On this episode we talk to interpretive specialist, tour guide, and horror fanatic Sarah Stopper about the hidden histories of Washington Square Park and Philadelphia in general and the struggle to preserve history in a time when those in power would rather we forget.
Listen to “The White Meat Podcast” on Spreaker.Here’s the transcript:
David Dylan Thomas: Hey everybody. Welcome to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, the writer, director of White Meat which is a movie where underneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia, and this is true, there are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if one night they all come back from the dead as zombies but the only eat white people?
So that is the premise and I got a little bit of an update. We are going to begin production on White Meat: Appetizer, which is the short film that’s gonna help us launch the feature. May 11th of this year, May 11th, 2025. We begin shooting White Meat: Appetizer and we’re all.
Really excited about it. So more news coming on that soon. But today we’ve got a fantastic interview with Sarah Stopper, who is a historian and tour guide right here in Philadelphia, who’s gonna tell us more about Washington Square Park, which is of course, the very premise of our movie begins there with a history there.
So let’s just get right into it with our interview with Sarah Stopper.
[musical interlude]
David Dylan Thomas: Welcome everybody to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and today my very special guest is Sarah Stopper. Sarah, tell the good folks here what it is that you get up to.
Sarah Stopper: Hey, so I obviously am a huge horror fanatic, but beyond that, what I do professionally, I’m an interpretive specialist and tour guide.
So I dig into the hidden social history of the Greater Philadelphia area, which is my hometown, and it has such sites to show, show you.
David Dylan Thomas: So I’m very curious. So the, the first part of that, you said interpretive. What was the rest of that?
Sarah Stopper: An interpretive specialist.
David Dylan Thomas: Tell me what that means.
Sarah Stopper: So interpretive specialists are a very niche type of writer.
So the way that I like to describe it is, you know when you go to a museum and you look at the stuff on the walls. I’m one of the people that museums contract to write the stuff on the walls. That’s that is,
David Dylan Thomas: That is, yeah. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Sarah Stopper: Oh, it’s okay. So you do that a little bit of like social media copy, short articles, like I post a lot to Medium.
I have an Instagram that is entirely devoted to this topic. Like diving into human stories and unseen stuff. So yeah, you can think of me as a giant history nerd who just wants to make it a little bit more fun, more accessible, and you get to see yourself in it. If maybe you’re not George Washington or someone that looks exactly like him.
David Dylan Thomas: That’s that’s fantastic. And it’s funny, what you do is one of those things that in the back of my head, I realize someone must do, but it never occurs to me someone sits down and does it. So I’ll go to like an art exhibit and I’ll see this really like the modernists and all this like exposition about the modernists or whatever, and it’ll be like, oh, that’s interesting or whatever.
But it never occurs to me, oh no, someone had to write that down. Someone had to say, no, change this to this, or we don’t have time for that. And then someone had to take it like. Because I’m a writer, so I know about the editorial process, but it’s like, it never occurs to me that no, literally every word you see out in public, someone had to write it down.
Sarah Stopper: Exactly. I mean, like if you’re a writer too especially that is such a niche type of copy that you’re writing, AI hasn’t taken over it. So here we are, and I am one of many people in Philadelphia that does this kind of work.
David Dylan Thomas: So you might know the answer to this then. Who writes all those little placards that stand in front of historic sites in Philadelphia? Like you’ll go to the London Coffee House and there’s a little plaque that says, Hey, they sold slaves here. Like, who writes that stuff? Do you know?
Sarah Stopper: I actually know exactly the sign that you’re talking about. ’cause I point that out on some of my individual tours.
David Dylan Thomas: Excellent.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah, so those kind of things, the placards that you see out in the city, out in the state, some of the federal ones, it depends on who was sponsoring that program. Some of them are gonna be volunteer written, and then other ones are people who work for either that site or they’re consultants who work for that program specifically.
So when you see those markers and you’re out in the streets, the colors of them and the physical format tell you which entity that came from. It’s a really interesting little world. Historic sites are crazy.
David Dylan Thomas: That is fa- I don’t wanna go too far off topic, but I kind of do. No, this is fascinating to me ’cause again, like things that I’m used to in other fields of work, it doesn’t occur to me also exist. So what, what I’m getting at is, it’s interesting you say it depends who sponsored them, which is another way of saying it depends who paid for it, right?
Sarah Stopper: Essentially, yeah, essentially. So there’s ones that are by the historical Commission, there’s ones that are very clearly marked NPS, national Park Service Register of Historic Places.
If you were looking to find out, you know, just the money flow and the workflow, if you see a piece that you’re interested in, that will tell you who was responsible for that. But when we’re talking about historic sites and how we talk about them. Who is writing it is also incredibly important to how that story is being told. We’re discuss that a little bit today.
