When Sharon Ewell Foster first published her novel Passing by Samaria in the late 1990s, it was a time of relative racial peace throughout the United States.
She believed it was an ideal time to encourage a frank and honest conversation about race relations and racial justice. Her novel tells the story of a young woman who moves to Chicago as part of the Great Migration and gets swept into race riots that became known as the Red Summer. But events in the last few months moved Foster to republish her novel and bring the story back into the public conversation.
Host Frank Stasio talks to Foster about her work in light of indictment decisions in the past few weeks that have sparked protests around the country.
