The Difference Ten Miles Makes

In much of the former Confederacy, rejoining the Union meant accepting the new rights for black citizens that had been added to the Constitution. But those rights were meaningless unless they were exercised and protected. Historian Kidada Williams joins the hosts to tell the story of a newly free man in rural Louisiana who tried to enlist the Federal government’s help to exercise some of those rights – and the violence that he and many other freedpeople across the South faced for asserting their rights.