StoryCorps Then and Now: The Griot of Knoxville

StoryCorps

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As we celebrate StoryCorps' 20th anniversary, we bring you the story of a man who integrated his high school as a teenager in Knoxville, Tennessee, and how a StoryCorps listener comment helped him reckon with his past five decades later.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi I'm Dave Ice say founder of Story Corps. This message comes from
0:03.9	NPR sponsor Subaru. All month long Subaru is helping shelter dogs find
0:08.2	loving homes including the hard to adopt underdogs. Learn more at
0:12.0	Subaru.com slash pets.
0:16.0	In 2017 a couple years after the Story Corps mobile tour started. We added another
0:24.5	airstream to the fleet and this one had a very specific purpose.
0:28.3	Where did you go in that first year? What was the tour?
0:30.9	Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Oakland.
0:35.0	We went to about 22 places.
0:38.0	So for example, somewhere down south we went two hours away was this place called Mound Bayou.
0:45.0	Mound Bayou was the first town incorporated in America by black people.
0:51.0	So I said, go over there and interview them, you know what I mean?
0:54.7	That's Melvin Reeves. He designed and launched StoryCorps, that's the initiative we're talking
0:59.4	about in this episode. You're hearing excerpts from a conversation I had with him a few years back.
1:05.0	So the name, Grio.
1:06.7	Can you talk about what that means and why you chose it for this?
1:09.8	Sure.
1:10.8	A Grio in West African culture is the holder of a community's history and some of them are able
1:18.9	to recite the history going way way back to the present day. So it just seemed sensible to use it as a way to frame what we were trying to achieve.
1:30.0	Story Corps Griot set out to ensure that stories of African Americans are preserved and presented with dignity.
1:36.2	Were people eager to work with you?
1:38.0	People were eager to work with us because they understood the importance of being included in the American
	...

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