Episode Details

In 2016, Lashrecse Aird made history as the youngest woman ever elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. She says her unique perspective - shaped by a childhood of adversity and hardship - allows her to better serve the full range of experiences within her constituency. And: Ebony Guy was inspired to get involved in activism from a young age by her grandmother, a beloved civil rights leader in Halifax County, Virginia. Now a board member at Virginia Organizing - her activist work has centered on voter education and political campaigns. Plus: From 1997-2001, Paul Clinton Harris represented Albemarle County in the Virginia House of Delegates. A descendant of enslaved people at Monticello, he describes his unlikely path to political office - serving in the very seat that Thomas Jefferson once held many years ago. Later in the show: A.E. Dick Howard directed the commission that rewrote Virginia’s constitution, which was eventually enacted in 1971. It was a bipartisan effort intended to heal the wounds of the state’s racist past. 50 years later, he reflects on whether the new constitution went far enough.