Introducing “The Sum of Us”

Hi, everyone. I'm excited to share the debut episode of a new podcast from higher ground called The Some of Us.
In this podcast, host Heather McGee travels all over the country to find ordinary people who are overcoming divisions and helping create better communities. From rural Maine to the coast of California, Heather teaches us about the surprising connections that are rebuilding America across our backgrounds, cultures, and differences.
Too often these days, it feels like we're more divided than ever. And the stories in this podcast are a great way to remind us that there will always be good folks all over this country who are working to bring

us closer together.

I'll be honest with you.

I just love this series. It's inspiring and energizing, and I have a feeling that you'll feel the same way.
Subscribe to The Sum of Us to learn more. I'm in Montgomery, Alabama, in the city's central park called Oak Park.
There are not too many people here, only a handful. There are more groundskeepers than visitors.
I see a children's swing set at a standstill. In the middle of the park, there's a wide, flat expanse of grass, surrounded by remembering old oak trees.
The quiet is eerie. It's like it's haunted by something that used to be here.
Buried ten feet beneath this wide lawn is a shell of what once was a dazzling public swimming pool that could hold over a thousand swimmers. This kind of grand resort-style public pool was commonplace in the country.
In the 1920s and 30s, towns and cities tried to outdo one another, building the most elaborate public pools. During the oppressive heat of summer, swimming pools are a haven of refuge for young and old alike.
Hundreds of such pools with well-equipped bathhouses have been constructed by WPA Leifold. By World War II, there were some 2,000 pools like this across the country.
The Montgomery Pool was grand and beautiful, a public work for all. But not really all.
Like so many public pools across the country, the Montgomery Pool was reserved for whites only. In the 1950s, Black families throughout the country argued in courts that their tax dollars also funded these public goods, including the pools.
So their kids should be able to swim in them too. And when they couldn't, the results could be tragic.
In the summer of 1953 in Baltimore, a 13-year-old boy, Tommy Cummings, a Black boy, drowned in the rough waters of the Patapsco River. Because there was no integrated pool where he and his friends, two white and one Black, were allowed to swim together.
The NAACP sued the city to integrate the pools and prevent needless deaths like Tommy's. When across the country, courts began to order the integration of public pools, many cities refused.
Like in Montgomery, where effective January 1st, 1959, the city council chose to drain the public pool rather than share it with Black people.

The big, beautiful public treasure, one of the city's gems that had brought pride and joy to white Montgomery, they chose to drain and bury it rather than allow Black neighbors to use it. This phenomenon of draining public pools rather than integrating them didn't just happen in the Jim Crow South.
It happened all over the country. In West Virginia, Ohio, Washington State.
As someone who studies inequality for a living, I became kind of obsessed with these drained public pools. I looked up old records, visited sites where they were buried.
I kept thinking about how so many white people chose to lose out on something they once cherished.

Chose to destroy a nice thing rather than share it.

It made me wonder why.

Why can't we have nice things in this country?

I mean public goods, like truly universal health care, a well-funded school in every neighborhood.

These things that really benefit all of us.

My name is Heather McGee, and I've spent my career in public policy

trying to find solutions to our country's biggest economic problems.

I've been traveling the country in search of the answer to that question. I wrote a book about what I found called The Sum of Us.
And ultimately, I learned that the reason we don't have nice things is because of this zero-sum mentality we have about race in America. The idea that if people of color gain something, then white people have to lose something.

This kind of thinking has led our country to drain the pools.

But not just the literal swimming pools.

The pools of resources for all of us.

From health care to housing.

But it wasn't always like this.

There was a time when this country invested in nice things.

Like in the 1930s, with the New Deal.

I'm going to go. wasn't always like this.
There was a time when this country invested in nice things, like in the 1930s with the New Deal. All the energies of government and business must be directed to increasing the national income, to putting more people into private jobs, to giving security and a feeling of security to all people in all walks of life.

The U.S. created Social Security, the GI Bill, and massive investments in affordable home ownership.

Attractive home of John and Margaret Bryant, the home they've always dreamed of,

the happiest investment they have ever made.

