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point.com. Great!

1:02

The Apollo. Grew.

1:13

Com and pull a so

1:15

many time and this tonight

1:18

is brush. I've

1:20

thought about when I was come in and banks

1:22

they. Have. Been on this stage

1:24

would. Godfather. So James

1:26

Brown and was like a frog. And

1:30

Michael Jackson and list goes on.

1:32

But. Tonight you going to have something

1:35

that especially the Apollo. Because.

1:37

You going to have to icons that

1:39

are going to talk about their work

1:41

and talk about what they do in

1:44

this country that is so needed. At

1:46

this time it couldn't be a better

1:48

night at the Apollo. This is not

1:51

just a great show to night. This.

1:53

Is history so.

2:01

So it is my honor and my

2:03

pleasure that I can't tonight

2:05

bring you to Godfather's soul, but I

2:10

bring you to Godmother of Woke. Where

2:17

you mad out? I

2:24

got that one. Oharn

2:37

Sheaesh! Woah!

2:53

How are you doing? I

3:01

am so nervous. Fantastic,

3:06

fantastic. Thank you

3:08

all so much for being here. It is such

3:10

an honor to be here at the Apollo and

3:13

for this event. Alright.

3:20

So it was early January. The

3:24

country was supposed to be preparing

3:26

for a peaceful transfer of power

3:28

in Washington. The elections had happened

3:30

in November and so in January

3:32

everybody was due to be sworn

3:34

in. The new leadership should be

3:36

taking over. But that early January there

3:38

was a problem. And

3:40

there had been rumbling about it.

3:42

People had been a little bit worried about it. But as

3:45

we got closer and closer to the

3:47

day on which the power was supposed

3:50

to transfer, it really looked like the

3:52

peaceful transfer of power was not going

3:54

to happen. And

3:56

this was the front page Of

3:59

the New York Times. Senate

4:01

snarled. Senate. Is

4:04

unfilled, Seating. Is

4:06

Blocks. Southerners prevent

4:08

senate organization. Extended

4:11

debate begun. The.

4:14

Supposed to be the United States Senate

4:16

thing seated, but it's not happening. They

4:19

can't convene. This.

4:21

Happens in January. Nineteen Forty.

4:23

Seven. And.

4:26

The problem. They were having is that there

4:28

was a single senator. Who was a problem

4:31

and. The problem

4:33

they were having is that most members of

4:35

the United States Senate did not believe that

4:37

he should be seated among them. And.

4:40

If he was gonna be blocks

4:43

from taking his seat. Segregationist senators

4:45

were so outraged by that that

4:47

they decided they would block their

4:49

from being any senate adults. they

4:51

would filibuster the convening of the

4:54

senate's there would be no Us

4:56

Senate anymore. Not unless they're guy

4:58

got him. Know. The

5:01

man in question is somebody who

5:03

you are introduced to in the

5:05

first softer of joy and reads

5:07

new book which is called Medgar

5:09

and Marley. Medgar

5:16

Evers and the love story that

5:18

a weekend American Chapter One Joy

5:20

introduces all of us to this

5:22

particular Senator. Because among

5:24

other things he was Medgar and

5:26

Marley Evers Sen in Mississippi which

5:28

is knifes he was. They are

5:30

representative and Washington and I say

5:32

it is nuts. And I'm now going

5:35

to prove it because Was Joy has brought

5:37

you an introduction to that Senator and her.

5:39

But I have brought her tonight. The worst

5:41

present in the world was I'm going to

5:43

give her Now in front of all of

5:45

you I have brought tape of that Senator.

5:48

Appearing. On meet the press

5:50

in the middle of that scandal

5:52

and I will warn you that

5:54

it is terrible. It is. if

5:57

is inarguably obscene But

6:01

it should give you some sense as to

6:03

what the exact problem was with this senator.

6:05

Here it is. Senator,

6:09

are you or have you ever been a member

6:11

of the Ku Klux Klan? I have. Do

6:14

you think... I am a member of

6:16

Ku Klux Klan number 40 called Bilbo.

6:19

Bilbo Klan number 40, possible in the

6:21

city. Do you think you'd get any

6:23

Klan support now, sir? I

6:25

do. Because you never left

6:27

the Klan in effect. No man can leave

6:29

the Klan. He takes an oath to do

6:31

that. He wants to kook kruck always to

6:34

kook kruck. I think that on this, sir,

6:36

I would bet the reporters integrity

6:38

against yours. Because all of the reporters seem to

6:40

agree on that particular quote. Now, what did they

6:42

all do? I go out and manufacture it? Or

6:46

did you... What did you say that approximated that?