David Dylan Thomas: I was gonna say that’s a great lead into what our kind of main topic is. So the way we, we met on blue Sky and we were, we’re talking about, I was saying something about the fundamental premise of white meat, which is, I. That there are enslaved people, bodies of enslaved people buried underneath Washington Square Park, and you kind of chimed with like, oh, you don’t know the half of it.
And you started, we started this conversation. So let’s talk about Washington Square Park. What’s the, what’s the hidden history of Washington Square Park?
Sarah Stopper: Oh man, I could talk about this for hours. So I, like I said, I’m a Philly native, and I didn’t even know this until I was first learning way back, like 10, 11, 12, I don’t even remember how many years ago.
My longest running tour that I, you know, was a contractor to and now an employee to is the original Ghost Tour of Philadelphia. Those things are kind of weird because they’re like half entertainment, half education. The way that you tell them is very important because you’re constantly walking a fine line of is this person entertained, but also am I respectfully telling you what happened at this site? It’s a little challenging. Interpretively.
Washington Square, I don’t live very far from it. I am there at least four times a week and I really wish more people knew the depth of that place and how deep it really goes. There’s so many people there, and almost all of those stories are completely unknown.
They’re nameless people. Thousands in that park.
David Dylan Thomas: So what type let, let’s back up a bit. What type, my understanding, you can tell me if this is kind of where the story begins. My understanding is that for some time Washington Square Park, among other things, was a, a potter’s field. Is that the idea?
Sarah Stopper: That’s one of the things that it was, yeah. So. The records in the city archives about that park are very, very spotty.
There are so many layers, literal layers of burial ground in that park that are for different reasons, that are different things happening contextually at the time in the greater Philly area, and are so painted in social structure.
So it had been a potters field where honestly people got segregated out of other churchyards and burial grounds in the Philadelphia region. They’re really pretty like old congregation churchyards. They’re nice, don’t get me wrong. They’re very interesting, but they were very exclusive, right?
So if you were an impoverished person, which was a large portion of Philly’s population across really all barriers at that point. If you were not part of a church, if you were excommunicated from a church or if you were someone who was previously enslaved, you may find yourself segregated out of other places and end up in these mass pits at places like Washington Square.
That’s kind of where it starts. And then the burials kind of ramped up depending on what was happening in the area. Right. So you’ve got the Revolutionary War, the conservative estimate of how many people attached to that war in this area in that park is upwards of 2000 people straight through the middle of the park.
David Dylan Thomas: Wow.
Sarah Stopper: There’s the Walnut Street Prison, which is now, you know, the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Building. If you go to Independence Hall, it’s that building across the street with the bars and the windows.
David Dylan Thomas: Really?
Sarah Stopper: That’s the first story of prison reform in the United States.
David Dylan Thomas: Really?
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. That’s why Eastern State Penitentiary even exists. That place is horrendous. So when people would die in there. They would have the bodies brought across the street to Washington Square, and that’s where they would be buried. Completely unidentified, right? And then through times of disease like smallpox, yellow fever, it just goes on and on. There’s so many people, and apart from a couple of placards in the tomb of the unknown, you’d never even know this if somebody didn’t point it out to you.
David Dylan Thomas: So, so, and I’ve, I’ve talked I, I talked to a wonderful Courtney from Bay Area talking about like all the bodies buried under San Francisco, which is a lot, like, this seems to be a common theme that Americans, other cultures, maybe this too, but Americans at least I know really love to segregate even in death, right?
It’s sort of like. Like, you know, we’ve been segregating your whole life. Why stop now? So there, there seems to be a common theme around who gets buried in these. And let’s, let’s be clear, like when we say Potter’s Field, when we say we’re talking about mass graves, right? We’re talking about the same thing we’d be talking about if we were talking about some kind of atrocity, let’s, I mean concentration camps, like all of these things that we associate with atrocity.
That’s physically speaking, we’re talking about the exact same structure, right?
Sarah Stopper: Yes, we are. That’s physically exactly what it is. These are burial trenches that reflect what was going on at that time. And one of the things that is kind of unsettling about Washington Square as a physical space, right?
Philadelphia has a not great history, especially with Black burial grounds in particular. Not receiving signage. Being built over, things like that. So when you understand that, like, let me give you an example. Bethel AME, which is like the home of the abolitionist movement in what was then the capital, right?
We’re talking about Absalom Jones and all of that, like that whole beginning of that urban abolitionist movement in Philly, Bethel, AME, their burial ground was paved over and is underneath rec center right now. Not far from Washington Square, and then there’s other burial grants that belong to historically black churches in West Philadelphia.