At last, the Bryants have all the space they need. All of these public goods helped to set one of the highest standards of living in the world in the 1950s, the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.
But it was for one type of American only. The government purposely omitted Black neighborhoods from investment in homeownership.
The Social Security Act excluded the two job categories that most Black workers were in, domestic work and agricultural work. Even the GI Bill benefits went through mostly segregated housing and education sectors.
So when the civil rights movement brought about the racial integration of this country,

something else changed. The majority of white people in America stopped supporting the party of the New Deal once it also became the party of civil rights.
We must not approach the observance and enforcement of this law in a vengeful spirit. Its purpose is not to punish.
Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions. Divisions which have lasted all too long.
Its purpose is national, not regional. Inequality began to grow decade after

decade. And now, here in the birthplace of the American dream, we have one of the most unequal economies, with housing, health care, college, retirement increasingly out of reach for most people.
When I got to Montgomery and walked the grounds of Oak Park,

it felt like I was on to something. Like there was something essential buried there.
Rooted deep in history. This beautiful pool we all lost out on.
Not just people of color. White people lost out on those pools, too.
Racism ultimately hurts all of us. I mean, I know that racism always hits its intended target, people of color, first and worst.
I'm saying this as a descendant of enslaved people. But I don't think we've really come to understand how much racism costs everyone.
This country's economic dysfunction, the poverty wages, the collapsing bridges, healthcare that's out of reach, underfunded schools, comes from our inability to share the pool, to really see ourselves as one people. Worthy of investment.
And I've realized, because racism has a cost for everyone, we've all got a stake in overcoming it. When I was 22, just out of college, I got an entry-level job at a new think tank called Demos.
Demos was focused on using research and advocacy to address inequality. A decade later, in my early 30s, I became the leader of the organization.
I often went on TV to talk about solutions to the country's biggest economic problems. What stuck out to you? Really, the overarching lack of accountability for the number one issue on most Americans' minds, which is jobs.
Right. But I wanted to get you to put this in context.
Higher education used to be a public good in this country. And I'd like to hear from all of you.
Ms. McGate, would you like to start? Thank you, Senator Warren.
That is an excellent question. I'll just say a few things that could be done.
One, Congress could stop giving preferential treatment to this kind of income. One day, I was on live TV talking about economic policy and national politics, and a man wanted to talk about something entirely different.
His name was Gary from North

Carolina. I'm a white male and I am prejudiced.
The reason it is, it's something I wasn't taught,

but it's kind of something that I learned. What can I do to change, you know, to be a better

American? Gary described his fear of Black men and the things he saw on the news about crime and

Thank you so much for being honest and for opening up this conversation because it's simply one of the most important ones we have to have in this country. Your ability to just say, this is what I have, I have these fears and prejudices and I want to get over them, is one of the most powerful things that we can do right now at this moment in our history.
So thank you. So what can you do? Turn off the news at night? Because we know that actually nightly news and many media markets that have been studied actually over represents African-American crime and under represents crimes that happen by white people.
Join a church if you are a religious person that is a Black church or a church that is interracial. Start to read about the history of the African-American community in this country.
Foster conversation in your family and in your neighborhood where you're asking exactly those kinds of questions. The exchange between Gary and me went viral, and it shifted something for me.
I realized that the Garys of the world have been sold a story. A story about their fellow Americans.
A story that makes them not want to share the pool. And no amount of research papers or legislative testimony was going to change that.

Laws are just expressions of a society's deepest beliefs.

Ultimately, the beliefs have to shift in order for outcomes to change.

So I did something unexpected.

I quit my dream job to try and understand what it is we believe about one another. I traveled the country.
I heard from everyday Americans, from people fighting for higher wages. Joining the movement, I then understood that we were kept in poverty on purpose.
This was something the system had built purposely to keep workers divided. Communities protecting their water.
Our white organizations that have historically had more power, currently have more privilege, and definitely have more information, are going to be some of our strongest allies. People defending reproductive freedom.
It took our tears. It took fallouts.
It took disagreements. I'm really proud about that.
It may not look like it and you may not be hearing about it, but there's a groundswell happening all over this country.

It's often under the radar, the big national news. But ordinary people in overlooked parts of America are owning up to what racism has cost us.
Even though we're in an era of intense division, I've learned that when we truly see each other, have honest conversations, and do the tough and sometimes messy work of crossing boundaries to build solidarity, then we can win solutions to the problems that are keeping most of us up at night. The racial justice uprisings and the pandemic have been turning points.
People are demanding more from their government, from their jobs, and from each other. Across the country, labor is on the march.
In California and Oregon, 24,000 nurses and other health care workers at Kaiser Permanente voted to authorize a strike over pay and better working conditions. New community fridges are meeting a critical need.