6:48

I said the best time to keep an a**

6:50

away from a white Democratic primary, Mr. V. It

6:52

was to see him the night before. Well,

6:55

what did you mean by that, didn't you? I know

6:57

that amount to lynch law, to intimidating him and keeping

6:59

away from the fall. Mr. Andrews and Senator and all

7:01

of the group in the balance of this program, we'll

7:05

have to ask you not to refer to any

7:07

race, group, or individual in any

7:09

derogatory term. Farewell.

7:13

Farewell? I

7:15

will note for the record that none of the

7:17

reporters were using this language. It was the sitting

7:19

senator. In fact, even after

7:21

being admonished like that, he went on to use the

7:23

n-word 12 more times in that

7:26

live broadcast on Meet the Press. So

7:30

there had been a Supreme Court ruling in 1944

7:32

that said you couldn't have whites only primaries.

7:36

But when that senator, Senator Theodore Bilbo, was

7:38

up for re-election in Mississippi two years later in

7:40

1946, he

7:43

openly and repeatedly told audiences in Mississippi

7:45

that they needed to do everything in

7:47

their power. Therefore, they needed to be

7:49

willing to shed blood to prevent

7:51

any black person from voting

7:54

in Mississippi's primary elections. And

7:57

this was not something he did once and then got

7:59

killed. confronted with it, this is not something

8:01

that he hid. He said this at every

8:03

campaign event. He was proud of it. He

8:06

was proud to admit it even on Meet

8:08

the Press. And

8:10

the only reason it ended up causing him any

8:12

trouble at all, the only reason it would

8:15

ultimately maybe cost him his

8:17

Senate seat, the only reason it would

8:19

stop the whole Senate from being convened

8:21

at all in January 1947, the whole

8:23

problem with it only

8:27

arose for him because of his constituents

8:29

who were black World War II

8:31

veterans, including Medgar

8:33

Evers. Black

8:35

US military

8:38

veterans returning

8:40

home at the end of

8:43

World War II, including 20-year-old

8:45

Medgar Evers and his older

8:47

brother Charles, they insisted

8:50

in that 1946 election that

8:52

they would not only register to vote, they would

8:54

vote. They had fought for

8:56

their country. They knew what

8:58

the Supreme Court had ruled. They knew the

9:00

Supreme Court said they could vote, even if

9:02

this guy, Bill Bowe, said that they couldn't.

9:06

And what resulted was incredibly violent.

