A story recorded in Topeka Kansas 1993 about the successes and failures of integration. Part of my Sony Award-winning series Homeward Bound.

1993 was a critical year in America’s march towards the presidency of Donald Trump. Bill Clinton became President. The economy was only just beginning to emerge from recession.  The nation was feeling unsure of itself.  IN 1993 I traveled around the Midwest for the BBC World Service.  I had been a student there 20 years earlier and wanted to see how things had changed.  My westernmost stop was in Topeka Kansas.  I had lived in Topeka just after graduating college. The city ahd changed enormously. There was a new Hispanic population.  Downtown area businesses had been hammered by the opening of a Wal-Mart superstore at the junction of two interstate highways on the edge of the Kansas capital.

I was traveling on my own and lucked into meeting Topeka’s head of press and marketing, a young African-American, and we had a very interesting conversation about integration’s successes and failures.


Yellow Springs Ohio 1993: Race, violence, fear. Part of the Sony-Award winning series, Homeward Bound.

In 1993, the BBC World Service sent me to the Midwest to report on America in transition. I had been a student there 20 years earlier at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

I had left the United States in 1985 and this was my first extended visit back to the country where I was born. I made a giant circuit driving southeast from Chicago to Yellow Springs and then swinging west along the Ohio River to Missouri, Kansas and Iowa before returning to Chicago and flying back to London.

I found a country uncertain of itself and going through changes it didn’t understand. Much of the division I heard about and observed on that trip has hardened and led to the election of Donald Trump.

I also encountered right wing talk radio for the first time. Listen to the voices I recorded.