The Forgotten Mothers A Pilgrimage Series

I went on pilgrimage to Sussex, England to find my foremothers—the women I know nothing about, but whose memories live in my blood. Mary Ann Simmons, my fourth great grandmother, left her homeland for a new religion. She walked the Mormon Trail seven months pregnant in the summer of 1860 for a chance to build Zion in a far off land. I know this because Mormons keep extraordinary records. I know almost nothing about the women she left behind. This is the first of many essays to come about the Forgotten Mothers.

How a Mormon Children’s Song Taught Me to Love My Dead

It started with a children’s song before I understood what genealogy actually was. Before I knew I was allowed to look in the gaps history left behind. This is about loving the dead—finding them, tending them, and refusing to let the archive have the last word on whether they mattered.

The Five Bells, Chailey

It was unusually cold for late November and it was fast approaching half past one. In the South Downs, the sun sets at twenty past four and we had three more churches to see before we lost the light. We’d just finished eating lunch at a cozy pub in England—I didn’t want to leave.

The Five Bells earned its name from the church tower up the road, where five bells were hung in 1737—the year the old Elizabethan building became a coaching inn on the road from Lewes to London. The southern portion of the building dates to before 1600, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the outside. It sits a short drive down the road from St. Peter’s Church in Chailey, a small parish in rural East Sussex, England, which is what brought my husband Bruce and I there in the first place.

We’d come to Chailey looking for Anne Monck and her mother Elizabeth—-my last known ancestor in my motherline, both of them attached to this parish in 1767, both of them almost entirely lost to history. The Five Bells was the closest place for lunch in the countryside. I was fairly certain, it was also a place my ancestors had been before.

We sat at the back of the inn, where it was most private during the ‘lunch hour’ rush of the local pensioners throwing banter over a pint at the bar. Laughing at this foreigner ordering a beer they knew she wouldn’t like. The table we’d picked was within view of the ancient brick hearth—original to the oldest part of the building—which means it was already ancient when Anne Monck was alive. Someone had been tending that fire, banking those coals, baking bread in the oven beside it, for four hundred years before I arrived with my NorthFace puffer and my notebook full of questions. I put my hand near the warmth of it and thought about all the hands that had done the same thing before. I didn’t want to leave because leaving felt like losing something I hadn’t fully found yet.

That not-quite-finding feeling, that almost-touching something feeling is what this series is about.

What Black Women Taught Me About My Dead

For most of my life I did what Mormon women are taught to do with family history: I collected names to redeem my dead. I built my tree upward and outward, added dates, attached photographs, and felt a quiet pride when the branches multiplied and I had names to take to the temple where I baptized my dead.

I was doing genealogy the way I was taught since I was a ten year old girl singing “Genealogy, I am doing it, my genealogy,” in my Sunday best. Carrying a quiet kind of pride that I’d learned how to say such complicated words. I loved the way it rolled off my tongue like a foreign word. Like a secret. I thought I knew exactly what that word meant, but young Jennifer had no idea what was in store when she began her family history all those years before. She didn’t know you were allowed to look in the gaps to investigate the silences.

That was, until she learned to read silences from watching Black women do it first.

Saidiya Hartman walks into the archive knowing it was never built for her. Tiya Miles follows a single cotton sack through generations of enslaved women’s hands. Imani Perry reads the land itself as a document. They were showing anyone willing to pay attention what it looks like to take seriously the lives of women the archive treated as incidental. They were not writing about my ancestors. But they taught me something I recognized anyway: I’m a white woman living in Appalachia with a seven-hundred-year thread doing my ancestral work in their debt.

Because what I found at The Five Bells, with my hand near a four-hundred-year-old fire, is that the methodology works on any archive. It works on Sussex parish registers and Poor Law indentures and manorial court rolls and marriage register entries where the surname shifts spelling between documents. It works on the gaps between a woman I can find everywhere and a woman I can barely find at all.

The Forgotten Mother - Anne Monck

Her name appears once in the documentary record as I currently have it.

Saturday, May the third, 1701. Were married William Cooper of Wooten and Anne Monek of the same.

That’s it. One line in a parish marriage register, held at the Sussex Record Office in Lewes, watermarked with the county seal. The surname shifts spelling depending on who wrote it down—Monek, Monck, Monk—which is how it goes with women whose names were recoded by other people’s hands. She was born in Chailey in 1676. She married in 1701. After that, the archive goes quiet in the way archives go quiet about women who didn’t own property, hold office, or trouble the authorities.

George Goring was also born in Chailey in 1676.

I know considerably more about George Goring. He voted in the Parliamentary election of 1705. He became Churchwarden in 1726. His name is carved on a panel in the vestry of St. Peter’s Church—the same church where both he and Anne Monck were almost certainly baptized, possibly within months of each other, at the same stone font. The Goring family were Lords of the Manor of Balneath. George Goring owned Ades, one of the great houses of the parish. He is commemorated in the church where he worshipped, in the vestry where he administered parish life, in the historical record of a man who mattered.

Anne Monck can only be found in a parish register and in my genealogy file.

This is not coincidence. This is the archive doing exactly what archives were built to do—preserving the people who held the power and side-lining the people who served, tended, baked, bore children, and kept the whole god-damn system running below. George Goring’s name is on the vestry wall. Anne’s name is in one marriage register entry and then nowhere. The difference between them is not who mattered. It’s about who the record was built to remember and who we have to imagine lived in those gaps.

I found my connection to the forgotten women of my motherline in that gap.

Behind Anne Monck is her mother Elizabeth. I know Elizabeth existed because Anne existed and you cannot have a daughter without a mother. But the archive has not given her back to me, yet. Elizabeth is the next foremother in my line and she is almost nowhere to be found. She is the reason I sat at a four-hundred-year-old fire in a Sussex pub in November and didn’t want to leave.

Who was Anne Monck? and where did she come from?

That’s what we’re going to find out.

xo,

I’m the kind of person who can’t stop chasing the ghosts of women who came before me. The foremothers have been calling me since the day I was born backwards, butt-first into this world. It took me fifty-two years and the school of hard knocks to understand what the universe was trying to say: in order to survive, you’re going to have to look back.