9:10

Joy writes about it in her book. There

9:12

were about 1,500 black Mississippians

9:15

who braved beatings and armed mobs

9:18

to cast a vote in that 1946 Mississippi primary. But

9:22

there were more than half a million black

9:24

Mississippians who were eligible to cast a

9:26

vote. Only 1,500 were able to. And

9:30

even that number was such a scandal. It

9:32

was such a challenge. It ended up bringing

9:34

Washington to its knees because black

9:37

veterans petitioned the Senate about

9:40

the violence that confronted them when they tried to

9:42

vote. And they

9:44

petitioned the Senate specifically about

9:46

Senator Bilbo having called

9:49

for that violence, having demanded that

9:51

violence. And the Senate

9:54

held hearings about it in Washington, D.C. and

9:56

they held hearings about it in Mississippi. They

9:58

held field hearings. 96

10:01

Mississippi voters, black Mississippi voters,

10:04

did the bravest thing imaginable and testified

10:06

at those hearings about the intimidation and the

10:08

violence that was brought against them to stop

10:11

them from voting that year. And

10:17

the point of the petition was that the

10:20

Senate should void his election and not

10:22

seat him in the United States Senate

10:25

and they assigned segregationist senators to hear

10:27

the to be on the panel to

10:29

to hear that testimony to hold those

10:32

hearings and the segregationist senators decided while

10:34

they weren't gonna prevent Bilbo from being seated

10:36

on the basis of this but it

10:38

did get a

10:40

lot of national attention. It became a

10:42

national scandal and this

10:45

scandal was an embarrassment and Senator Bilbo

10:47

was an embarrassment to the United States Senate

10:49

and so ultimately they

10:51

decided well, we may not keep him out of

10:53

here for inciting murderous

10:55

mobs against black voters, but maybe instead

10:58

we'll get him for his wild

11:00

ass corruption. He

11:03

took bribes up to and including

11:06

as Joy describes in the book a

11:08

new Cadillac, a new swimming pool, the

11:11

excavation of a lake to create an

11:13

island for his home. They even built

11:16

him his own private road. It

11:18

was all bribery and the Senate at least decided they

11:21

would get him for that. But

11:23

the whole reason that it happened is because black veterans

11:26

held this man up for the country

11:28

to see who he was and

11:30

what the country saw was repulsive. And

11:37

in the end, January 1947, it's

11:39

the first midterm election after the end of

11:41

World War two. The

11:44

Senate is only able to convene. We only

11:46

have a Congress at all because

11:49

Bilbo agreed that he would not try

11:51

to be seated. He would instead go

11:53

home to Mississippi and get medical treatment

11:55

that he needed and They

11:58

would just handle the whole issue. That

12:00

his moral turpitude and is corruption.

12:02

When he came back to Washington.

12:06

whereupon. Senator Theodore Bilbo finally found

12:08

it in himself to do the honorable

12:10

thing. For once in his life is

12:12

finally had the decency. To go

12:14

home and ball. And

12:19

he never seen that Scissors United say

12:21

said as he never came out to

12:23

Washington. so they never had to vote

12:25

on whether or not to. Seize him And

12:28

that's how we got our senate. That. Homes.

12:33

Today it is. You

12:35

know, Theodore Bilbo? He

12:38

has been lost. To history. He.

12:41

Doesn't loom in our history anymore. Today who looms

12:43

in our history is Medgar Evers. Medgar

12:50

Evers strategic mind and his bravery.

12:54

Or. A story of heroism and

12:56

bravery that echoes through generations. We.

12:59

Remember him for his work as the

13:01

Field Secretary Mississippi Feel Secretary. The Naacp

13:03

remember him for his martyr him for

13:06

his assassination. We should also remember him

13:08

for what happens the moment he came

13:10

back from World War Two. He.

13:13

Was on a bus coming home to Mississippi. He

13:15

had been discharged. By the army he

13:17

was being sent home on the

13:19

bus home from his army service

13:22

in Europe fighting against the Nazis.

13:25

He. Was beaten. He.

13:27

Was set upon and beaten. He said he was beaten

13:29

to with an in of his life. He said it

13:31

was the worst beating of his life because he refused

13:34

to move to the back of that bus when he

13:36

was ordered to do so. He was

13:38

wearing his Us Army uniform at the time he

13:40

received that be. As

13:43

a new veteran registering to vote

13:46

trying to vote standing up against

13:48

Bilbao's terroristic claimed that senate seats.

13:50

Joy. Ride that! That very early

13:52

fight in Mississippi branded both Medgar

13:55

Evers and his older brother Charles

13:57

as young men to watch. As.

14:03

The year after that fight, Medgar ever

14:05

started college at Alcorn A&M.

14:07

He was soon to be followed by a

14:09

young woman, merely Louise

14:11

Beasley, who laid eyes on him

14:13

her first day at school, and

14:16

she never stopped looking at him again. They

14:21

fell for each other. The

14:23

first moment they saw each other. They

14:26

married within a year. They were fiercely

14:28

in love until he was assassinated in 1963. And

14:32

beyond. And that love

14:35

story, including the beyond, is

14:37

rendered here in this new book by my

14:39

beloved friend Joy. And

14:47

so I will just say this one last thing. Even

14:50

if history is not your thing, even

14:53

if it is not what moves you the way

14:55

it moves dorks like me and Joy, this

14:59

story of Medgar and Merle Evers is history,

15:01

but it is also a love story. And

15:04

it is also a parable and

15:06

a paragon of bravery that

15:08

can teach us how to live now. If you

15:10

can read the life stories of Americans who

15:14

live through what they lived through. If

15:16

you can read these life stories and not feel

15:18

a fire lit under you to do more

15:21

yourself, to give more, to risk more,

15:23

to live in such a way that history will put you

15:25

on the right side of it, then you need to get

15:27

yourself checked out because you are not okay. It

15:33

is one of the great joys in

15:35

my life that I work somewhere now where

15:37

I have colleagues who share my obsession

15:39

with forgotten monsters like Theodore

15:41

Bilbo, but who can

15:43

also earn the trust and the friendship

15:45

of heroes who are still among us

15:48

like Merle Evers Williams. To

15:50

persuade her to tell her her story.