You wouldn’t know that that’s what they were. Do you start to see the pattern appear?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is like a, a, a, a a fetish with American government, right? Like I, I recently learned about all of the different Black cities and towns, like we talk about Black Wall Street, and, but like, there was, and Rosewood, there were so many of them, and so many of them were literally flooded, right?
Like, this apparently is another trend where it’s like, either we’re gonna physically bury you under, like dirt or, or bury your, your burial grounds, or we’ll just flood you. Like there’s literally like. Maybe 40? It’s ridiculous. Of these lakes you can find around America where if you go under the lake far enough, you’re gonna see a town.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. Like Lake Superior. And that’s why it is the way that it is. Absolutely. Absolutely. It is.
David Dylan Thomas: So, so why Washington Square? Like what is it about that location that made it the home of so many different kinds of mass burials?
Sarah Stopper: So Washington Square is such an interesting location, right? It was used as a green space. It’s one of the five original spaces drawn into the William Penn Planning Commission grid of Philadelphia. All five of these green spaces still exist. Rittenhouse Square is another one where Philly City Hall is, that got totally paved over when they took the hall that’s there, Franklin Square, that area with the fountain on the parkway that’s by the art museum. Logan Circle with that very fancy one. You only see it on like the news? Yeah. That was another one.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm.
Sarah Stopper: It’s just. It was kind of centrally located right off the port. It made for an interesting green space. But then as all these things started to happen, and as the neighborhoods took shape, like what we now call Washington Square West, which is where the park is
It’s Washington Square, so it’s the center of East and west, essentially. Right underneath that was a neighborhood called Seventh Ward. That is a historically Black neighborhood. So it’s also all these different, you know, mixes of people and situations. It’s kind of the center point of all these stories that met geographically, if that makes any sense.
And then the social paint that just went over them ended up affecting the people that were there ultimately.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, ’cause there’s a, there’s a history of gentrification there too. I remember being on a tour where it was sort of like, yeah, this used to be, you know, lower income housing. This used to be where people who didn’t make as much money lived and now, like those are million dollar condos.
Those are like Society Hill. Like, that’s, that’s all. And when I first, I, I first got to Philly in 2004. And when I first got here, I just sort of, when you get to a city, you sort of take everything for granted. You don’t assume there’s a history, but I assume that, oh, this is the rich part of town and it was really interesting to learn.
Not always.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. I mean, what’s really funny is I actually just posted about that this morning on my Insta, the area where now like there’s the store called River Warts Produce, which is like the [unintelligible] of Philadelphia. It’s in an area of old city that was gentrified and is further gentrifying to be like a very high income area.
Ironically is where all the port workers used to live right off the port. It wasn’t always that way.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm.
Sarah Stopper: It’s changes through time with any major urban area. We still see it all the time in Philly. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah. The, the process is going on. I remember another shocking fact I learned is that the most recent redlining court case took place, I think less than 10 years ago, and it was in West Philly.
Sarah Stopper: Yep. I could believe that. Either west or northeast. That doesn’t shock me in the least. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: So another historical piece of Washington Square Park I’d like it to get into, get into is the term Congo Park. Can you tell us a little bit about the, the kind of like how Washington Square Park for a time was a gathering place for free Black and enslaved Black people.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. So this story has a joyous line for some people, depending on, you know, the context of what’s happening and then change over time. And events occurred and it actually started to spiral into honestly medical apartheid. So if you’re willing to go there.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah.
Sarah Stopper: So. One of the things that used to happen at Washington Square, because it was, you know, right off the Seventh Ward, people who were taught differently are often very shocked to find out that there were enslaved people in Philadelphia, the slave trade at that time, and the sale of human beings chattel slavery as it was made its way up the Delaware River, the Tea House on the Delaware, basically like right on where like front is really is not that far from Washington Square either. So you had all of these people who were either freed, who had bought, or at some way gotten their freedom or were who were actively enslaved, would have meeting places in and around what is now Washington Square just to find community and to find each other. So going all the way back, I think this was in the Annals of Philadelphia. It was either 1845 or 1850. It’s in there someplace. If you really go back to the primary research, there’s firsthand accounts and things like that of people who were from all over the African dysphoria, like diaspora, speaking in different languages, sharing different food, that there was music, that there was dancing.
This was a really, really trying dark time for people and really there’s a sense of like honestly reaching out into that darkness just to find another human being.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Stopper: You know? So that’s kind of where that started. But then things kind of took a little bit more of a turn from my understanding of this and all the things I’ve ever read or talked about with historians in the area.
