Behind the scenes on the photo shoot for our Season 2 art.

This weekend, thousands of people marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama to protest the rapid-fire eradication of black congressional districts across the South following the Supreme Court's latest salvo against the Voting Rights Act. The Pettus bridge is the site of Bloody Sunday where, in March 1965, marchers for voting rights, led by the late, great John Lewis, were savagely beaten by cops and racist goons as they crossed the bridge. Since that day the bridge has been a symbol of the brutal struggle for civil rights.

But it's actually a monument to a Confederate officer.

Edmund Pettus, the man whose name is emblazoned in steel across the bridge's heavy support beams, was a Confederate officer and, after the South lost the war, a major player in the Alabama chapter of the Klan. The bridge was built and named after Pettus in 1940, 75 years after he and his loser comrades lost the Civil War.

The Confederacy is everywhere right now. You see it in the states rushing to redraw district lines. You see it in the removal of stories of the horrors of slavery from our national parks. You see it in the rewriting of history books and in the renaming of military bases and in the restoration of confederate monuments only recently taken down. We're living through a full-on zombie revival of dead confederates.

In an early planning meeting, Akilah was like "I see a confederate statue with googly eyes," and yes.

Which makes today's release of the new season of Rebel Spirit, the podcast that I write and produce with the incredible Akilah Hughes, more timely than ever. We're on a zombie hunt, and Episode One kicks it off.

In our first season, Rebel Spirit dealt with the lingering ghosts of the confederacy in school mascots and team names like the Rebels, the team at Akilah's high school in Florence, Kentucky. It was a season of trying to make change and learning (the hard way) about just how resistant people are to making that change.

This season Akilah is back trying to make change, but this time her sights are even higher: she's attempting to fill the void left in the Kentucky statehouse where a statue for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was removed in 2020 and replaced by nothing. The journey Akilah embarks on in her attempt to place a better symbol in the statehouse (you'll have to wait until Episode 2 to discover what it is) ends up a walk through the Civil War and its fallout and helps to answer the question of why there are so many monuments to traitors like Jefferson Davis and Edmund Pettus still standing in this country. Also, despite the subject matter, it's hilarious.

I'm so excited for you to embark on this journey with Akilah and me this season. Rebel Spirit will be coming out every Tuesday for the next ten weeks. Don't wait til the end, come along for the ride. Get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or wherever you listen to podcasts.