Shortly after he was born in 1971, Ryan White was diagnosed with severe hemophilia. Ryan was able to reduce his hospitalizations from the disease through the use of in-home injections of Factor VIII concentrate, something he and other people with hemophilia saw as a lifeline. The downside of this lifeline was that it pooled blood and plasma from thousands of donors, increasing the user’s risk of exposure to diseases like HIV. In 1984, Ryan was diagnosed with AIDS. His fight to be allowed to attend school and live as normal a life as possible made him a household name and helped humanize the HIV/AIDS epidemic for many Americans, culminating in the passage of the Ryan White CARE Act months after Ryan’s death in 1990. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Paul Renfro, Associate Professor of History at Florida State University and author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode audio is a clip from “Episode 259: Alyssa Milano,” Two Broads Talking Politics, July 23, 2019, used with permission of the original podcast. The mid-episode music is “The Beat of Nature” by folk_acoustic; the audio is free for use under the Pixabay Content License. The episode image is a photo of Ryan White taken at a fundraising event in the spring of 1989 in INdianapolis, Indiana; it is available via Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Additional sources:

• “Who Was Ryan White?” The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, Health Resources & Services Administration.
• “Remembering Ryan White, the teen who fought against the stigma of AIDS,” by Dr. Howard Markel, PBS Health, April 8, 2016.
• “Ryan White, Teen Who Contracted AIDS, Shifted Narrative Around the Disease,” By Paul Renfro, Teen Vogue, December 6, 2021.
• “Elton John credits Ryan White’s family with saving his life,” by Associated Press, PBS, April 3, 2022.
• “S.2240 - Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act of 1990,” 101st Congress (1989-1990), Congress.gov.
• “Celebrating 30 Years of the Ryan White CARE Act,” HIV.gov, August 18, 2020.
• “U.S. Statistics,” HIV.gov.

When she was just fifteen years old, in 1830, Sarah Martha Sanders was sold to Richard Walpole Cogdell of Charleston, South Carolina. Within a year she was pregnant with his child, and just after she turned 17, Sarah Martha gave birth to Robert Sanders, the first of nine children she would bear to then 45-year-old Richard Cogdell. Because the legal status of the children followed that of the mother, these nine children were also Richard’s property. None of this was unusual for the time. The unusual turn happened in 1857 when Richard Cogdell, for unknown reasons, purchased a property in Philadelphia and immediately signed it over to his five living children with Sarah Martha, immediately moving there with them for good. Joining me to discuss this story is Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Professor Emeritus of History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Tangled Journeys: One Family's Story and the Making of American History.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode image is “Cordelia Sanders (1841-1879), age 15, Charleston,” P.2014.51.2, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia. The mid-episode music is “Satisfied Blues,” composed and performed by Lemuel Fowler, recorded in New York City on July 19, 1923; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox.

Additional Sources:

• Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.
• “Tracing Charleston’s History of Slavery, From a Burial Ground to a DNA Swab,” by Caroline Gutman and Emily Cochrane, The New York Times, April 11, 2024.
• “Old Slave Mart,” Charleston, South Carolina, National Park Service.
• “The Charleston Slave Badges,” National Museum of African American History & Culture.
• “Telling the complicated history of Charleston, South Carolina,” CBS News,” February 24, 2020.
• “Abolitionism,” by Richard S. Newman, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
• “Philadelphia and the Birth of the Nation’s First Abolitionist Society,” by Fidan Baycora, Historic America, April 14, 2021.
• “First American abolition society founded in Philadelphia,” History.com.
• “Big Idea 5: The Forten Family: Abolitionists and Reformers,” Museum of the American Revolution.

At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education.” In the Reconstruction Era, throughout the South, and especially in the Washington, DC, region, formerly enslaved people fought for educational opportunities. Even as other advances of Reconstruction were clawed back by the forces of white supremacy by the late 19th century, much of the educational progress remained, so that Douglass in 1894 could still see “encouraging signs in the moral skies.” I’m joined in this episode by my son Teddy as co-host and by Dr. Kate Masur, the Board of Visitors Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “I Want to Be Ready,” performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and recorded in New York City on December 22, 1920; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a photograph from 1864 of the Jacobs Free School, founded by Harriet Jacobs; the photograph was distributed to Northern abolitionists who had helped fund the school and is now in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• “The Blessings of Liberty and Education,” by Frederick Douglass, delivered in Manassas, Virginia, on September 3, 1894, The Frederick Douglass Papers Project.
• “How Literacy Became a Powerful Weapon in the Fight to End Slavery,” by Colette Coleman, History.com, Originally posted on June 17, 2020, and updated on July 11, 2023.
• “An Act to amend the act concerning slaves, free negroes and mulattoes (April 7, 1831),” Encyclopedia of Virginia.
• “Margaret Douglass,” Shaping the Constitution, Resources from the Library of Virginia and the Library of Congress.
• “Harriet Jacobs: Working for Freedpeople in Civil War Alexandria,” by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre, Journal of the Civil War Era, July 16, 2019.
• “Letter from Teachers of the Freedmen,” by Harriet A. Jacobs and Louisa Jacobs, National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 16, 1864, in Documenting the American South.
• “Lost Capitol Hill: The Little Ebenezer Church School,” by Robert Pohl, The Hill is Home, February 9, 2015.
• “The Freedmen's Bureau,” National Archives.
• “History,” Howard University.
• “General Oliver Otis Howard House,” National Park Service.
• “Jennie Dean and the Manassas Industrial School,” Manassas Museum.