Washington Square because of the nature of the pits, because of the open nature of all of that, had an issue with grave robbing and it wasn’t just the things people were wearing, it wasn’t just things that people be buried with. It also included human body parts and cadavers. There was an open trade for that.
And historically speaking, and still in present time, you know, you can read amazing books like Medical Apartheid that get really into this. Lower income or enslaved African-Americans have always been more victimized by the medical system in the United States than they’re white counterparts, right?
Like this is a documented fact. It still continues. Today, Philadelphia is known as the birthplace of American medicine. Our first hospital of the US is a 15 minute walk from the middle of Washington Square. So one of the reasons that people continued to kind of go and congregate at Washington Square from that community was to protect people that had died and buried there from human trafficking, graverobbery. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: And this is, this is still, you know, going on in recent memory. If I recall, the Penn had the bodies of some of the MOVE victims, if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?
Sarah Stopper: That is true. I was just reading recently that there’s only been a handful of those, you know, remains too, that have been returned.
They are still court battling that out right now.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And, and, and for those of you who don’t know, the MOVE bombing was a horrible incident where the police effectively dropped a bomb on a group of Black activists. There’s a fantastic podcast about this called the Africa versus the Americans versus Africa versus the America Am Versus America that, that you should check out.
But yeah, so this is the more things change, right? So, so another piece of this though, well look. So one thing we’ve been kind of doing repeatedly here is referring to it as Washington Square Park, which it is now. But it didn’t really get that name until much later. Right? Like that’s a fairly recent development.
Sarah Stopper: Eighteen hundreds. Yeah. When it became a, a leisure set up of as opposed to what it was before. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: So what did they, what, what kind of names did it have before it became Washington Square Park?
Sarah Stopper: Off of the top of my head, I’m gonna be very honest. Sure. I don’t recall all of ’em. And it also depended on who you asked,
David Dylan Thomas: Right, right, right, right.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. So I don’t have a clear answer for that right now, unfortunately. I can get back to you on it though.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, no, that’s fine. But that’s interesting too because like before you were talking about Washington Square West. So I used to live in, I used to live, I used to live in the Gayborhood Right? Mm-hmm.
And if you ask someone who lives in the Gayborhood where you live, they say the Gayborhood. If you ask a real estate developer, they’d call it Washington Scar West. Like, so it’s funny how, like the, the theme we were talking before about like who names a thing, who writes a thing, is really important to what you learn about that thing.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah, it sure is. I mean, even the preservation of spaces for different reasons. Talking about Washington Square and, you know, the grave robbery that happened there and things like that. We were talking a little bit earlier about, you know, Absolom Jones, Bethel, a MA, and all of that, and what happened to their church yard, right?
David Dylan Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Stopper: So that same group of people, Richard Allen, Mr. Jones, all of that. When this was still being used as a burial ground and there were still people from the community being buried there. They petitioned the city to get protection for Washington Square as a whole, as a burial ground to cover everyone in there because of the things that were happening.
Yeah, basically body snatching. It was called resurrection at the time.
David Dylan Thomas: Really?
Sarah Stopper: Yes. So the wild part about that is maybe not so wild because you know, government in the 17 hundreds. They were being petitioned by two Black men who were very prominent in the city of Philadelphia. Their petition was wholeheartedly denied.
David Dylan Thomas: Wow.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. So while, while we’re on the topic of those folks, part of the, backstory to White Meat involves the yellow fever epidemic. And that as I read up on it, that is a wild story. I, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like how Black people tried to help and kind of how that turned on them and kind of just I forget what his name was, but the one dude who basically thought they couldn’t get sick, like that whole.
It’s just like, I, I always say if I ever get asked to do an episode of Drunk History, I wanna do it about that story ’cause it’s so wild.
Sarah Stopper: They were speaking my language on this one because the one thing that I love more than like haunted or spooky history is actually medical history. Special interest for me and yellow fever is a wild story that actually still has ripples to how urban areas handle pandemics today. Like we talked about it a lot at the beginning of Covid, believe it or not.
So here’s the quick version of that. For the people who don’t necessarily know when they’re talking about yellow fever, 1793 to 1795 in Philadelphia, this physically decimated the city’s population, right?
Especially people who were coming from Europe or who had recently been immigrated. Dr. Benjamin Rush is the guy you were talking about who is credited to be the father of American Psychiatry. He is buried here in Philly. I was actually born in the neighborhood he was from, which is not even a half an hour from where I’m sitting.
Right. Benjamin Rush upon noticing that you know, midwives, care providers. Casual doctors as they were called amongst other things, people who were black healthcare providers and black volunteers. The way that he looked at this through the lens that he looked at the world as an individual, which was not fabulous by any stretch.
