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.