Hello my lovelies,

We had our gathering of the SYNT tea drinking and story bee society earlier this week. It was glorious to be with people I’ve met here because I was brave enough to post my words and you were brave enough to read them. There’s nothing more radical than meeting each week to sit in the comfort of women writers—to witness each other’s souls and to write about what it means to be human. There’s something special that happens in our group and I want you to feel it too. If your schedule allows, consider joining us Tuesday’s 11am ET on Zoom. Always free. All are welcome.

SYNT invite link

How Religion Makes State Violence Feel Holy

It’s been less than thirty-six hours.

The snow’s still piled up outside, the same snow that was falling when I first read the news alert. I’ve been trying to write this all day, but the world keeps throwing itself at my window. How do you process one avalanche when the next one is already sliding down the mountain behind it?

Let me just start in the messy, quiet space between headlines. Between the ebb and flow of family running in and out from the snow. I’m not sure I can offer comfort, but I can offer witness. And maybe that’s the same thing.

What follows is not gentle. It’s an indictment of the church married to the state, a calling-out of the profane dressed in holy robes. If you’re still finding comfort in the idea that these institutions are fundamentally good, that they just need reform or better people in charge, this essay will name what that comfort costs. But if you’re like me—a hopeful heretic who believes the sacred lives in the refusal, who knows there’s a better way to exist in this world—then I invite you to read on.

On January 29th, they arrested Don Lemon. The next day, Georgia Fort. Activists Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy followed.

An ICE agent stood at a pulpit in St. Paul. A layman, neither trained in theology nor pastoral care, claimed the sacred trust of shepherd while employed as an instrument of state terror.

He stood in that essential silence—the same silence Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. named in his Letter from Birmingham Jail—and called upon the mantle of pastor to sanctify the authority of the state. Who offered communion with one hand and signed deportation orders with the other.

He called upon the trust built by prayers, by casseroles, by hands held in hospital waiting rooms. He called it forth. Then he laid that trust, like a vestment, over the cold steel bars of what the state actually does—kidnapping without warrants, detention without documentation, deportation without due process. Illegitimate power operating outside the law, wrapped in the authority of the pulpit—sanctified by the state’s will.

The charge against the journalist and activists, essentially, was bearing witness to something holy—the sacred act of protest itself. They were arrested for bearing witness to a truth so loud it shattered their consecrated lies. They spoke truth in the face of profanity, in a sanctuary built on state lies, and the architects of those lies charged them with a crime against the power they call god.

They were arrested for naming that heresy—and in naming it, they performed the ultimate act of faith—they refused to call it god. To protect the idol, you must punish the iconoclasts. The heresy isn’t in the shouting, it’s in the witnessing of the perfectly quiet handshake where scripture meets state. Where let us pray meets you are hereby ordered.

Amen.

So, I’m writing this like a diary, a note passed between the waves. Writing keeps me from drowning, it’s how I winnow the sacred from their mundane. They wrap their violence in scripture until it feels like milk and honey from the Promised land. Challenging the notion that “what we do to you is not just legal, it’s ordained.”

It’s ritual purification. Silencing the witness to protect the holy story of church and state. It’s the spiritual gaslighting that makes your sacred inner knowing feel like it has always been the sin. They are using the sacred to sanctify the profane.

And before the ink on that sentence could dry, the news floodgates broke. Hours after those arrests, the Epstein files dropped. A tidal wave of names—the President, the CEOs, the Justices—all accused of assault, of making evidence disappear through death and the privilege of wealth. The document proclaims: the entire structure a crime scene of the most profane. Then the alert about the five-year-old boy, kidnapped from his preschool by ICE, now reported to be sick without his mother’s care. A concentration camp for a child, a death sentence in exchange for his crib—the unholy end to their heavenly claims.

It is a system vomiting up so much horror that our collective consciousness is crushed by the sheer weight. Outrage requires focus, and they’ve shattered ours like a prism. Grief needs a quiet moment, and they’ve made the noise so loud we can no longer name the profane. The overload is the weapon. Our fragmented attention the refrain.

The Epstein files are a smokescreen of the grotesque, but also a mirror. They show the same convergence—elite power operating as its own church, using wealth and status as a sacrament of impunity. The priest, the president, the billionaire—different vestments, same profanity of the inhumane.

And Liam, the sick child alone in a camp? This is the Eucharist of their creed. The unholy sacrament. The architecture ends in a feverish boy, crying for his mother whose arms have been replaced by the cruelty of the state.

By the time I finish this sentence, he’s been returned home. But that doesn’t erase the days he spent sick and terrified, nor does it absolve the system that took him in the first place. His reunion is not redemption—it’s damage control. The wound remains, even when they release their grip.

I’m so tired, I know you are, too. I write from the whisper of fatigue.

We cannot respond to every story. We were never meant to. But we can choose one thread and follow it with all the sanctity of our attention.

My thread is this unholy alliance between pulpit and state. Yours might be the camps. Or the files. Or the version playing out in your city council, your school board, your family dinner where politics is forbidden but power is always served.

Make your record. Write your story. When they say it wasn’t that bad, your record will keep us tethered to what was real. When they flood the zone with the next horror, and they will, your thread is a rope back to what matters. Back to your own breath. Back to the quiet space between headlines where we began.

They want us fragmented, overwhelmed, and alone in our rage.

So we must be deliberate, connected, and together in our witness.

The five-year-old needs their mother. The journalists need their freedom. The truth needs its chroniclers. And we need to remember that this system doesn’t just want our compliance. It wants our belief. It wants us to think its violence is necessary and righteous.

We withhold belief by seeing clearly. By naming the architecture while it’s still running. Systems fail when we declare that violence isn’t holy, and we refuse to look away.

In that stubborn, specific attention, we tell a different story—one that doesn’t require god to excuse its sins.

We’re in a blizzard now. But we can still see each other’s lanterns through the fray.

Keep holding yours steady. You’re reading mine.

“so we must be deliberate, connected, and together in our witness.”

Yup, I said that above and I mean it. I want—no, I need—to gather in community. To gently push back against the quiet isolation that can settle in when we’re deep in the weeds of our own work, forgetting the warmth and possibility that comes from simply sharing the space.

I’ve chatted with friends for ages about starting a writing group, but it always ended as just a nice idea… until now.

This week, we begin.

Please join me for free Writing Circles every Tuesday at 11am ET.

It’s a free, hour-long sanctuary for words. We’ll start with a thoughtful prompt or poem to ease into the page, then write together in a supportive silence (cameras on or off—you do you). We’ll end by briefly sharing how the writing felt, to honor the effort without critique.

