You are listening to True Stories on Siouxland Public Media, I'm Mary Hartnett. On the True Stories podcast we talk with authors who take on problems of daily life and also some that take on some of the most important issues of our time.
Today we talk with Deborah G. Plant about her new book, Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom for All. Plant is an African American and Africana Studies Independent Scholar, Writer, and Literary Critic specializing in the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston.
She is editor of the New York Times bestseller Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston and the author of Alice Walker: A Woman for Our Times, a philosophical biography.
A recent Pew Charitable Trust study shows that the large growth of the United States’ criminal legal system in the late 20th century brought a widening racial gap in incarceration. https://bitly.ws/3crJp
By the year 2000, Black people made up almost half of the state prison population but only about 13% of the U.S. population. Black adults still were imprisoned in 2020 at five times the rate for White adults.
In her new book, Plant points out that, today, two and half-million American citizens are incarcerated, And 6,300 of them are incarcerated inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The facility is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. One of those prisoners is Deborah Plant’s brother. He has been incarcerated there for nearly 25 years. Despite evidence showing his innocence, Bobby Plant has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Drawing on parallels between her brother’s incarceration and years of thorough research dating back to the creation of our US Constitution, Plant provides: “a compelling argument against the systemic abuse of justice as a weapon of oppression.” We talk about the prison system, its similarities to slavery and how we may be able to reform the system.
Deborah G. Plant is an African American and Africana Studies Independent scholar, writer, and literary C=critic specializing in the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston. She is editor of the New York Times bestseller Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston and the author of Alice Walker: A Woman for Our Times, a philosophical biography. She is also editor of The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, and the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit and Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston.
She holds MA and Ph. D. degrees in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Plant played an instrumental role in founding the University of South Florida’s Department of Africana Studies, where she chaired the department for five years. She presently resides in Florida.
