Flipping Tables

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When I scheduled this talk with Odessa, one of Nashvilles staunchest activists, I had no idea what was about to unfold in Minneapolis with the shooting of Alex Pretti just 5 days after we recorded this session. I think this conversation could not have landed on a more relevant time if I had tried.

Odessa Kelly is a Nashville native, organizer, and political activist focused on racial, economic, and social justice. She was born and raised on the East Side of Nashville in a working-class community facing poverty, substance abuse, and gun violence. Kelly graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in Business Administration and later earned a Master’s in Public Service from Cumberland University.
She spent nearly 14 years working as a civil servant for Metro Nashville’s Parks & Recreation Department, including leading the Napier Community Center, where she worked directly with youth and families. Witnessing systemic inequities and the impact of policy decisions on her community pushed her toward broader community organizing work.
In 2016, Kelly co-founded Stand Up Nashville, a grassroots advocacy organization dedicated to fighting for economic equity, affordable housing, workers’ rights, and community benefits from local development. Under her leadership, the group won Nashville’s first community benefits agreement with a major soccer stadium project, securing commitments on living wages, affordable housing, and childcare supports.
Kelly has been honored with several awards, including the National Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Award, a National Courage Award, and Nashville Scenes Activist of the Year for her work advancing justice for working people and marginalized communities.
As a mother of two and a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church, she has also run for public office. In 2022, Kelly was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, campaigning on expanding economic opportunity, housing justice, and representation for working families.
Her activism and platform emphasize lived experience, community empowerment, and challenging systems that leave working-class people behind. And now she meets with us to tell us how to carry that legacy forward.

I apologize this is late everyone, as you know this has been a really busy and tough weekend in the reporting/political realm.
So excited for this conversation with a dear friend of mine, and one of my favorite voices in town. Kyndle Wylde is a Memphis born soul, blues and rock singer. You might recognize her as the winner of the 2024 CBS morning mixtape competition with a delicious soul version of "I Can See Clearly Now". She now performs and tours with Post Modern Jukebox and her cover of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" with them has over 1.6 million views. She also released her debut, self titled EP in 2025.
But what you might not know, is that she was born and raised in a small Tennessee town. She was part of the family worship band in her grandfathers church and she had a long road of self discovery to find that not only she could be an artist but she wanted to. She shares the moment the church told her "walk the Damascus Road" and when she didn't, found the support system pulled out from her.
But it turns out love, a dream, and slow unsteady steps to self discovery- can change your world.

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Viola Fauver Liuzzo was a 39-year-old white civil rights volunteer from Detroit who traveled to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. On the night of March 25, while driving 19-year-old activist Leroy Moton back toward Selma, she was chased down U.S. Route 80 by a car of Ku Klux Klan members—Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., William Orville Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. Wilkins fired a shotgun into Liuzzo’s car, killing her instantly; Moton survived by playing dead. The presence of Rowe, who had a history of participating in Klan violence while on the FBI payroll, sparked major controversy about what federal authorities knew and tolerated.
Alabama first tried Wilkins for murder, but his initial trial ended in a hung jury, and a second all-white jury acquitted him despite Rowe’s eyewitness testimony. After the state failed to secure a conviction, the Department of Justice charged Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas under federal civil-rights law (18 U.S.C. § 241) for conspiring to deprive Liuzzo of her civil rights. All three were convicted and received ten-year sentences, marking one of the earliest successful federal civil-rights prosecutions against white supremacist violence. In the aftermath, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover orchestrated a smear campaign against Liuzzo—spreading false claims about her character to deflect criticism of the FBI’s role in managing informants. Her murder and the federal response helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later fueled congressional scrutiny of FBI conduct during the Church Committee investigations.
Sources:
James P. Turner, Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions.
Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo.
Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
Wayne Greenhaw, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963.
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.
Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s.
U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee Reports).
FBI COINTELPRO Files (Declassified).
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Archives on the Liuzzo Case.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, The FBI and the Civil Rights Movement (archival materials).
NAACP Records and Papers on Selma and Voting Rights.
Civil Rights Documentation Project, Library of Congress.
Eyes on the Prize (PBS Documentary Series)
Home of the Brave (Documentary on Viola Liuzzo).
National Civil Rights Museum, Viola Liuzzo Exhibits.
Southern Poverty Law Center Archives on Ku Klux Klan Activity.
John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.
Lerone Bennett Jr., “Selma: The Road to Freedom,” Ebony Magazine Archives.
Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.
Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr..
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (context on FBI surveillance).
Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000.
David Carter, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement (on federal infiltration of civil rights groups).
United States v. Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas (Federal §241 Trial Records).