Think of it as body doubling with a heartbeat. A structured yet gentle container to help you keep your record, find your thread, and tell your truth.

This is your invitation to practice noticing, that deliberate attention, that connected witness, and the stubborn, necessary work of chronicling your truth while the blizzard rages outside.

Sound like your kind of circle? Just message me to save your spot, and I’ll send you the link.

P.S. Can’t make it live? I’m also curating a close-knit, 6-week Writing Circle cohort beginning in March. Applications open Monday, February 16th, with early access for founding and sustaining members. Feel free to ask me about that too.

Tell me, what is it but a gift-
this white morning, blank
as the day I came into this world?
- jennifer crow

I spent most of the afternoon researching and writing this analysis because I thought it was essential that I share what I’m seeing from my particular perspective as someone who is convinced that history’s most dangerous playbooks are being reopened. In the interest of timeliness—because these tests rely on a lag in public understanding—I am publishing this without the usual rounds of edits. It may contain minor errors, but I trust its core framework: the pattern of the Palmer Raids is the key to understanding today’s arrests. Consider this a dispatch from the field of historical analysis, sent while it’s still steaming hot, like my tea.

Palmer Raids and the kidnapping of journalists

The details are widely available elsewhere. I won’t be doing the reporting here so much as the analysis. This is about the architecture.

On the night of January 29th, federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon in Los Angeles. The following day, January 30th, they arrested journalist Georgia Fort in Minnesota. Attorney General Pam Bondi also ordered the arrests of activists Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy. Four people, arrested in coordinated actions across multiple states over two consecutive days.

Here’s the justification: their coverage of and participation in a January 18th protest at a St. Paul church. The target of that protest: a lay pastor at the church who also serves as an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Protestors demonstrated against the convergence of religious and state authority embodied in one person - a church leader wielding deportation power, religious legitimacy providing cover for state violence. Journalists covered the protest. Activists organized it. Twelve days later, the Attorney General ordered their arrests, framing the demonstration at a church as a “coordinated attack.”

Here’s what makes this illegal: in at least one case, a federal judge looked at the warrant application and said no. The judge—whose entire job is to determine whether the government has legal grounds to arrest someone—denied it. And federal agents arrested them anyway. They’re holding journalists and activists right now without the legal authority to do so. A judge said no, and they did it anyway.

This is the pattern I’ve been tracking through the Palmer Raids, except now it’s happening in front of us. A church leader who’s also an ICE official—that’s institutional coordination. Religious authority providing moral cover for state deportation power. Protestors showed up to make that coordination visible, to say “we see what you’re doing here.” Journalists documented it. And then the state arrested everyone who exposed how the machinery works. That’s the architecture. That’s how it always works.

If you’ve been reading my work on the Palmer Raids, you already know this pattern. You’ve seen it before. This is what it looks like when the state tests whether the legal system will still function as a check on executive power, or whether law has become optional for those with badges and guns.

Let me show you how this works, because the architecture is the same now as it was in 1919-1920, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer orchestrated the largest mass arrest operation in American history—arresting over 10,000 people in a single coordinated sweep, most without warrants, many without charges, holding them indefinitely while deporting thousand based on nothing more than their political beliefs and associations.

The Palmer Raids weren’t about law enforcement. They were about testing how much the state could get away with when it claimed the nation was under threat. The answer then, as now, is: more than you think. More than the Constitution says. More than the courts allow. Because the state doesn’t need permission when it’s already decided the answer doesn’t matter.

The Architecture of Extralegal Violence

Here’s what happened in 1919. The country was in upheaval. Labor strikes were spreading. Immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia were organizing workers. Anarchists and socialists were publishing newspapers, holding meetings, demanding an end to capitalism. And then, in spring 1919, a series of mail bombs were sent to prominent business leaders and government officials. Most failed to detonate, but the threat was real enough to provide the justification Palmer needed.

What followed wasn’t just arrests. It was the construction of an entire system for bypassing legal protection while maintaining the appearance of legality. Palmer appointed a young J. Edgar Hoover to head the General Intelligence Division, whose purpose was surveillance and infiltration of radical organizations. They built files on thousands of people—not because they’d committed crimes, but because they attended meetings, read certain newspapers, spoke certain languages, associated with certain communities.

The raids themselves happened in coordinated sweeps across multiple cities on the same night. Federal agents, often working with local police and private vigilante groups, broke into homes, union halls, and meeting places. They arrested people without warrants. They held people without charges. They denied access to lawyers. They beat people based on membership in organizations that were legal at the time of joining but had been retroactively criminalized.

The legal justification was thin to the point of transparency. The Sedition Act of 1918 and immigration laws gave the government authority to deport non-citizens who belonged to organizations advocating the overthrow of the government. But “overthrow” was defined so broadly that union organizing, anti-war activism, and advocating for socialism all qualified. And the enforcement was so selective that only certain immigrants—specifically those from Eastern Europe, Russia, Italy—were target, while German immigrants who’d supported the Kaiser during World War I faced no similar treatment.

What made the Palmer Raids so effective as a tool of state violence wasn’t just the arrests themselves. It was the way they coordinated across multiple systems to eliminate escape routes. Federal agents handled the arrests. Immigration officials handled the deportations. Local police provided support and looked the other way during beatings. The press published sensationalized stories about bomb plots and foreign radicals. Banks froze assets of arrested individuals. Landlords evicted their families. Employers fired anyone associated with the targeted organizations.

The system worked because it was networked. No single institution had to take full responsibility. Each could claim it was just following orders, just doing its job, just enforcing the law. And by the time judges started issuing rulings that the arrests were illegal, that due process had been violated, that people had been held without cause—thousands had already been deported, lives had been destroyed, organizations had been dismantled, and the chilling effect on political speech had accomplished what the raids set out to do.

The Test Is Always the Same

When a state wants to know how much it can get away with, it runs a test. It picks a target that most people won’t defend—anarchists in 1919, undocumented immigrants today, journalists who report on state violence. It claimes an emergency that justifies extraordinary measures. It coordinates action across multiple agencies so that no single institution appears to be acting alone. And then it does something that clearly violates the law while maintaining the performance of legality.