15:54

Who also have the juice, the

15:56

sheer talent and energy and beautiful

15:58

mind and passionate fans. to

16:00

help put the Ever story, the Medgar

16:02

and Merle Ever's legacy and love story

16:04

back in the American pantheon of heroes

16:07

where it belongs. The only person who

16:09

could do that is here tonight. Please

16:11

welcome my friend, the great Joanne

16:13

Reeve. Today

16:39

and every day, Planned Parenthood is committed

16:42

to ensuring that everyone has the information

16:44

and resources they need to make their

16:46

own decisions about their bodies, including

16:48

abortion care. Lawmakers who oppose

16:50

abortion are attacking Planned Parenthood, which means

16:53

affordable, high-quality, basic health care for more

16:55

than 2 million people is at stake.

16:57

The right to control our bodies, and

16:59

get the health care we need, has

17:02

been stolen from us. And now, politicians

17:04

in nearly every state have introduced bills

17:06

that would block people from getting the

17:08

sexual and reproductive care they need. Planned

17:11

Parenthood believes everyone deserves health care. It's

17:13

a human right. That's why they fight

17:15

every day to push for common-sense policies

17:18

to protect our right to control our

17:20

own bodies, and against policies that interfere

17:22

with decisions between patients and their doctor.

17:25

Planned Parenthood needs your support now

17:27

more than ever. With supporters

17:29

like you, we can reclaim

17:31

our rights and protect and

17:33

expand access to abortion care.

17:36

Visit plannedparenthood.org/future. That's plannedparenthood.org/future. We're

17:46

at the Apollo Theater. I

17:49

mean, this is, it's like pinch

17:51

yourself. You have the legends that have been

17:53

on this stage. I know. Pinch yourself. I know.

17:56

It's, uh, yeah, I can't even think about it. In

17:58

fact, I'm wearing glasses that mean that... I can't

18:00

see any of you. Which is on purpose

18:02

because if I could I'd die. Alright,

18:06

so Joy, the book has

18:08

been out about eight weeks now. Number

18:10

one New York Times bestseller. And

18:18

I know from experience writing books that

18:21

you live in the research and you

18:23

live in the writing and it is

18:25

a very, it's a lonely thing and you create

18:27

this thing and you don't know how it's going to live in

18:29

the world. So I just wanted to ask you what you have

18:31

learned from having this book and

18:34

this story out in the world for eight

18:36

weeks now. People reading it, people responding to

18:38

it, people telling you what it means to them. You

18:41

know one of the things that I've definitely learned, I'm

18:43

just so grateful that people responded to this

18:45

story. You know

18:47

because at you like we're history geeks. I would

18:50

just read a straight up book about you know

18:52

the history of Mississippi with no love story in

18:54

it, right? I just I'm interested in history because

18:56

I think it is needed. We need to understand

18:59

where we've come from. But

19:01

I did the story as a love story for

19:03

a very particular reason and the reason is Merle

19:05

Evers-Williams because she gives you that you know when

19:07

you talk with her. But

19:09

what I've learned in just talking to

19:12

people now all across this country about this

19:14

book is how hungry

19:16

people actually are to hear

19:19

about love and to think about

19:21

the possibility that love can move

19:23

things and do things. People

19:26

care about history but

19:28

people also care about

19:31

and are pleasantly surprised that even in

19:33

some of the worst moments in our

19:35

history people did ordinary things.