He surmised looking at this like, oh, well, you know, the black caretakers and the peoples that, that are still here and working. The labor people that weren’t able to leave the city like, you know, the one percenters were. They’re not getting sick and dying at the same rate. So it, they must have immunity.
There must be something to it, even though they didn’t even know what immunity was yet. ’cause germ theory wasn’t a thing. At the time, the prevailing idea of this was like, oh, this disease, this bilest thing, it’s, it’s from miasma or bad spirits or bad humors or energy? No, it, it was actually malaria that comes from mosquitoes.
When you put that together with 2025 basic medical eyes, the mosquitoes were coming off of the Delaware River ’cause it’s a port city, right. A lot of the cargo, like rum, sugarcane, human beings, because there’s human trafficking involved here coming out of the West Indies in the Caribbean is bringing mosquitoes that have something that happens more often in that climate.
Right. When you look at it now, that seems really common sense, but Dr. Rush and many of his peers thought that this disease had racial differences. It didn’t. When you think about, you know, the movement of the slave markets on the east coast, right? A lot of people are coming from the coast of Africa making that very dangerous forced journey across the Atlantic into the Caribbean. Some people are there and some people continue on to what is now the colonies. Right? They’ve been exposed to malaria because they were on those ships and passed through. It wasn’t because of bad humors or bad energy. That’s not real, but it was kind of like, when you look at it now, it really shows you the social paintbrush that this was painted in.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Sarah Stopper: And yellow fever unfortunately killed so many people so quickly. A lot of those bodies in the square are from that pandemic specific.
David Dylan Thomas: Hmm.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: And, and my understanding is that Absalom and, and others in an attempt to improve relations between Black people and white people in the area volunteer to help the remaining white survivors and, did not in fact have this magical immunity that Rush thought they did. And so a lot of them died and ended up in Washington Square Park. Is that correct?
Sarah Stopper: That is true. So there was a thing that happened during yellow fever, and when I talk about this on various tours that I give that include this story, whether it’s, you know, medical history or otherwise, the idea of carts that came around, like bring out your dead style?
That happened in Philadelphia during this pandemic. And a lot of the people who were honestly stuck working those carts were Black men.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm.
Sarah Stopper: So they were in ground zero of this, literally picking up the bodies. And if you’re in the areas where those mosquitoes are, what’s gonna happen to you? They were affected.
There were a lot of, you know, Black women who learned mid midwifery, right? Who learned herbal healing and things like that. They also got exposed and when it came to writing about what these, you know, very upper society, white male doctors at the time were writing about, you notice that both of those stories are completely left outta that narrative.
Yeah, that’s the truth. That’s how we got here with a lot of the people who were at Washington Square. They were people who ran into that pandemic or were forced into the work who got completely forgotten even in death.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And, and, and slander too, right? There was some white dude in the suburbs, ’cause a lot of people, just the people who could noted out of Philly and moved to what, but at the time was the suburbs now is like, you know, more Philly. But and when they came back, I remember there’s this one dude who basically wrote this hi history of the, of the yellow fever. That was like, oh yeah, the Black people. They were just stealing stuff. And, and then, and then ab I think, I think it was Absalom and, and some other, another dude sort of like wrote, oh no, here’s what really happened.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. One of the authors of that document was also Richard Allen, who was, Richard Allen actually brought up the point where when it was discussed, the grave robbing specifically and the body snatching specifically, he made it a point to say, well, actually, why don’t you look at the medical school before you look at me?
Essentially. And he was correct in that. He absolutely was. Doctors like Will Shippen, Philip Physic, Benjamin Rush yet again? They were buying human beings in that park.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm.
Sarah Stopper: For use in learning and teaching anatomy, things like that. They’re unclaimed unknown bodies for the most part. And even if they had community, like the people who were formerly enslaved, that people were still keeping an eye on socially at that time to these guys, they took what they took.
Unfortunately.
David Dylan Thomas: yeah, and it’s, I think the reason Rush is such a fascinating character to me in all of this is he seemed to be trying to do the right thing. Right. This is one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Right. This is sort of, sort of one of like the, the core. And he, in his, in his, in his head, in his addled mind, to be generous, in his addled mind.
He’s like, oh yeah, this, it’s so wonderful that these black, ’cause my understanding was he was actually an abolitionist.
Sarah Stopper: This is the crazy thing about Benjamin Rush. Benjamin Rush is a complicated human. Yeah. In every way. So Benjamin Rush was also this guy. He was painted in shades of racism because that was the reality in which he was raised.
That is his time and also his economic and political power.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm. Like
Sarah Stopper: I, I’m sorry, I gotta call a dog a dog.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, please, please
Sarah Stopper: Like he’s also a sexist too. He’s really a, mm. For that. And then he has these other moments where he’s like, you know what guys? I don’t think slavery is great. I just don’t think you should do that.
