The American story is often packaged as a linear climb toward a “more perfect union.” But for many Black families, history feels less like a ladder and more like a pendulum—swinging between hard‑won breakthroughs and the inevitable backlashes that follow.

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator Eugene Robinson for an exploration of this rhythmic history. Moving beyond headlines and isolated shocks, Robinson draws on the two‑century journey of his own family—the heart of his memoir Freedom Lost, Freedom Won—to show how national politics are lived, felt, and carried across generations.

This is not a traditional book talk, but a guided conversation. Together, we’ll consider how a single family’s story can illuminate the country’s larger cycles, why progress so often provokes retrenchment, and what it means to experience the same historical moments from perspectives that are too often overlooked. Most of all, we’ll ask what it might take to imagine a future that doesn’t simply repeat the past, and place our present moment within a much longer arc of American history.

Moderated by Anissa Durham.