19:37

And I think that is what's most powerful about

19:39

that story about this story is that these were

19:42

ordinary people who had an ordinary

19:44

wonderful life beyond the horror that

19:47

they were facing. I felt

19:49

like one of the things that you were

19:52

teaching in this book and it wasn't explicit

19:54

but it was laced through it was

19:57

that love is. part

20:00

of human resilience. That

20:03

there was this repeated merle goes

20:05

back and again over and over

20:07

again to this thing

20:10

that was said to her by Medgar, which

20:12

was painful, which is that I can't not

20:15

do this. I'm doing this for you. I'm

20:17

doing this for the kids. And

20:19

Mrs. Evers is confronting him by saying, you

20:21

need to stop doing this work because me and

20:24

the kids, we need you more. And he's saying I'm

20:26

doing this work out of my

20:28

love for you. And that is like

20:30

this helix of depth in terms of

20:33

how hard that is. But I think you're

20:35

trying to tell us that her love for

20:37

him was transformative both

20:39

through her grief and also making

20:42

her the leader that she became. It

20:44

was and the thing about it, this is I

20:47

think we like to think of the

20:50

civil rights movement and of this era, the 1940s, the World War II, post-World

20:54

War II era through rose colored glasses, the glasses that

20:56

you really can't see right through. And

21:00

we assume that everybody black was eager to be

21:03

in the civil rights movement. And then everybody that was a

21:05

World War II veteran was heroic and

21:07

good. None

21:09

of those things were true. There were people

21:12

who fought in World War II heroically in Europe and

21:14

came home and practiced fascism. And

21:17

there were lots and lots of black people who just wanted

21:20

to live their lives, go to work, send

21:23

their kids to school and just not

21:25

have to deal day in and day

21:27

out with racism and not have to

21:29

fight it. And also they were afraid.

21:32

And I think that it's something people don't like to admit. Everyone

21:35

likes to think if you went back in time and you were

21:37

in that era, you'd be on the front lines and you'd be

21:39

Medgar Evers. The vast majority of people wouldn't. Most

21:43

people were just trying to survive. They

21:46

were just trying to get through the day

21:49

and not get lynched and not get humiliated in front of

21:51

their children. And just getting through that

21:53

day in its own way was heroic, right? And

21:56

they were just trying to do that. that.

22:00

You know, we both have covered what

22:03

happened with Mr. Navalny in Russia. The

22:06

reason that Navalny is a powerful

22:08

story is that it is abnormal

22:10

to be Navalny. It's abnormal to

22:12

be Medgar Evers. It's abnormal to

22:15

be Dr. King. It's normal to

22:17

be scared. And Marley was

22:19

scared. And she's very honest about that. And

22:21

she was a normal person who just wanted to

22:23

marry her insurance salesman husband and live her life.

22:26

And everything else that he was doing terrified her.

22:29

And she was honest with him about that. And

22:31

he was honest with her and said, I get

22:33

that. But if I don't do

22:35

this, this state and this country won't be

22:37

good enough for you and my kids. Yeah.

22:40

Yeah. And

22:45

I didn't know one of the things that

22:47

I learned from your book is that in

22:49

his life before he was martyred, one

22:52

of the ways that he was written about in

22:54

the national black press was

22:56

as essentially a poster child

22:58

for I am not leaving Mississippi. He

23:01

was saying she wanted to leave as soon as, as

23:04

soon as he was graduated and they were married. And

23:07

he was saying, listen, I love Mississippi.

23:09

And there's so much that's wrong with

23:11

Mississippi and it is so dangerous and

23:13

I will never leave this state. And

23:16

that was a curiosity even in his

23:18

lifetime that somebody with the resources, the

23:20

ability and the notoriety that he had

23:22

would choose to stay. But it

23:25

was a deep form of patriotism and love of

23:27

his country and love of his state. Right.