Also, grave robbing is probably not fabulous, but he still partake in it secondhand, and he was one of the first people that during that prison reform rush from Walnut Street Jail to what later became Eastern State Penitentiary happened to notice that why are there so many people that don’t look like me, that don’t have as much money as me here?
It’s like he used to get so close to the point and just miss it completely.
David Dylan Thomas: And and it’s worth noting here that the myth of black and vulnerability of Black bodies invulnerability to pain, to disease, to all these things persist to this day and endangers Black women’s lives in particular to this day, like the stat still stands that Black women die in childbirth at a much greater rate than white women even if you control for income level. But this is, it probably didn’t start here, but this is one of the sort of, I think, foundational moments of that myth in action was, oh yeah, Black people, they can’t get yellow fever. Let ’em get as close to the bodies as you want.
Sarah Stopper: Exactly. I mean, you think about this contextually Philadelphia was the birthplace of American medicine. This is where the books were being written. This is where people were coming to learn and still to this day, still to this day, it is double digits the percentage of American physicians that train in this city, at some point in their career.
David Dylan Thomas: Really?
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. I, my mind was blown when I heard that. That’s wild. But like if you really like roll it back and you look at the things that we’ve been teaching for centuries. The racism was baked right in, right in. And I think that when you think about the Square, especially if you sit with this in your head for a minute and you’re in that space and you’re sitting there, I always tell people whenever I go on tours, this is going to tendril into the back of your mind and it’s going to go home with you.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Sarah Stopper: Because all of these thousands of people that are completely unknown, there’s a couple pieces of signage that say that they’re there. They’re actually with you every moment of your life until you join them in death. Every one of us, without any exception, that is an intense thought on a street corner on like a random Saturday night.
But it is true. And it’s important.
David Dylan Thomas: I think that, so I think this is a really important thing, and this is some of, some of what I’m trying to accomplish with the movie is to make the invisible visible, right? It’s like, yes, these bodies are deep, from my understanding, not even all that deep. And. I am making you look at them.
I’m saying, no, you’re, you’re not gonna just walk over them. You’re not, you have to look at them and, and in some cases you have to run from them ’cause they’re trying to eat you. Right. But the, but the, but the, but the basic idea is, hey, this can’t stay buried forever. And I. When I visit countries like Germany and I go to Berlin and I see the stumbling stones and I see the sort of like window into the library where like all these books were burned or where I see chunks of the wall, right?
I see a city that wants to remember that forces you to remember that turns memory into art. That, that that is very conscious of, and in conversation with its past. Whereas in America, it’s very much oh, the guests are coming over. Hide all the dirt. Right. We gotta make this place look nice.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah, for sure. Especially in areas that are heavily federally funded. Like Sixth and Walnut. Yeah, it the United States ’cause we do that thing, that exceptionalism thing, right? Or we teach you about the first Thanksgiving. One of the reasons why I switched careers from literally psychiatry to history education was because the way that we discuss and teach history, even in the spaces where things happen, it’s not just whitewashed, it is so sanitized and distant and almost boring on purpose, that you don’t ask any questions. And I hate that. That’s ridiculous. To me, we’re still seeing the shadows of these things in 2025. Like talk about it, you know, like it’s important. But at the same time, like one of the reasons why when I came across your movie when I was scrolling through Blue Sky, one of the reasons I was like, oh my God, I’m immediately on board with this is because.
That is the point, isn’t it? Especially with certain genres. Like one of the reasons I’m a huge horror fan is because it forces you to sit with the uncomfortable and ask questions about it. And when I’m like looking through the synopsis of the project, I’m like, not only do I really want to see more attention called to this giant city park with 1,000,000,001 totally forgotten and unfair stories in it, but it is forcing people to confront like, hey.
This happened and it happened in the middle of a giant city that you all have at least seen on the news. Let’s go there and really start asking questions about what just happened. I love that. I think that’s a fantastic way of approaching that conversation.
David Dylan Thomas: And I like kind of what you said indirectly about curiosity, right?
This the not ask questions thing, and I think that’s a fundamental thing in human life right now is the difference between people who ask questions and people who don’t. And in a society that encourages you to try to be one of the people who don’t ask questions. I mean, I I think a lot about the Democratic Republic of Congo is the site of the most violent, deadly conflict since World War II, and most people don’t know it.
Between the late nineties and the early two thousands, about seven million people died in that conflict. And that’s a staggering number. But you, I will guarantee you, if I just walk outside and just start walking and everyone I meet, I ask them, I’m gonna be walking for a long time before I find somebody who knows what I’m talking about.
