nicole goes in. "Your 'well actually' is one of the most pervasive and ludicrous myths to come out of post-reconstruction America. In 1860, 80% of our GDP was tied to slavery. The dollar value of the enslaved was worth more than all other U.S. commodities combined.” And it didn't stop there! You just kept going. It was like a whole lot of tweets, right? You know, banking, and then eventually, I think eventually you even assigned some readings.

NIKOLE: I did. (Laughter and Cheering)

CHENJERAI: I feel you. I feel you on that.

CHENJERAI: That was like 41 tweets.

NIKOLE: It was a lengthy thread.

CHENJERAI: I just want to slow down and walk back to that moment. So you were at your desk, probably about to write something awesome, something incredible.

NIKOLE: I was actually trying to finish a cover story. I had to take a little pause.

CHENJERAI: Alright so you're finishing the cover story, and you see Fluffy's tweet. (Laughter)

JACK: Cause you follow Fluffy.

AL: This is like drunk history for real. (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: So what goes through your mind?

NIKOLE: You know, it is actually like it is the most asinine thing you could say, that you would steal millions of people -- millions of people didn't come to the United States, but we stole millions of people from the continent -- you build entire industries over this, right? The most wealth is concentrated in the South. The first shot comes out of Fort Sumter because South Carolina had more millionaires than any place else in the country -- more than New York, more than anywhere else. And then you want to tell me that it was actually a very inefficient form of labor.

I don't know about you, but I can go home at the end of the day, and I can choose how long I'm going to work. But when you own someone, and you can literally beat them to death to make them produce for you, it's the most insulting thing to somehow say that that was just inefficient, and somehow white folks just decided to steal and enslave people, and to pass laws that not only they would be enslaved for their entire lives, but all their progeny and all their progeny after them would be enslaved forever, and to say that that wasn't because it made money?

It just, it angers me.

JACK: Nicole I want to know, did that work? What was Fluffy's response to that?

NIKOLE: So it was a typical response, which is, after I'd disproved his whole shitty tweet with my actual facts, he starts to change what he was actually saying in the tweet.

JACK: Oh that move. Yeah, that's a famous move.

NIKOLE: No I wasn't saying this, I was actually saying that. And then I’m like, screen-shotting, like, “No, this is what you said. It was exactly this, and not that.” So I also think people, um. I don't know, it’s, it’s (sighs)

JACK: So he changed his screenshot. Do you think he actually changed his mind?

NIKOLE: Yeah, I don't think he actually knew enough. This is, again, what we face all the time. Like, we study this. And some person who's never studied it, never read a book about it, doesn’t know what it's like, feels like they can tell you what is the truth. If I don't know something about something I literally would tell you, “I don't know enough about that to engage on this topic. I just don't know!"

CHENJERAI: I'm just going to walk into a surgery room and be like, “You're doing that wrong, dog. (Laughter)

NIKOLE: Exactly. “Move! C’mon man.”

CHENJERAI: Hand me the scalpel.

NIKOLE: You wouldn't normally do that, but I think people feel free to do that with black folks all the time.

CHRISTY: All the time. And I think, I can add, in this particular case when you're talking about history, you know history is a dissemination not just of the facts that have been left behind, but a dissemination of the kind of questions that folks are asking. That's why what makes me insane is people who say, “Well you’re just revisionist history, and that's not real history.” That's what all history is. Because we are always asking new questions. And when new questions are brought to the table, that's when we go back to the source material to find the answers. That’s what we do! (Applause)

NIKOLE: Yes.

CHRISTY: And in the days of self-curated content, which is what we're dealing with today, you all can go out there and find anything to support your little piece of whatever you need, to make you feel whole, and that your world is not falling apart because someone just told you that something is completely different than the way that you thought.

That argument that Nikole was just talking about, that slavery didn't make money? Why do you think that the Confederacy went to war? Think about this for a minute: The American South, the thirteen states of the American South, provided 90% of the world’s market for cotton.

NIKOLE: Cotton, absolutely.

CHRISTY: Ninety Percent. They had the sixth largest economy in the world when they decide to pull the trigger and leave the United States. This was no small decision. This wasn't brother against brother about state's rights! If it was state's rights they would have gone to war when Pennsylvania and New York said, "We are not enforcing the fugitive slave acts and returning your slaves!"