Volunteers keep public refrigerators stocked.

Years of protests by Indigenous people, local farmers, and environmentalists

resulted in TC Energy shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline.

Because the truth is, things that really matter in life, we can't do by ourselves.

I can recycle, but I can't fix global warming.

I can make, but I can't fix global warming. I can read to my son, but I can't make sure his neighborhood school is well-funded.
But when we come together, those nice things can happen. That's the benefit of cross-racial solidarity, what I call the solidarity dividend.

It gives us the collective power to win nice things for all of us. And I found it in some really surprising places.
so i've been traveling the country, witnessing solidarity in action.

Discovering how people are coming together despite everything telling us not to.

People from all backgrounds shared their America with me.

In Kansas City.

Because I never thought of holding white workers' hands and talking about you going to march or do anything together. In the mountains of Nevada, we are all here because somebody gave up something.
And it's not just us as Native people. All of us have a history that somebody way back when did something, they made a decision that changed the course of their family's history and the dialogue here in the United States.
In rural Maine... Hello, beautiful babies.
Hi. Oh, what beautiful girls.
Look at your eyes. I think it's that thing of being scared of what you don't understand when you live in a very white town.

On the Pacific coast of California.

This is like the happiest I've been in a really long time.

It's really great.

So great.

In Memphis. I looked out and saw the bouquet of people.

And that's what God loves is a bouquet.

Everything he made is diverse. My journey made me a more hopeful person.
I saw people overcome distrust and learn to fight for each other instead of against each other. So many of the people I met took inspiration from knowing that despite the brutal legacy of racism in America, we've made progress before.
We've come together, fought for change, and chosen to swim in the same pool. All right, so here we're coming up.
The big American flag. One of my first stops was Kansas City, Missouri.
And then this pool house says Swope Park Pool. After flying in, my team and I drove straight to another historic pool, one of the few that didn't get drained.
It's beautiful. There's water still in it right now.
Just like in Montgomery, white leaders in Kansas City fought against Black swimmers using the pool, and they closed the pool during the legal battle to integrate it.

But the community came together, and it reopened in 1954. And on that summer day, a small group of Black and white swimmers showed up to swim together.
And so it stands today. when I walked the grounds, I noticed that the Kansas City pool is also surrounded by oak trees, just like the buried pool in Montgomery.
You know, it's funny. In Montgomery Oak Park, I picked up some of these little acorns from the trees just to remind myself about how, you know, things regenerate like these generations past.
But ultimately, we still got these roots that we need to deal with. And just a reminder of how recent it all was.

These remembering trees have now seen generations of children and families of all races swimming together,

basking in the sun and enjoying this public good,

enjoying a nice thing.

It's what can happen when we're willing to be in it together, when we decide the pool is for all of us. From Higher Ground, I'm your host, Heather McGee.

And this is The Some of Us.

I'm going to take you to Memphis, where I met Miss Scotty Fitzgerald,

who lived near pollution her whole life.

You could see the pipes and the smoke coming out of the pipes, you know, and then you could smell them stinking rotten eggs. When a new pipeline promised more pollution for Scotty, people came together to do what no one thought was possible.
You don't fight oil and gas. You're never going to win.
It's like, to stop an actual pipeline building, I didn't know if that was possible. How Black Memphis and White Memphis came together, despite their differences, to protect something precious.
On our next episode. From higher ground, this is The Sum of Us.
Created and hosted by me, Heather McGee, and produced by Futuro Studios. Our producers are Kasim Shepard, Ryan Kailoth, Emil Seikiros, Joaquin Cutler, and Juan Diego Ramirez, with help from Liliana Ruiz, Sophia Lowe, Susanna Kemp, and Alyssa Vladimir.
Our senior producers are Nicole Rothwell, Jeannie Montalvo, and Fernanda Echavary. We're edited by Sandy Ratley and Maria Garcia.
Executive produced for Futuro by Marlon Bishop. Mixing by Stephanie Lebeau and Julia Caruso.
Research by Lynn Cantor and Carolyn Lipka. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Mukta Mohan, Dan Fehrman, Anna Holmes, and Janae Marable.
Jen 11 is our editorial assistant. Executive producers for Spotify are Daniel Eck, Dawn Ostroff, Julie McNamara,

and Corinne Gilliard. Our original music and theme song is by The Sacred Souls.

Join us for the next episode of The Sum of Us, a podcast in search of hope and solidarity.