The test is not “can we win in court?” The test is “will anyone stop us before we accomplish what we set out to do?” Because by the time courts rule that the action was illegal, the damage is done. The person has already been held. The documents have already been seized. The organization has already been disrupted. The message has already been sent to anyone else who might resist: we can do this to you, and your rights won’t protect you.

These arrests are that test. Here’s what we know so far.

Five people arrested in coordinated actions across multiple states. Two journalists—Don Lemon, a Black journalist and former CNN anchor now working independently, and Georgia Fort in Minnesota. Two activists—Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy among them. The arrests happened over two consecutive days, January 29th and 30th, which demonstrates planning and coordination. In at least one case, a federal judge reviewed the warrant application and denied it, which means a judicial officer with the authority to check executive power looked at the evidence and determined it did not meet the legal standard for arrest. The Department of Justice, which is part of the executive branch and therefore subordinate to judicial authority in our constitutional system, proceeded with the arrest anyway.

This is not one rogue agent acting outside policy. This is the Attorney General of the United State personally ordering arrests while framing protest at a church as a “coordinated attack,” and federal agents executing those arrests even after a judge said no.

The message being sent is clear.

To journalists: document state violence and ICE coordination with religious institutions, and we can arrest you.

To activists: organize against the church-state machinery of deportation, and we’ll frame it as conspiracy.

To the judges: your denial mean nothing if we choose to ignore them.

To the public: the legal protections you thought you had are only as strong as the state’s willingness to honor them, and right now, the state is testing what happens when it doesn’t.

Why These Targets, Why Now

The choice of the target matters. Palmer targeted anarchists and socialists because most Americans feared them, or could be made to fear them through propaganda. The state today targets undocumented immigrants for the same reason—it’s easy to build public support for violence against people who’ve been labeled as “illegal” and “foreign.” But what happened on January 18th at that St. Paul church, and what happened twelve days later with these coordinated arrests, reveals something more specific about how institutional coordination works and why exposing it gets you targeted.

The protests these journalists covered was specifically about institutional coordination. A lay pastor who is also an ICE official represents the exact convergence of religious and state authority that the Palmer Raids depend on. During the Palmer Raids, church often supported the arrests by framing deportation as God’s will, as righteous punishment for godless radicals. Religious authority told immigrants to submit to state power, and state power deported those who didn’t. The institutions reinforced each other. Resistance to deportation could be framed as resistance to God. Resistance to church authority could be framed as resistance to law.

When protesters demonstrated at a Saint Paul church where religious authority and ICE authority are literally embodied in the same person, they were making visible how that coordination still operates. The church provides moral legitimacy for deportation. ICE provides enforcement power for the churches vision of who belongs in America. And when journalist documented that protest-–when they showed people resisting this institutional convergence –they exposed the machinery that works best when it stays invisible.

Bondi arrested two journalist alongside two activists, making clear that the state is treating documentation of protest as equivalent to participation in what it’s framing as criminal conspiracy. When you arrest journalists alongside activists and use the same justification for both, you’re saying there’s no distinction between witnessing and committing, between reporting and organizing, between documentation and violence.

The twelve-day gap between the protest and the arrests is deliberate. It’s long enough that the arrests can’t be framed as maintaining order during an active event. This wasn’t about preventing violence or managing a crowd. This was about punishment for documentation, about sending a message that if you expose how church and ICE coordinate, if you show people resisting that coordination, the state will come for you. Not immediately, when the justification might be crowd control. Later, when it’s clear the purpose is deterrence.

The racial dimension of these arrests demands attention. Don Lemon is a black journalist who has been vocal about police violence and state repression against Black communities. The Palmer Raids similarly targeted specific immigrant communities – eastern Europeans, Russians, Italians – while leaving other immigrants untouched. The selection of targets always reveals what the state wants kept invisible. When the state arrests Black journalist covering an protest against ICE coordination with churches, when the state arrests activists organizing that resistance, the pattern shows what documentation and what resistance will be tolerated and what will be criminalized.

Notice what gets labeled as “coordinated” and what doesn’t. A pastor who is also an ICE official coordinating religious and state authority to enforce immigration policy – that’s normal, that’s acceptable, that’s not called coordination. But people protesting that coordination, and journalist covering that protest, that gets framed as “coordinated attack” that justifies arrest. The state can coordinate across institutions to control populations, but when people coordinate to resist that control, coordination itself becomes criminal.

Throughout the Palmer Raids, journalists played a contradictory role. Some published sensationalized stories that justified their arrests, warning of eminent revolution and bomb plots. But others documented the abuses – the beatings, the lack of warrants, the denial of due process.These journalists became targets themselves. Their offices were raided. Their files seized. Some were arrested on pretexts. The message was the same then as it is now: if you document what the state doesn’t want documented, you become a threat to state power, and threats can be eliminated.

The journalists arrested weren’t just reporting news. They were documenting resistance to the specific mechanism I’ve been writing about—the coordination of church and state to enforce immigration control. This is exactly the kind of reporting that threatens state power because it’s accurate. Because it names what’s happening while it’s happening, rather than waiting until it’s safe and historical and already over.

When the state can criminalize documentation of its own violence, it can operate without witnesses. And without witnesses, there is no accountability. There is only the state’s version of events, which always justifies what the state has done.

The Coordination We’re Watching

Pay attention to what happens next, because this is where you’ll see the full architecture of state violence reveal itself. Watch how other agencies and institutions respond to this arrest.

Will other journalists defend their colleagues, or will they distance themselves by suggesting they must have done something to warrant arrest, even without a warrant? Will media organizations file legal challenges, or will they quietly accept the new boundary of what’s allowed? Will professional journalism associations condemn the arrest as an attack on freedom of the press, or will they issue milquetoast statements about “concerning developments” that require no action?

Will judges across the federal system respond to this demonstration that their authority can be ignored, or will they continue issuing rulings as if those rulings still matter? Will the judge who denied the warrant hold the DOJ in contempt, or will that denial simply be noted in a file somewhere while the arrest proceeds?

Will Congress exercise its oversight authority to demand explanation for why the executive branch is ignoring judicial decisions, or will they issue statements of concern while funding the very agencies carrying out these actions? Will legal scholars write op-eds about constitutional violations, or will they wait to see if this becomes normal before deciding whether to object?