Right? And that’s 7 million people, right? You can make 7 million people disappear with very little effort. So, so these, these, these stories. So, so, but, but, but like, and the only reason I found out about it, you know, as a Black man is getting curious, right? Is like saying, I’m not gonna settle for what I am being offered from the AP or Twitter or whatever.
I I’m going to ask some questions like, what is the deadliest conflict since, right. And then, and, and the funny thing is, and this is what I think is interesting, and it’s kind of the opportunity here for, for storytellers like yourself and like me, is it’s actually not that hard. Once you start asking the question 10 minutes of Googling, you find out, oh yeah, 7 million people died in the Congo. Half a million died in Ethiopia in 2020 to 2022. Native Americans are killed at much higher rates than black people by cops. Like 10 minutes of Googling. Right. This is not buried in some vault somewhere. So I think on the one hand, we’ve never had the history hidden from us more than now, and it’s only gonna get worse as the government comes after DEI. But at the same time, because of the internet, frankly, which is the cause of, and solution to all life’s problems, it’s actually really easy to find the truth still. Right? It’s just, but you have to want it. You gotta want it.
Sarah Stopper: Yeah. I agree. I agree. I think that’s especially scary not only because you know, this current administration is wiping DEI, which, that’s just ridiculous to me in every single way. But now they’re actively going after not just the Department of Education, but cutting funding for museums and libraries. Like there is an executive order that has the museum worker industry absolutely panicking right now.
Because that is threatening the livelihood of thousands of thousands of people and the stories of the people that are dead that still deserve to be discussed. So those kind of things mean that, you know, places that do touch upon these things, like the Philadelphia Medical History Project, which is something that’s being pulled together by independent tour guides in Philadelphia that gets all into a lot of the things we touched on today. It’s almost like almost there was a concerted effort to sweep that under the rug for company. Just a little bit more like, what are we doing right now? Honestly? Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: I, I get really concerned about, among other things, the the upcoming sesquetennial, what’s the word?
Sarah Stopper: Yeah, the 250.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, the 250, yeah. And that it’s gonna happen while Trump’s in office, which means it’s gonna be whitewashed to the power of whitewashed. But in Philly, I’m really curious, like, to your point, like how much history can we put forward during that time? So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll tell you what, what, what, what I’m thinking of in particular.
So Penn recently created a replica of a 1700’s, 1800’s. Coffee house. And it, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of sketchy, but the phrasing is like in the style of the London Coffee House. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, let me see. Is there any reference to that they sold slaves there. So let’s start there.
Tell me about the London Coffee House.
Sarah Stopper: So the London Coffee House. One thing that I wanna make very, very clear is when it comes to colonialist era revolution and pre-revolution colonies, right? Like developed areas, I don’t even really know how to say this appropriately right now, because they could go in 15,000 directions and you know, Lenapehoking all day, but Philadelphia as it’s an up and coming right?
Coffee houses, taverns. There’s a reference in the musical Hamilton that talks about the room where it happens. Those are the places where it happens. Where you’re talking openly about underhanded banking deals, where you’re talking about, you know labor violations before labor violations were a thing, and straight up human trafficking.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Stopper: The London Coffee House is where people very openly discussed and arranged for the purchase of enslaved human beings. Right there on the Delaware River. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: So this would be like walking into a Starbucks and people are there like I, I’ll give you this much. And they’re like, negotiating.
And the, there’s people right there and they’re like inspecting them and yeah.
Sarah Stopper: You’re openly having a discussion about buying another human being for your unpaid labor purchases. While you have a beverage sometimes, or sometimes you just use it as a meeting point.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm.
Sarah Stopper: That’s a thousand percent what it is.
You’re at a community place talking about buying human beings.
David Dylan Thomas: So the idea that there’s gonna be a replica of this, and again, I can’t confirm how intentionally it’s meant to be this particular one, right? But the idea that you’re gonna have a replica of that and have zero mention of, oh, and by the way, they used to sell people here.
Right? And it’s being done specifically for this 250. So that’s why it got me thinking about, oh my God, right? The 250. I will be if, if, if there’s gonna be any discussion of all of the injustice that was happening at the time. And not as a side issue, but as like integral to the planning of the revolution and why it was happening and all, you know, that it’s all a big giant entangled mess.
It’s gonna have to come from us. Like it’s really interesting. Tell me more about this like tour, tour guides getting together kind of thing ’cause that to me sounds like the future, frankly.
Sarah Stopper: All right. So the Philadelphia tourism industry is powered by yes, tour companies, that have scripts that have specific niches, right?
