James Fallows has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States. Winner of the National Book Award and National Magazine Award, he’s the author of twelve books and his work has appeared in numerous publications and on public-radio. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.

Deborah Fallows is a linguist and writer. The author of Dreaming in Chinese and A Mother's Work, she has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others. She has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University.

Following the success of their NYTimes bestselling book Our Towns and HBO documentary based on their reporting on around 50 towns around the country, they formed the Our Towns Civic Foundation to promote reporting from under-served areas across the US, connect innovators and give Americans a fuller and more realistic picture of their country’s challenges and opportunities.

JAMES FALLOWS
on the beginning of Our Towns

It was the accumulation of a month or two of travel in South Dakota and then in rural Vermont, and rural Michigan. We thought, we're seeing things that we never read about, that just by following the newspapers, we know all about New York and D.C., but we don't know anything about Sioux Falls.

We don't know anything about Howell, Michigan, and it's so interesting. And I think what I'm building to on the timeliness, it was and is, I think, a moment in American history where people have a sort of caricatured view of the America that's not directly in their experience. They think, okay, where I am is all right, but those people out there are crazy. Those people out there are extreme. Those people out there, we don't understand them. 

DEBORAH FALLOWS

You have these Governor's Schools, and they are public boarding schools that are open to kids from around the state. In Mississippi, they came from the Deltas. They came from the double wides. They came from the fancy suburbs of Hattiesburg. And they would go to this boarding school in Columbus, Mississippi for a couple of years at a time, a public school, and live there together.

It was called the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. On the other hand, some of the real shining stars were the social studies and English teachers in that school. They had a program. So Columbus, Mississippi was a Civil War hospital town.

It has a very fraught racial past, as you can imagine. It's a black town. It's a white town. It's a very mixed town now. The social studies teacher kind of took it upon himself that the kids needed to understand this history, and the town needed to reckon with its past. And how could we all do this together?

So his solution, which seems kind of simple but was brilliant, was to have the kids research people who were in the cemeteries buried after the Civil War, find out about their lives, create productions that they would do, reenactments of that era of their history in the cemetery, in the town, invite the townspeople. There was nothing whitewashed.

So to speak about any of what they were doing. And we watched these presentations grow from an audience of 12 people to, over the years, an audience of hundreds of people from the town, black, white, everything, talking about what the kids were presenting and how it fit into the history of their town, using it as a vehicle to talk together with each other about the racial situation in their town today.

This interview was conducted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Sam Myers. Digital Media Coordinator was Sophie Garnier.