Kali Nicole Gross is a professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University and author of Colored Amazons: Crime Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. Her recent book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, discusses a lurid crime involving an African-American woman and her lover that took place in Philadelphia in 1887. In their conversation, Gross tells Robert Scheer about life for African American women in the northeast after slavery was abolished. They discuss the parallels between the today’s tensions between African-Americans and the criminal justice system and those Tabbs' time. And Gross tells Scheer how she believes slavery not only impacted African-Americans but also has "deformed" whites as well.
KCRW