NIKOLE: You see how mad she is about this? Although I would argue that it was about state's rights, it was about state's rights to own slaves.

JACK: Right

CHRISTY: Exactly

NIKOLE: Nobody was stunting on what the reason was back then. They were very clear, very explicit. It was only now. I mean what I always say is that black people are the most inconvenient truth about America. We don't want to acknowledge that George Washington owned hundreds of people, Thomas Jefferson, in the original Declaration of Independence, castigates slavery, but has to take it out in order to get signers to the Declaration, and then is like, ‘Actually I kinda need this money, so I'm going to keep mine too.’ So actually, as we try to tell ourselves that we are this exceptional nation -- the type of nation that had never been seen in the history of the world -- but then you have this population of people who are only here because they were deprived of every one of those liberties that our country was founded on, we're inconvenient as fuck.

NIKOLE: So you have to write us out of all that. You have to. It's so interesting when we're talking about the monuments. The only time most white folks ever want to talk about George Washington owning slaves is when they're like, ‘Why do you want to tear down this monument to like, Confederate soldiers? George Washington owned slaves.’ But all the rest of the time…

CHENJERAI: They don’t want to talk about it. Nobody want to talk about it.

NIKOLE: They don't want to talk about that shit! We want to be like, ‘Why do you have to bring that up? Why do you have to bring up the fact that he owned slaves?’ So we have always been the most inconvenient narrative, and that's why it's a national conspiracy to teach the Civil War in a certain way.

NIKOLE: It’s not a Southern conspiracy. I mean they have their own shit. But we all need this.

[MUSIC]

CHENJERAI: We’re gonna take a quick break.

JACK: When we come back, Al Letson tells us a story from when he was in his 20s, about his friend Rod, who loved the Confederate flag.

[BREAK]

JACK: Hey, we’re back with the second half of our live show with Al Letson, Christy Coleman and Nikole Hannah-Jones, tearing down the lies about the Civil War.

CHENJERAI: We’ll jump in with a story Al told about a friend of his, and Al’s struggle to change his mind.

AL: When I was, um -- many years ago I used to be a flight attendant. And when you’re a flight attendant, a lot of times you would fly with a group of two pilots, or in a group of five flight attendants for the same month. And I flew with this one guy from South Carolina, his name was Rod, and Rod was such a good dude. He was so good. And back then I wasn't making any money. So a lot of times -- we made zero money as flight attendants back then -- so a lot of times I would go to my hotel room, and I would steal the pretzels from the planes so I could eat, because I just did not have enough money to eat.

And if Rod saw me doing that, he would stop me, and he would pay for my food. He was that good of a dude. Every time we talked about the Civil War, though, he could never understand what that flag meant to me.

To this day, I have all these strong emotions towards Rod because he was - he loved me, I loved him. We were boys! But every time we would talk about the flag, he just didn't understand it. And I could tell him over and over about the times that the flag has haunted me. Literally, I grew up in a city where white dudes surrounded my house, and spit on my mother. There was like 20 of them. They surrounded my house and spit on my mother, and most of those dudes at the time had t-shirts with Confederate flags on them. But I could tell Rod all of that, every little bit of it, and this was a guy who would buy me food when I didn’t' have anything, and he still could not hear it.

CHENJERAI: So here's what I want to know, what did he say, how did he actually respond?

AL: Heritage. Heritage. ‘It has nothing to say with you and slavery, it has nothing to do with black people. I love black people. My best friends are black folks, but this has to do with my family and my heritage.’

Yeah, I cared about him. I cared about him because he was someone who showed me he cared about me. But that was the one thing that we were never able to cross, no matter how hard we tried, which taught me a lot about like, when I’m posting comments on Twitter. I’m not posting for all the people that are hardened in their belief. I'm posting it to all the other people who go into your museum who are curious and who want to understand, I'm posting it for the people who can be swayed. But there's so many people out there that, they’re never going to change their opinions.

CHENJERAI: That's the thing that I want to know, is how can we decide? Because I just see the energy that we put in to teach these folks who are not paying us, you know.

