What if everything you were taught about American history was edited, the same way the Slave Bible was edited? In 1807, enslavers produced a version of scripture with every passage about liberation, equality, and resistance removed. Of the original 1,189 chapters, only 232 remained. Today, books are being pulled from school libraries and state legislatures are passing laws to restrict what history students are allowed to learn. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall wants you to understand that these are not separate phenomena.

Browne-Marshall is a constitutional law professor at John Jay College and the author of A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2025), a sweeping 500-year account of American resistance, from Chief Powhatan's warnings to the English at Jamestown in 1607, to Standing Rock in 2016, to the Amazon Labor Union in 2022. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Broadnax Bradshaw, an enslaved woman in Kentucky who threw a pot of boiling water at the man who beat her. They never touched her again. That story opens the book. This conversation builds on it.

In this episode, we get into the distinction Browne-Marshall draws between America and the United States, the idealistic promise versus the coercive machinery that has always worked to suppress anyone who tries to collect on it. We talk about Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, when poor White farmers and enslaved Black people fought together against the colonial elite, and what the wealthy did immediately afterward to make sure that alliance never formed again. We talk about the legal architecture of land theft, the agency of enslaved people that mainstream history has systematically erased, and the trifecta - litigation, legislation, and protest, that Browne-Marshall argues is the only combination that has ever produced durable change.

Gloria states that this is not a history book orlesson. It is a toolkit. A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is available now from Beacon Press. As Audre Lorde said: your silence will not protect you. This book is the evidence.

This episode covers:

• Why protest is not anti-American, it is America fighting its other half
• The 1676 moment that invented divide-and-conquer politics in America
• What Standing Rock actually accomplished, even though the pipeline was built
• How the Slave Bible connects directly to book bans happening right now
• The strategic framework Browne-Marshall calls the trifecta, and where it's working today

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