In Episode 11, longtime Arkansas Poor People’s Campaign committee member and Little Rock, Arkansas native Mary Givens explains the generational trauma and the relationship with her dad that sets her activism on fire.

Givens’ 20-year-career in literacy activism right here in Central Arkansas, her parents’ wisdom, and Mary Turner, a woman who was barely twenty-years-old and eight months pregnant when she met with a Georgia mob in 1918, unfold in this episode as Mary lays out the causal relationship between generational racist violence and the structural oppression that protects it as poverty and illiteracy go unchecked in Black communities crying out for healing and repair.

Listen in as Mary breaks down the different kinds of racists and likens them to the various Covid strains that have infected communities, some more harmful than others, but each dangerous and potentially deadly.  Our podcast ends on a high note with a nod to the work that activist groups have done and continue to do despite setbacks like murdering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Arkansas’ newest stand your ground laws.