And watch the platforms. Hours after news broke about Don Lemon’s arrest, I searched for his name on threads and saw extensive discussion – enough that I recorded nine minutes of peoples responses and reactions. When I searched again hours later, I got no results. Not fewer results, not less engagement. No results. The discussion had been made unsearchable. I was however able to find more posts about Don Lemon, but I had to change my search terms in order to make them revealed.

This is network suppression operating in real time. The Attorney General coordinates arrests of journalists and activists across multiple states. The platforms make information about those arrests difficult to find even when you’re explicitly searching for it. By the time the public realizes what happened, the immediate window for response has closed.This is how the machinery works – not through one institution acting alone, but through coordination across systems so that each can claim plausible deniability while the overall effect is total.

Watch the coordination. Because what makes state violence effective isn’t the arrest—it’s the way every other institution either actively supports it or passively allows it to continue. The Palmer Raids worked because newspapers sensationalized the threat, because local police evicted families, because employers fired workers, because judges often ruled in favor of the state, and because most of the public accepted the government’s framing that dangerous radicals needed to be removed for everyone’s safety.

The same coordination is available now. Watch for it. Notice who defends the arrest by suggesting the journalist must have done something wrong. Notice who stays silent. Notice who pivots to discussing the proper procedures for obtaining warrants, as if the issue is bureaucratic rather than the open declaration that warrants are optional. Notice how the focus shifts from “the state is arresting people without legal authority” to “let’s wait for all the facts” to “this is complicated” to “nothing we can do about it now.”

Notice which outlets report on these arrests and which don’t. Notice whether coverage mentions that a judge denied a warrant and the arrest happened anyway, or whether that detail gets buried or omitted entirely. Notice whether the framing is “Attorney General arrests journalist” or “journalists arrested at protest” or “coordinated attack on church leads to arrests.” The language chosen reveals whose narrative is being amplified.

Notice whether anyone asks why a lay pastor is also an ICE official, or whether that convergence of religious and state authority is treated as unremarkable background detail. Notice whether coverage examines the twelve-day gap between protest and arrest, or whether that timeline disappears from the story. Notice whether the racial identity of the arrested journalists matters to the coverage, or whether it’s treated as irrelevant.

What the Palmer Raids Teach Us About This Moment

The Palmer Raids eventually ended, but not because the legal system stopped them. Most of the arrests were later ruled illegal. Most of the deportations were determined to have violated due process. But by the time those rulings came down, Palmer had already accomplished what he set out to do. He had broken the back of radical organizing. He had demonstrated state power. He had shown that the government could arrest thousands of people, hold them without charge, deport them without trial, and face minimal consequences for doing so.

The raids ended primarily because Palmer overreached. He predicted a massive May Day uprising in 1920 that never materialized. When nothing happened, his credibility collapsed. The press turned against him. Congress started asking questions. His own Department of Labor, which handled deportations, began refusing to cooperate with arrests that lacked legal basis. It wasn’t that the system suddenly started working—it was that Palmer had used up his political capital by making predictions that didn’t come true, and without public fear to justify continued action, other institutions were willing to push back.

But here’s what didn’t change—the infrastructure that Palmer built, remained. J. Edgar Hoover took the surveillance apparatus created for the Palmer Raids and turned it into the FBIs domestic intelligence operations, which continued targeting radicals, communists, civil rights activists, and antiwar protesters for decades. The legal theories Palmer used—that associational membership could justify deportation, that speech could be criminalized as sedition, that the state could hold people indefinitely during investigations—remained available for future use. The precedent was set: when the state claims emergency, it can suspend legal protections, and by the time courts rule that the suspensions were illegal, the emergency will be over and the damage will be done.

We are living in that same playbook now. The journalist arrested without a warrant today is a test case. If these arrests stands—if they continues to be held without judicial authority, if no other institution intervenes, if the public accepts this as the new normal—then the state has established that warrants are optional. That judicial oversight is optional. That the courts can deny permission and the executive can proceed anyway.

And once that precedent is set, who’s next? Which other targets become arrestable without judicial review? More protestors? More organizers? Academics who study state violence? Anyone who documents what the state wants hidden? Anyone who protests at any church where religious authority coordinates with state power?

The fact that these arrest targeted documentation of church IC coordination is not incidental. It reveals what the state considers must threatening. Not protest generally, but protest that exposes institutional coordination. Not journalism generally, but journalism that shows how religious and state authority work together to enforce immigration control. The arrests say: you can have protest and you can have journalism, but not when they make the machinery visible. That’s where the line is. That’s what gets you arrested.

What We Do With This Information

I’ve been writing about the Palmer Raids because the pattern is repeating. I’ve been building the historical framework so that when things like today’s arrests happen, you have the architecture to recognize it. This isn’t a one-off incident. This isn’t bureaucratic confusion. This is the state testing the boundaries of its power by deliberately violating judicial authority and watching to see who stops them.

Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to be a witness. To name what you’re seeing. To refuse the reframing and justifications and “wait for all the facts” that are designed to make you question your own perception.

The state arrested four people in coordinated actions across multiple states. Two were journalist who covered a protest. Two were activists who organized or participated in it. The protest was at a church where a lay pastor is also an ICE official. A federal judge denied at least one warrant. The arrests happened anyway. That’s the information you need. Everything else is distraction or justification.

Palmer arrested 10,000 people in coordinated sweeps across multiple cities. Most arrests were later ruled illegal. But “later” meant after people had already been deported, after organizations had already been dismantled, after the chilling effect had already accomplished its purpose. The rulings didn’t undo the damage. They documented it, which matters for history, but didn’t protect the people targeted in real time.

We are living in the “real time” part of history right now. The part where the arrests are happening, where the violations are occurring, where the tests are being run. The part where your response determines whether the state faces any cost for ignoring judicial authority, or whether silence and acceptance signal that this is now just how things work.

I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what you’re watching. The state is testing whether law still matters or whether power is all that remains. That’s the test. How institutions and individuals respond is the answer.

And the answer you give—through action or inaction, through speech or silence, through solidarity or abandonment—will determine what happens next. Not just to these five people, but to everyone who might document state violence in the future, to everyone who might protest at locations where religious and deportation authority converge.

The Palmer Raids teach us that the state can arrest thousands of people illegally and face minimal consequences if the public accepts the framing that dangerous people needed to be removed. The state can ignore courts, violate due process, and destroy lives, and if no one stops them in the moment, the legal rulings that come later won’t undo what’s been done.

So here we are.