Prepare to get angry.
I unfortunately fell back into the bad habit of doom scrolling. And it was so discouraging to watch what happens online. The increased amount of abuse towards women, calling for them to not be able to vote, taking away resources for single parents (because sure, lets punish the parent who stayed), and the double standard of women's sexuality has been gut wrenching for me.
Christmas Eve I read a book called "Witchcraft for Wayward Girls" by Grady Hendrix. I read it in one day. Now while its fiction, its factually based on what happened in homes for unwed mothers in the US- a grandchild of the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. This double standard is so ingrained, so enmeshed in our culture and society and since the Dobbs decision, those homes - where so much abuse, fraud (gasp), coercion and trafficking happened, are now increasing in number.
Women will never be free and equal if we acquiesce, if we cave, if we allow it, if we carry shame that was never ours to begin with. We shatter those standards by first learning about them and what they have done to the women before us.

1803 Offences Against the Person Act (Lord Ellenborough’s Act)
1828 Offences Against the Person Act
1837 Offences Against the Person Act

1861 Offences Against the Person Act, Sections 58–59

Infant Life Preservation Act 1929

Abortion Act 1967 (UK)

Lane Committee Report, Report of the Committee on the Working of the Abortion Act (1974)

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) historical ethics reports

Brookes, Barbara. Abortion in England, 1900–1967. Croom Helm.

Fisher, Kate. Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960. Oxford University Press.

McLaren, Angus. A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Blackwell.

Williams, Glanville. The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law.

Irish Department of Justice. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (McAleese Report), 2013.

O’Sullivan, M. The Irish Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Manchester University Press.

Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press.

Finnegan, Frances. Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. Oxford University Press.

Luddy, Maria. Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940. Cambridge University Press.

Raftery, Mary & O’Sullivan, Eoin. Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.

BBC Panorama investigative reporting on the Laundries

Irish Times archives (historical reporting on Magdalene institutions)

UN Committee on the Rights of the Child briefs on Irish institutional abuses

Joint Oireachtas Committee hearings on institutional abuse

Solinger, Rickie. Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. Routledge.

Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Penguin.

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. Yale University Press.

National Florence Crittenton Mission Archives

Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, early 20th-century records on “unmarried mothers”

Maza, Sarah. Work on U.S. adoption coercion practices

Original court records from state maternity homes (various—primarily Minnesota, Tennessee, New York)

Liberty Godparent Home archives, Liberty University (reporting, survivor testimony, investigative journalism)

Liberty Lost podcast and transcripts (primary oral history from survivors)

Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reports

New York Times investigative reports (1950s–1990s) on maternity homes and adoption coercion

Senate Subcommittee hearings on adoption abuses (1970s–1980s)

Social Security Bulletin archives on “Aid to Dependent Children” (ADC) and out-of-wedlock births

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What does real, REAL resistance look like?
Tad Stoermer is a public historian, teacher, and author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States releasing June of 2026.
His work dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history. He removes the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. That continue to protect that abusive power.

From his website:
"A Resistance History of the United States is a record of repeated fights against abusive authority, carried out by people who refused the lies used to justify it. Those battles have taken different forms: the women and men in Salem who would not confess to witchcraft, the Black Loyalists who seized their own freedom during the Revolution, and the Anti-Federalists who forced a Bill of Rights to limit nationalist power. It’s a tradition carried forward by people like Ona Judge and Henry David Thoreau, by the clandestine networks of the Underground Railroad, and by the violent resolve of John Brown and the Secret Six—resistance so disruptive it helped push the nation into civil war, and so ambitious it took the focus and will of the Radical Republicans to begin building a new republic from the ruins. A Resistance History of the United States uncovers these moments not as steps toward inevitable progress, but as a set of hard-earned lessons—a usable playbook for confronting the abuse of power in our own time.

ad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world here today to help us face what is to come.
He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for American Studies and a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught public history at Harvard, served as a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg, and was advisor for history content at C-SPAN.