AL: Sometimes you've got to clap back just to clap back though. (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: Do you have a rulebook? Like if you get the tweet, you get the question, how do I know when to respond.

AL: No, if I'm just at work and I'm feeling frustrated and I see that tweet, you might get it.

(Laughter)

CHENJERAI: You might get this work.

NIKOLE: I'm typically tweeting at work so I am getting paid technically. (Laughter) Sometimes, my editor will be like, ‘Stop tweeting and write the story!’ I’m like, ‘Sorry.’ But I mean, you can tell pretty quickly someone who really doesn’t know. You have some folks who you can tell in the first tweet or two, that they're not really interested in engaging, they just want to troll. And pretty much, I might write one snarky tweet and then I'm done with that, I can't waste my energy on that.

But then there's a lot of folks who legitimately don't know. They don't know. They've been taught the same myth that most of us about been taught, and they haven't self-educated because most people are interested in a lot of different things and history might not be it. And those are the folks that I actually try to engage with, which is why I will give a reading list. I'm like, ‘Actually if you really want to know, read this book. Look at this article.’ Or in a series of 140 characters that I can thread together, I can give you a brief history lesson which at least will make you think, ‘Damn, I never thought about it that way. I didn't know.’

I'm a journalist because I feel like my job is to inform, and to try to help people understand the world that we live in, so that's ultimately what I feel my responsibility is. And so, wometimes it'll be in a 10,000 word piece, and sometimes it will be in a couple of tweets, and you reach very different audiences with those things. So I think it is, I don't know about you, but it does feel like you can very quickly determine which people are serious and really don't know, and which people are just being assholes.

AL: Absolutely. The other thing that comes to mind when Nikole talks about being a journalist, is that what tends to happen is that like, if you’re a white person, people think that you can be impartial. And if you're a black person, people think that you've got a stake in it. But the truth about America is that we all have a stake in race in America.

NIKOLE: Absolutely.

AL: That every -- and Nikole said this, and I wasn't at the speech when you said it, but I've been like “Yes!” is that like every beat in America is about race, because in America you can't get away from it. And when people start talking, like, ‘Oh you're doing identity politics.’All politics are identity politics! We just don't call it identity politics when it's white people. We just don't call it identity politics. It’s all identity politics!

NIKOLE: Hundred percent

JACK: We do since November.

NIKOLE: But even then, if you look at what’s been written since November, it’s that the Democrat’s problem was that they were worried about identity politics, as if Donald Trump did not run exclusively on white identity politics, right? I mean but that, that's inherently the problem. If you look at my Twitter bio, I say I write about race from 1619. Right? 12 years after the English land on this continent, we have imported Africans and determined they will be slaves. 12 years. So to somehow believe that we can disconnect black racism and slavery from America is insane.

AL: Right.

NIKOLE: It's in the DNA of our country. It is our country. This is who we are, and I think this is the ugliest truth that we can't face. We cannot face that. And I hear people all the time who are like, ‘I didn’t' own slaves, I didn’t have anything to do with that.’ And I’m like, you didn't sign the Declaration of Independence either, but you're claiming that shit! So I'm going to need you -- (Laughter)

CHENJERAI: Preach

NIKOLE: You don't get to pick your heritage.

CHENJERAI: Right, right!

NIKOLE: We have to take it all. But we only want to take the good parts and not the bad.

[LIVE TAPE FADES OUT]

CHENJERAI: Hey y’all, I’m gonna jump in here. We talked a lot more with the guests. And we’re actually going to post the uncut audio of the whole event on our website - uncivil.show. But to finish up the podcast, I want to skip ahead to one last response from Christy Coleman.

JACK: We were talking about the Confederate flag, and about how more and more places are taking it down, but how at the same time it almost seems to be making a resurgence. You see it all the time now, on front yards, shirts, bumper stickers, Nazi rallies. And you hear people saying that the Confederate flag is not a symbol of racism, but a symbol of heritage. And Christy said no. First of all, during the war, there was no single Confederate flag.