Five people arrested for covering and organizing a protest at the church where a lay pastor is also an ICE official. At least one arrest executed after a judge denied the warrant. The attorney general framing protest at a church as “coordinated attack”. “Social media platforms making discussion of the arrests unable. And all of us watching to see what happens next.

Welcome to the test. I hope we pass it this time.

This is part of an ongoing series on the Palmer Raids and the architecture of state violence. The next essay will examine how resistance actually worked in 1919-1920—the lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, organizations, and public pressure that eventually forced the raids to end. For real time pattern recognition as events unfold, subscribers receive shorter analysis pieces applying the framework to current developments.

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Jennifer Crow is a sociologist and writer studying institutional silencing mechanisms. She writes Hidden Narratives from East Tennessee, where she lives with chronic illness and tracks patterns of state violence from bed.

Hello,

I hope you’ve been staying warm this week. Grab a blanket, set the kettle on for tea, and get ready for this week’s post. It’s a day late and a dollar short (as they say), but I’ve figured something out about the ebb and flow of my writing process that I need to share.

I’ve been writing backwards.

Last week I started drafting what I thought was a little “too much”—a 5,000-word analysis tracing the evolution of American tyranny from the Trail of Tears to Slave Patrols through the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Palmer Raids to internment camps to COINTELPRO to I.C.E. I wanted to understand the context of the “Gestapo vs. Slave Patrol” debate. I connected what’s happening in Minnesota and other states across the country, to the evolution of the states construction of what constitutes the “other.” The “other” being the group marked expendable in order to achieve the states aims.

I thought I was doing it wrong because I wrote the deep-dive before drafting my Unholy HER profile. But what I finally discovered this week changes everything. I realized that I need to excavate the whole site before I can show you the unholy HER. I need to understand the political before I can connect it to the personal.

I need to see the complete pattern—how all these iterations build on each other, how the machinery evolves while the logic stays the same—before I can write about Emma Goldman. Before I can tell you about my great-grandmother Sarah sitting on her porch watching her neighbors disappear.

Starting with the macro analysis isn’t the problem. It’s the foundation. It’s how I understand what I’m digging for.

And once I see the whole system, I can work backwards to show you how to see it too. Starting with the woman who taught people to recognize the pattern. Starting with Emma Goldman.

So yes, I’ve been writing the essays out of order. And trying to play catch up ever since. The deep dive is drafted. The personal essay about standing on the ground where it happened—that’s written too. And what you’re reading today—this introduction to Emma Goldman—this is what I write last.

Because by now I know which details matter. I know which threads to pull. I know how this one woman’s story illuminates the machinery that’s still running.

This is how spiritual archaeology works. You don’t start with the artifact and work your way to understanding the system. You excavate the whole site until you understand the system, and then you select the artifacts that reveal it most clearly.

Emma Goldman is one of those artifacts. So is my great-grandmother Sarah. So is the fact that my father worked for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI—the same Hoover who rode that tugboat out to watch Emma Goldman’s ship depart (more about that below).

The personal is political because the pattern runs through our own family lines. And you can’t see that pattern until you’ve excavated enough to understand how the machinery actually works.

So, without further ado, let’s pull this thread.

today in silenced stories | Emma Goldman

They called her the Most Dangerous Woman in America.

Not because she threw bombs—though the newspapers accused her of that. Not because she advocated violence—though the government called her a terrorist. Emma Goldman was dangerous because she taught people something far more threatening than any explosion ever could. She taught them to see how power actually works.

For three decades, she stood on platforms across America and named what most people had been trained not to see. That capitalism, the state, organized religion, and compulsory marriage weren’t separate systems that happened to coexist. They were coordinated machinery, each piece reinforcing the others, all of them depending on the same thing: keeping people from recognizing the pattern.

She spoke against economic exploitation and military conscription. Against laws controlling women’s bodies and laws controlling women’s reproduction. She spoke against any institution that required hierarchy to function and violence to maintain. As a Jewish immigrant who had fled the pogroms, she understood how religious, economic, and state violence worked together and she taught others to see that connection. She didn’t just oppose these systems individually—she showed people how recognizing one form of oppression could help you see all the others.

That’s what made her dangerous enough to deport.

On December 21, 1919, the United States government stripped Emma Goldman’s citizenship and forced her onto a ship bound for Soviet Russia. J. Edgar Hoover, a twenty-four-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat, personally orchestrated her deportation. He rode a tugboat out to Ellis Island to watch her leave. He wanted to see her face as America disappeared behind her.

Goldman’s deportation was the headline victory of the Palmer Raids—Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s campaign to eliminate political dissent in America. Between November 1919 and January 1920, federal agents arrested over ten thousand people, most without warrants. They detained them for weeks without charges. The targets were overwhelmingly Jewish and Italian immigrants, socialists and anarchists whose very presence was framed as a threat to American values.

They deported hundreds without due process.

But Goldman’s spectacular deportation was only half the story. The other, less known half was what happened to the thousands of ordinary people the raids terrorized into silence. People whose names never made the papers. People who simply disappeared from their communities, from census records, from the historical record entirely.

People like my great-grandmother Sarah Wormald Blakey, who sat on her porch in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood that winter and watched her world collapse around her.

Emma Goldman is an unholy HER because the state called her unholy for teaching people to see what institutions coordinate to keep hidden. She spent her life documenting her own persecution and the systemic targeting of everyone who dared challenge the narrative.

She knew the machinery needed both the famous martyr and the invisible victims to work. She knew her deportation was theater to terrorize people like my great-grandmother Sarah into silence. She knew that understanding how power operates requires seeing both what makes headlines, and what disappears without a trace.

When I started writing this piece, I wanted to understand where to put ICE in historical context. I quickly learned that to understand modern ICE raids, you have to understand the Palmers Raids. To understand the Palmer Raids, you have to understand how Emma Goldman taught people to see coordination—how capitalism needs state violence needs immigration control needs family separation. How these aren’t separate problems but machinery working together.

This is how spiritual archaeology works. You start with one question (where does ICE fit?) and you pull the thread until the whole system becomes visible. Goldman is that thread. The Palmer Raids are the pattern. And the machinery is still running.

We dig deeper next week. Read the details below. Until next time.

- jc

next up…

“Emma Goldman and the Women of Hope Street.”

