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Act One: Black in the USSR

Yelena Khanga grew up in Russia knowing almost no other Black people. Emanuele Berry asks Yelena what that was like.

Act Two: History is Not a Toy

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to Mariya Karimjee about a college application essay question. Essay B asks students to imagine a person they might meet in college—someone from a very different background.

Act One: How to Win Friends and Influence White People

Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Act Four: Childhood’s End

Producer Neil Drumming looks into two videos he found on YouTube—one that takes place in Atlantic City, another in Brooklyn—that deal with the trouble kids face walking home from school.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks with Adam Mansbach about what happened when he went looking for an apartment and was mistaken for someone else. Adam is the author of the book Go The F*** To Sleep.

Prologue

Ira speaks with New York Times Magazine Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones about her years reporting on education and the various kinds of school reforms administrators have tried to close the achievementgap that never seem to work. Nikole says there's one reform that people have pretty much given upon, despite a lot of evidence that it works – school integration.

Act One: Inconvenience Store

Miki Meek reports on how bad things got for black residents of Miami Gardens, Florida – and why they got so bad – by telling the story of two men, a convenience store owner and one of his employees.

Act Two: Comey Don't Play That

FBI Director James Comey gave a speech this week calling for law enforcement to redouble itsefforts to serve the black community, and calling for a conversation about race in policing. Producer Robyn Semien has noticed that local big city police chiefs do not think race is a factorin the newsmaking incidents where white officers kill unarmed black men.

Act One: Rental Gymnastics

Reporter Nancy Updike talks to a group of New York City residents about their frustrating attempts to rent an apartment. With hidden microphones, we hear landlords and supers tell the apartment hunters that there's nothing available.