Like, you can go on a food tour, you can go on an art tour of a specific neighborhood, a ghost tour. Some of us work independently and write itineraries, custom fit for groups, corporate groups, school groups, et cetera. It’s a wild world out here. Which is really funny because unless you’re used to seeing it, you’re just like, oh, well, these people, they just pop out of the woodwork every spring and then they go away for the winter, and then there’s a billion tour guides.
It’s a whole industry and no one ever thinks about it if you’re living in the city, but it’s huge, right? There are individuals like myself that pick your niche and start asking questions that start going to planning meetings for big things like the 250 and openly ask like. Hey, are we gonna tell this story?
Is anyone on this storyline at all? And then you have, you know, groups of tour guides that get together who all have like, you know, their niche or their special interests and basically say, why don’t we get together and write a challenging narrative surrounding this topic. One of my favorite groups in this general area, and I think I emailed you their direct contact when we were first talking about this, was a is a group that does, this is primary tour writers.
There’s researchers, historians. It’s a co, basically like a community of people who work in, you know, museum studies, archives, libraries, tourism, and their niche just as an example is basically Philadelphia’s version of Black Wall Street in the 1830s. That’s the kind of projects that I hope these massive historical projects are consulting with to give more than one view.
I’m kind of watching the 250 right now, just personally and professionally because I want to see what we do with that, given the current climate. That’s kind of what we mean though, when we say like, you know, there’s tour guides that are working together and independently to discuss different tracks.
I wanna see how they get folded in. Yeah, I really do. I’m very curious to see where that goes.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. We’re gonna have to wrap up soon, but before we do, I want to tap into the horror of it all. What are, what got you into horror and like, what are some of your favorite horror films?
Sarah Stopper: Oh, man. We could talk for another hour about this.
I love it. I loved horror since I was three, four years old.
David Dylan Thomas: What horror are you watching at three?
Sarah Stopper: Listen, universal Studios, monsters, and also the commentary that comes with them. So yeah, no, my dad got me started on those. I had them on VHS tapes. I grew up, it was the nineties, the early nineties, and Universal monsters were having a moment, like you could get the Burger King toys and everything fell in love with it.
I owned them all. Like the gillman that squirts when you squeeze his chest and the woman pull his arms and he howls. Like I had all those. But then my professional interest before I worked in history was actually psychology. Particularly social psychology. And I was always a little goth weirdo. Like I just, I like that side of things.
I like asking questions about it, like, what does it all mean? You know? And then I started to see parallels in horror movies that are actually saying something. They’re all saying something. I mean, not all of ’em. I don’t think Terrifier is that deep personally, but like most of them are, you know, like Final Destination is about anxiety, it’s about fear.
You know, everything Jordan Peele has ever put out as a social commentary. Everything Rod Serling ever put out with the Twilight Zone is social commentary and I. I like people, I want to hear everyone’s stories. It’s what really fuels me. I wanna understand, right? So if I can understand it through art where the aesthetic also appeals to me, I’m going to Monster Mania Con, like down straight.
I am a horror girly because it just, it it’s favorite ones my all time favorite movie and I feel like. Such a poser when I say this now is the 1922 Murnau Nosferatu.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah Stopper: Beautiful. I love that. Hilarious too. If you understand German humor, there’s a lot happening in this.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, really? Okay. Okay.
Sarah Stopper: Oh my gosh. But other ones that I really, really love. The OG Night of the Living Bed. Gorgeous. Best zombie movie ever made. So many different ways. It can be interpreted in 15,000 different ways. The shots are fantastic. It did the most with very little. Gorgeous movie. Other ones that I really like recently, there’s one that I really liked.
It’s in the last couple years. It’s called Exhuma. I love Asian folk horror too. I just love the social context that that comes into and like all of the different belief systems that get pulled into it. Exhuma is a long watch and you gotta really lock in when you watch this, but it’s like half folk horror, half Samurai story.
David Dylan Thomas: Interesting.
Sarah Stopper: Which was a neat blend. And Late Night with the Devil was one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last five years.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Sarah Stopper: Yes, yes. You give me something cheesy and gritty and seventies that’s gonna make you ask a lot. I’m in totally.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. No, that’s fantastic. Sarah, it’s been lovely having you on.
I’m sure we will do it again. Sometime. Where can folks find your stuff?
Sarah Stopper: So if you wanna know more about like, just weird little tidbits, literally walking down the street around here and you know, you wanna hear it from somebody who’s not gonna be like in a very fud duddy. And I’m gonna, most [indecipherable] language possible.
It’s thathistoryjawn, on Instagram. You can find me there.
David Dylan Thomas: Awesome. Well thank you very much for being on the show. For the White Meat Podcast this is David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you all next time.
Sarah Stopper: For sure. Thanks, David.
