The Thread

The Thread builds its history around connections, the lines that run between people, places and ideas. One season introduction states the premise plainly: sometimes it is an idea that binds people and events together, even across wide stretches of time and space. Two very different stories show how that works. The first is The Election Day Massacre, a three-part special series about Ocoee, Florida, on election day 1920. Hundreds of Black residents were the victims, and their white neighbors were the attackers. The reason, as the series puts it, was that Black citizens had tried to vote. The series calls it the worst incident of election violence in American history, and one that is almost forgotten today. It adds a pointed detail of geography: all of this happened a few miles from where Disney World now stands. Then the frame widens. Black soldiers come home from Europe, and veterans including Moses Norman and July Perry join a movement that draws in hundreds of Floridians organizing against white supremacy. The 19th Amendment brings a new bloc of voters, Black women among them, and the tension climbs. Klan intimidation fills in the rest, from some five hundred hooded men parading in Orlando to a torchlit march through a Daytona school campus after the power was cut, a scene described by Paul Ortiz, author of Emancipation Betrayed. The violence is presented as centuries in the making, running back through Jim Crow and Black codes to the first enslavement in the region. The series also stays with the people who fled, families piling children into wagons and walking all night along roads, railroad tracks and sugarcane fields. One of its sharpest moments belongs to Caritha Perry, who spent a month in jail with her mother and later said she never wanted to see Ocoee again, not even on a map. The second story follows an idea instead of a place. In REPLAY: The Transformation of Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy's religious turn is traced to Matthew 5 and the instruction to turn the other cheek, which led him to treat pacifism as a requirement of Christian life. The show connects that belief forward to Gandhi and back to William Lloyd Garrison, the American it credits with influencing Tolstoy. REPLAY: ‘I Will Be Heard' turns to Garrison himself, a 23-year-old Boston printer and anti-slavery activist in 1829 who, the show argues, preached and practised civil disobedience more than a decade before Thoreau's 1849 essay. It sets him beside Gandhi, who also found the courage to face the mob, and beside Dr. King in Birmingham, who later reached the same conclusion about making injustice vivid to the public. By the Tolstoy episode's own account, that season began in Memphis with Dr. King's killing. The promo for the Election Day series lays out the event and what was at stake, which makes it a sensible first stop. A listener comes away with less a list of dates than a sense of how one life, law or belief leads into the next.