CHRISTY: Because I can take you down into the vaults in our collection and I can show you 350 different Confederate flags. Confederate battle flags. One has an image of Pocahontas on it. Another one is just a field of blue with a big white circle, and it says "Home." Another one... So what people identify as the battle flag today, the Confederate battle flag today, is in fact the flag from the army of Tennessee. This is a flag that Nathan Forest, Bedford Forest, General Forest, he was the cavalryman -- he wanted to able to have his flag and do his thing...

CHENJERAI: But after the war -- this flag was not showing up in public spaces. Robert E Lee said don’t fly it. He said he didn’t want quote “keep open the sores of the Civil War” … instead he wanted to, quote “obliterate the marks of civil strife.” And so you didn’t really see it. But then, WWII happened, and Southern men headed off to war, and picked it up again.

CHRISTY: They started taking not just any flag, but Bedford's flag. Because you know what happened in 1939 besides the invasion of Poland? Gone with the Wind.

JACK: Right.

CHRISTY: This is important. Popular culture is important. Gone with the Wind. So now it's cool to be from the South, because now we're noble. And these guys, these young guys took these flags with them into the war, and then they came home feeling victorious, and their government was telling them that their America was going to be something else, with Brown v. Board and other civil rights legislation coming through.

And what do they do? They take the flag, Bedford's flag, and they fly it, every chance they get. And they use it as a weapon of intimidation. So, that is the heritage attached to the rectangular flag -- stars and bars.

What I find even more insidious today -- when you talk about the flag coming down -- what I find even more insidious today, you may find in the South now, you may not see that happening, but now there's a different flag that’s showing up. They're flying the second national flag of the Confederacy. Because people don't know what that is.

I'm going to tell you what that is. It's a circle of white stars, 11 or 13, with a red stripe, a white stripe, and a red stripe. That's what they're flying now. Which is worse? I don't know. Because they're both about the confederacy, right? Theoretically, right?

So, I guess all of this is to say, when it comes to these monuments they have multiple meaning. When they were going up, they were to mourn a generation that was dying away, a generation that had fought in this war. But they were also going up at a time when the White South in particular -- and not just the South, let me just say. When the nation was reasserting white supremacy, and we were getting more segregationist policies, North and South, and these were going up because no one was defending the rights anymore that had been guaranteed in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.

People get all pissy about the 2nd amendment, but no one gets pissy about the clear language in the 15th amendment. Really short amendment: “The right to vote should not be abridged by any state on the basis of any condition,” I mean really? It's simple! But that's exactly what they did. And that turned the season. So if it wasn't about war, if it wasn't about slavery, if it wasn't about black people, if it wasn't about that, then why did this as a nation work so doggone hard to suppress a whole group of folk over, and over, and over, again?

(Applause)

NIKOLE: Dang girl, dang.

JACK: Yep.

NIKOLE: That is when you just take the microphone up and drop it! I mean, drop that shit. Still got that mic. I mean, you got on stage and went off the chain!

CHENJERAI: Alright. Well folks, that is our show! (Applause)

JACK: And now some credits. Uncivil is produced by Chris Neary, Chiquita Paschal and Saidu Tejan Thomas.

CHENJERAI: That's my team. Give it up!

JACK: Our senior producer is Kimmie Regler, editing by Pat Walters, Jorge Just, Caitlin Kinney and Alex Blumberg. Thank you also to Brittany Luse from the Nod and James Cabrera who did our visuals.

CHENJERAI: And also a quick shout-out about our music. We took the music real seriously. The original music that was made for Uncivil was made by our very own Bobby Lord and Matthew Boll, in collaboration with Ann Caldwell and the Magnolia singers, as well as Mt. Zion A.M.E. Choir on Glebe Street in Charleston. Thanks again for coming out y'all, we'll see you at the bar. Get lit!

(Applause and Cheering)

[MUSIC SWELLS]

CHENJERAI: We’re hard at work on the next episode,so we’ll be back in two weeks…

JACK: and on that episode, we’ll take you back to the very afternoon when the Lost Cause, the root of Confederate mythology caught fire.

JACK: Wow, what’s the catechism?

KC: It’s a call and response. And they would say, “Why was the war fought?” And the response the children were supposed to say was “The war was the war was fought over state’s rights, not slavery.”

“Were masters cruel to their slaves?” “No, they were benevolent! They were kind to their slaves.” A cruel master being rare. It was like an after school club.

[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]