The full story of Emma Goldman publishes next Monday on Hidden Narratives. How the machinery worked then. How it works now. And what it cost the women whose names we’re only now beginning to recover.

How Goldman’s deportation and Sarah’s silence were two parts of the same coordinated machinery. How the Palmer Raids didn’t just eliminate famous radicals—they broke working-class immigrant solidarity by making political consciousness itself dangerous. How my family’s journey from Sarah’s organizing past to my grandmother’s Mormon conversion to my father’s FBI career under Hoover shows exactly how the system reproduces itself across generations.

Because you can’t understand Emma Goldman without understanding Sarah Wormald. You can’t understand the spectacular deportation without understanding the anonymous terror. You can’t understand how political repression works without seeing both sides of the machinery operating simultaneously.

join the discussion

I’d love feedback on any of the following:

The Palmer Raids didn’t just target famous radicals—they terrorized entire communities into silence. That silence gets passed down through generations until we forget what our grandmothers knew.

Next week, we’re going deeper into what the Palmer Raids actually accomplished—not just Goldman’s deportation, but what happened to the Sarah Wormalds sitting on porches across America, watching their worlds collapse in silence. How the machinery doesn’t just eliminate resistance—it recruits the children of the silenced (silent generation, anyone?) into the apparatus that destroyed community solidarity.

are you seeing the pattern? what “spectacular cases” are we watching while anonymous kidnappings happen without news coverage? (redundant to anyone paying attention but we can discuss just the same.)

Leave a comment

Jennifer Crow is a writer and spiritual archaeologist working from Mocking Crow Farm in Appalachia. She excavates suppressed women’s stories and traces the institutional mechanisms that silenced them. Her work explores how patterns of silencing persist across centuries, how institutions coordinate to make resistance disappear, and what it costs the women who see the walls to name them anyway.

[Updated April 2026: This post has been revised to reflect how Hidden Narratives has evolved into the thing it was always meant to be. It simply needed a trip across the ocean, the comfort of women writers, and a ritual with graveyard dirt to take shape. ]

Hello My Lovely 🐝,

Welcome to Hidden Narratives, ‘this is the place’ for the stories that were never meant to be told. The ones institutions tried to bury and our grandmothers took to their graves—and the ones the patriarchy really, really don’t want you to know.

Hidden Narratives starts with the premise most of us feel but haven’t yet named: the story you were told about your family, your people, your faith—isn’t the whole story. Someone decided what got passed down and what got buried. Hidden Narratives is the practice of going back for what got buried to finally understand why you are the way you are.

I created this space because I believe the stories we’re told to keep quiet reveal the most about how power operates and how resistance survives. I believe that the first rule of the matriarchy is that women do not hold the secrets of men. I believe that healing happens in circles. And I believe your story is a f*cking revolution.

Hidden Narratives is the method I developed to understand something about ourselves and each other, by excavating our dead. It’s the sociological imagination in practice—the ability to see how your personal story connects to larger historical and social forces. Your grandmother’s silence isn’t just her silence. It’s the institution that taught her to keep it.

There’s a canyon in Utah named after my fifth-great-grandfather. I grew up driving through it, proud of the name on the sign. I never asked who else lived there before him. I never asked what the canyon cost.

That’s the sociological imagination—not just knowing the name, but asking what the name is built on.

It’s what happens when you apply a sociological imagination to the graveyard—when you stop asking ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and start asking ‘what happened to us?’ And underneath everything—the excavation, the graveyard dirt, the women who don’t appear in the official records—are two questions I can’t stop asking:

how did we get here? and who are we because of it?

They sound simple until you start pulling the thread. Then they become the only questions that matter. Everything else in this space is an attempt to answer those.

What is Hidden Narratives?

Every family has an official version of a story that got told at dinner tables, repeated at funerals, and handed down like the good China your grandmother collected and her recipe for funeral potatoes—fragile, handled carefully, never quite examined, always consumed. For some of us, that story was small. A simplified lineage, a softened scandal, a great-grandmother whose name nobody remembers. For others, it was total. A cosmology. An entire way of knowing built on someone else’s version of events.

I grew up inside one of those total stories. Joseph Smith’s vision. The golden plates. The move to Zion. The pioneers. A Utah canyon named after my fifth-great-grandfather and what that means. It was told as truth, and I believed it the way you believe in gravity because everything in my world was organized around it. When I finally saw under the frame, I wasn’t just finding out some facts were wrong. I was losing the compass I used to evaluate what was true at all.

That’s when I started digging.

And I couldn’t stop. Not until I found my first foremother—and the woman who left her homeland for the mirage of a Mormon Zion, far, far, away. I needed to understand why the women in my line made the choices they did that got us here. What I found, the deeper I went, was something I didn’t expect—my gaze on the past softened as I began to understand the conditions of their lived reality that led to the impossible choices they faced.

That’s what Hidden Narratives is. It’s the belief that the official version is never the whole story—and that the stories with the silences, the exiles, and the women who don’t appear in the narrative are the ones worth knowing.

And then there’s what you find when you go looking for the women specifically—the ones who kept something alive when the institution told them to sit down and shut up. It traces how women’s spiritual practices shift and change over time and who benefitted from those changes and who was harmed.

I found them in my own motherline and Mormon feminists first. Women who laid consecrated hands on their children’s heads and pronounced mother’s blessings like it was their right—because it was. Women who held their own gatherings high on the mountain tops welcoming all who cared to receive. A place where women were ordained and blessings pronounced simply because they believed, because they were there, because they had need.

I had to leave the religion to find them. But I found them.

That’s the other thing Hidden Narratives does—it gives you back the women your traditions tried to edit out, erase, or excommunicate. Not as martyrs, nor footnotes in some man’s story—but as the full, complicated, holy and unholy HERs they actually were.

If you have ever felt that the story you were handed isn’t the whole story, you’re already doing this work. Hidden Narratives is just the name for it.

How I got here.

It started one Sunday in 2018. I was drafting an essay for grad school when a sudden weakness overtook me. I thought I’d sleep it off, but when I woke a few hours later, I could not move my body. The emergency room had no real answers—they simply told me that sudden paralysis isn’t a medical emergency then sent me home with a Xanax and an admonition to “reduce stress,” my experience written off as the modern-day version of hysteria, beginning my descent into one of the darkest periods of my life, trading academic dreams for the elusive hope of recovery.