23:29

I mean, and this was a 1958 Ebony magazine does

23:32

this profile on him. It's his first sort

23:34

of big national sort of press. And it's,

23:36

it's titled why I love Mississippi, you know,

23:38

and it's a weird thing. And these are

23:40

Northern black journalists coming to the South and

23:42

talking with a Southern black man who had

23:44

gotten out even to Europe, you know, lots

23:46

of not lot, not most, but you know,

23:48

there were an appreciable number of black people,

23:50

black men in particular who went to Europe

23:52

during the World War II era and didn't

23:54

come back because he could live a normal

23:56

life in France. He didn't have to be

23:59

discriminated against. later for that, I'm not coming

24:01

back to this country. But

24:03

he deliberately came back. And you have

24:05

to remember that Mississippi has this connective

24:07

tissue to Chicago. If you are

24:09

a black person from Chicago, your people are probably

24:11

from Mississippi. Because there was this $11.50 train

24:14

that went back and forth and a

24:17

lot of people, when they got out

24:19

of Mississippi, went straight to Chicago, Indiana,

24:21

some other places. But Chicago has a

24:23

lot of Mississippi folks. Emmett Till's family

24:25

was one of those families that had

24:27

that connective tissue. And so Charles and

24:30

Meagher Evers, Charles his brother, they went to

24:32

Chicago every summer. They knew what Chicago

24:34

was like. They'd been, they had traveled

24:36

a little bit. And so

24:38

they had choices. And once he had

24:40

his middle class job at the NAACP, they

24:43

could have theoretically said, stay with me

24:45

somewhere else. With his insurance industry job, he

24:47

could have said, I could go somewhere else. He

24:50

was smart enough. He was certainly capable

24:53

enough to live anywhere else. But we did

24:55

this background on one of the things my

24:57

research assistants and I did is we went

24:59

all the way back to enslavement of these

25:02

two families, the Everses and Murley's family. And

25:05

what you find is that they come

25:07

in the very beginning

25:10

from Africa to Mississippi. So they're Mississippi

25:12

in their bones, roots, blood, and tears,

25:14

both of them. And so for him,

25:16

I think his attitude

25:18

was, why should I leave Mississippi?

25:20

If fascists don't like me being equal, maybe

25:23

they should leave Mississippi. I

25:26

loved also that you tell the story about him

25:28

hunting and fishing and being an outdoorsy guy and

25:30

wanting, in part, to be able to expose his

25:32

kids to the country. And he

25:34

has this quote that I really do actually love.

25:36

It's from Abraham Lincoln that he had in his

25:39

home, he had a sign with this quote from

25:41

Abraham Lincoln that says, I'm driven to my knees

25:44

knowing that I have nowhere else to go. It's

25:46

a shorthand of it. And I think that's how he

25:49

felt. He didn't want to live

25:51

in a concrete jungle. He didn't want to live in

25:53

the city. He wanted to be in the country where

25:55

he could hunt and fish and do the things he

25:57

loved. He loved the bucolic nature of Mississippi. He loved

25:59

it. He loved the fauna and the flora.

26:01

He loved the things about Mississippi that weren't the

26:03

people. And he just felt

26:06

that the people needed to do better. Ha

26:08

ha ha. One

26:15

of the things, you're talking about how the

26:17

rose-colored glasses, the way that we look back

26:19

at that era, we all like to think that not

26:22

only would we be a hero, but that everybody

26:24

who we relate to and we think of that

26:26

history, they were all probably heroes too. One

26:29

of the things that you spend quite a

26:31

bit of time repeatedly going back to are

26:34

African Americans in Mississippi

26:36

who were

26:38

paid by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,

26:41

which was a state-organized spy

26:43

agency to spy on the

26:45

civil rights movement. And

26:48

the files of the Sovereignty Commission will curl your

26:50

hair. I mean, it's

26:52

unlike anything else in American

26:54

political history, but there were black

26:57

leaders, black newspaper owners, newspaper editors.

