We Refuse to Forget with Caleb Gayle

The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past

Caleb Gayle talks with us about his new book, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. This book tells the story of the Creek Nation, a group that historically owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. The story is told through the lens of a few people, but most prominently a man named Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief of the Creek Nation, and his descendants who were stripped of their Creek citizenship in the 1970s. We discuss how this happened with an examination of racial and ethnic identity, challenging our preconceptions of identity as it shines a new light on white supremacy, and marginalization that continue to hamper progress for Black Americans today. Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity. A professor at Northeastern University, he is a fellow at New America, PEN America, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, and a visiting scholar at New York University. Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Guernica, and other publications. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Gayle is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, the University of Oxford, and has an MBA and a master’s in public policy, both from Harvard University. He lives in Boston. Join us for this fascinating discussion and then go out and buy We Refuse to Forget!