It’s been seven years since I woke up paralyzed from that nap. Recovery is ongoing. Symptoms of MG fluctuate from hour to hour and day to day—offering a masterclass in living with uncertainty. I may have dropped out of grad school, but I’ve earned an honorary doctorate in the untold stories of embodiment—and in what institutions do to bodies that won’t comply. How they pathologize. Dismiss. Erase.

I began writing to make sense of life after my rare disease diagnosis of myasthenia gravis, a condition that stripped me of everything I used to define the meaning and purpose of my life. I’d lost my identity and didn’t know if I’d ever find a way back to myself, having lost access to the person I’d spent the last ten years building.

Writing eventually led me back to the story I’d never told—my time as a pregnant teen in the Mormon foster care system.

Before diagnosis, I was studying sociology examining the social consequences of religious beliefs through the lens of gender and power. My qualitative research with Mormon feminists in the Ordain Women movement focused on institutional power and ostracism.

Then I got sick, and suddenly I wasn’t just studying how institutions control women—I was living it. My own body became the case study.

The medical dismissal—being sent home with Xanax, told my paralysis wasn’t an emergency—mirrored exactly what I’d documented in my research. Different institutions, different decades, same pattern of control.

I started recognizing the patterns everywhere: in my research interviews, in historical records, in the stories women told about their mothers and grandmothers, and in the stories we tell about ourselves.

Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you start looking for evidence—tracing back through your own lineage not only to find the women who experienced it before you, but to find the source of your oppression.

I’ve become someone who can’t stop chasing the ghosts of the women who came before me. That chase is what fills this space.

Who I am.

I’m Jennifer Crow. I write from Mocking Crow Farm in Appalachian Tennessee. I was born and raised in the American inter-mountain west. I was born in California butt first into this world, looking back before my first breath. Lived in Utah during the years of my youth. Graduated high school in Oregon. Met and married my husband in Washington, D.C. and raised our family in Tennessee.

I live with myasthenia gravis, a rescue dog Finn, three Gen Z housemates—two my son’s friends, and a lot of questions about the women who came before me.

What you’ll find here.

the THREAD is where I pull the loose ends of inheritance to see what unravels.

It lives across three strands:

Hidden Narratives - excavating the stories behind the stories. Ancestry, exile, belonging. The kind of digging that leaves ancestral dirt under your fingernails. Heritage storytelling for families, institutions, and anyone who needs to know where they came from before they can figure out where they’re going.

unholy HER - a storytelling platform where our community gathers to share profiles of the religious rebels and hopeful heretics we find along the way. We welcome submissions of your own unholy HERs. We gather Tuesday mornings on Zoom for our story bees — the See You Next Tuesday tea drinking and story bee society (SYNT) — where we sit in the comfort of women writers, inspired by a favorite, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We start with a gentle prompt, write together in silence, then return to check in before checking out.

this Appalachian Life - I go to town and write about what it means to be a woman who carries 400 years of exiled women in my body while also needing to pick up dog food and maybe stop by the library to say hi to Nicole. Personal essays as field report.

What to expect.

This is where I teach how to excavate your own dead, read family records for hidden clues, and recognize institutional control patterns across generations.

Sometimes it’s a case study from client work. Sometimes it’s a deep dive into my own mother-lines—Sussex churchyards, Mormon pioneers, the women they called difficult. Sometimes, it’s tracing spiritual practices across generations—how they shifted, what women kept, what they did when no one was watching.

Sometimes it’s a reflection on what ancestral intelligence looks like in practice. This is what I’ve come to call applied ancestral intelligence—not the reverence for the past as artifact, but the active use of what the past knows to make sense of who we are today.

Always, it’s about the kind of digging that leaves graveyard dirt under your nails and identity in your veins.

The graveyard dirt in my foremothers’ churchyards.

How to participate.

Sign up. Subscribe. Open your emails and write back to me.

Pull your scrapbooks down from your shelves and start asking dangerous questions about the things that don’t sit right in your soul. Learn to find your ancestors and why they aren’t just the ones that live in your blood.

Come sit in the comfort of women writers and learn how to tell the stories of your unholy HERs. Submit a profile (I learned that one from Ordain Women). Share the THREAD with a friend.

Listen to the music. And watch the sky for the stars that tell you where it all began.

On paying.

Hidden Narratives is behind a paywall because this is the work I teach to clients. It’s not a secret. It’s sacred —(iykyk). Subscriptions are how I fund the DIG.

What is the DIG? Great question, I’m glad you asked. Or maybe that’s a conversation for another time.

I’m such a tease.

Anyhow… subscriptions are how I fund the farm, Finn’s treats, the flowers and plants you see in this Appalachian Life, and the bird seed and honeybee hives that keep it all humming.

unholy HER is always free. this Appalachian Life is mostly free. You don’t need a paid subscription to be part of this community. But if you want to come deeper into the excavation, the door is open, pull out your scrapbook—I’ll brew us some tea.

Hidden Narratives is where we excavate the stories they tried to bury. 🪦

I’m glad you’re here to help unearth them and to see the patterns they reveal.

Wishing you a morning when the cattle are lowing in the field.

xo -

P.S. Substack lets you choose which sections of the THREAD land in your inbox. If you only want unholy HER, or only want Hidden Narratives, or need a break from the graveyard dirt—you can toggle each section on or off. 💛

Here’s how: Log into your Substack account, go to settings, find ‘the THREAD’ under your Subscriptions, and you’ll see a toggle next to each section. Green means yes, gray means no. Or just hit “unsubscribe” at the bottom of any email—it will let you uncheck the sections you don’t want without losing the ones you do.

Jennifer Crow writes with myasthenia gravis from Mocking Crow Farm in Appalachian Tennessee. She is the founder of Hidden Narratives, the curator of unholy HER, and the author of the forthcoming memoir EXILED. Someone’s going to film the documentary when these damn spells finally start working. Subscribe to the THREAD to get her essays first.

A gift to start.

Two playlists I made for this work:

Soft Matriarchy - Instrumental music by women composers. Songs that help me think while I write without pulling me out of my process. Music to sweeten the air.

Feminist Theology - The lyrical canon of my favorite women artists singing resistance, solidarity, and religious rebellions. (The Indigo Girls get top billing.)

I welcome requests to add your favorites to these playlists. Just message me below

Hidden Narratives: where we excavate the stories they tried to bury. 🪦