26:59

There were black activists who were

27:01

essentially on the payroll of

27:04

the segregationist movement to

27:06

spy on leaders like Medgravers

27:08

and others. And you

27:11

make sure to tell those stories and name them

27:14

as well. I wanted to ask you about

27:16

that decision. Well, because the truth of the

27:18

matter is that

27:20

segregation and maintaining it after Brown

27:22

v. Board, it required a

27:25

massive apparatus that in

27:27

the state of Mississippi included that Sovereignty Commission. It

27:29

included the white citizens councils, which was basically the

27:32

sort of dressed up version of the Klan. These

27:34

are the people who owned the banks and the

27:36

insurance companies that people could pull your mortgage. If

27:38

they found out you joined the NAACP, then

27:41

of course there was a violent section of the Klan. But

27:44

it also did require the complicity of

27:46

some black people who'd made the

27:48

calculation that either for financial reasons

27:50

or others, it was

27:52

better to play ball. Some

27:54

of them were business owners who liked having

27:57

a captive audience to be blunt. segregated

28:00

society, you as a store owner, black

28:03

people had to shop with you. There wasn't anywhere else for

28:05

them to go. And then

28:07

there were some black newspaper editors who

28:09

thought the NAACP was too radical. They

28:12

didn't like the way they were speaking

28:14

about Mississippi society, and they felt that

28:16

they were troublemakers, and that they were

28:18

hurting the business communities that were all

28:20

black. And they felt that the

28:22

status quo could work for them financially. And

28:24

since they weren't suffering, they didn't see any

28:26

reason to change it. And

28:28

they did take money. And the thing was

28:31

so interesting is some of them were exposed

28:33

at that time, like in almost real time,

28:35

like in that era, you know, you discovered

28:37

that the leading, not

28:39

just any newspaper, but the

28:41

leading black newspaper editor, leading

28:44

black newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, the editor of

28:46

that newspaper was taking money from the Sovereignty

28:49

Commission. Leading pastors were taking

28:51

money. So

28:54

this gets to the question

28:56

that for me loomed over the whole

28:58

book for me, and that I most want to talk to

29:00

you about tonight, which is a little

29:02

bit of inside baseball about how we do our work, and so

29:04

I hope you don't mind. But

29:06

it's about good guys and bad

29:09

guys in history. And

29:11

at a very fundamental

29:13

level, this book is making

29:15

the case that James Baldwin was right,

29:17

that if we are going to take

29:19

inspiration from civil rights leaders who were

29:22

martyred, then there is

29:24

a triumvirate of Martin and Malcolm

29:26

and Medgar, and you

29:28

make the case for putting Medgar and Merle

29:30

Evers in front of mind as heroes, as

29:33

Americans who stood up and were brave in the face

29:35

of evil and oppression. But what do we do in

29:38

our history with the people who are

29:40

committing the evil and who are perpetrating the oppression?

29:43

And I feel, a reason I want to talk to you about

29:45

this is I feel like you've made really interesting

29:47

choices about what history to

29:49

tell in this book. And I

29:51

am fundamentally divided, because part

29:54

of me is very happy that

29:56

nobody's heard of Theodore Bilbo. Like

29:59

being long- to history, yeah, good,

30:02

I'm glad you are. But part of

30:04

me wants everybody to know who he was and what

30:06

he did, and I feel like part

30:08

of why we seem

30:11

unprepared and ill-equipped to

30:13

deal with our generation's

30:15

worst confrontation with oppression and

30:17

tyranny is because we don't know that much about

30:20

the oppressors and the tyrants of previous generations.

30:22

So how do

30:25

you, how do you, how do you, how do you,

30:30

how do you thread that? I

30:32

mean, it's a great insult, it's a

30:34

great curse to tell somebody you will

30:36

be forgotten, you will be lost

30:38

to history, you will

30:40

have no headstone. On

30:43

the other hand, maybe

30:45

that's not the worst thing that can happen to

30:47

the worst people. I agree

30:49

with you, I am somebody who wants no

30:52

villains lost to history, and

30:54

the reason I say that is that it

30:57

does sometimes feel like we keep

30:59

reliving the same era as in

31:01

American history over and over again.

31:04

And in this current era,

31:06

it does feel like, and all

31:08

of you, we already know, watch Rachel's incredible

31:10

show, when you're talking about the 1930s and

31:12

40s, what

31:15

it sounds like you're talking about is now. And

31:18

the only way that you can get

31:21

people to repeat the same errors

31:23

is that they don't

31:26

remember that it happened before, that you think

31:28

Donald Trump is some sui generis thing that's

31:30

never existed before. But when you say, no, no,

31:32

no, no, here's another version of that.

31:35

If you think, well, this has never

31:37

happened before that you've seen people denied

31:40

the right to vote or denied access

31:42

to the ballot. No, no, it's pretty much the

31:45

same playbook. Nothing's new under the sun. People

31:47

don't change the tactics of evil. They

31:49

just repeat it because people forget that

31:51

it happened. And

31:54

so I am not for amnesia in that sense.

31:56

And so the theater bill, but we are both,

32:00

in the back because Rachel

32:02

Maddow, I'm fairly sure bugs my house

32:04

because she's obsessed with everything I'm obsessed

32:06

with. Literally once we both discovered we

32:08

were obsessed with equatorial Guinea and I

32:10

was like, no one else cares about

32:12

equatorial Guinea, but you and me. And

32:15

so we've both done tons of reading about it. And we

32:17

love it. I just didn't have arguments and we're

32:19

both obsessed with Bilbo. When I saw

32:21

that Theodore Bilbo showed up in

32:24

the filing from the state of Colorado in their

32:26

appeal to try to get Donald Trump thrown off

32:28

the ballot, I was so happy

32:30

that all of the people around me thought that

32:32

I was such a weirdo that I think they

32:34

probably wanted to leave the room. But I was

32:36

like, guys, to my poor producers, Theodore

32:39

Bilbo guys, Bilbo is here. And they

32:41

were like, okay, is that

32:45

a noun? Is that a noun? Does it

32:47

matter? It

32:49

matters. Here's and I'm gonna very quickly, the reason

32:51

that you have to pay attention to Theodore Bilbo

32:54

is that what Theodore Bilbo and others

32:56

like him were doing, we're not fighting

32:58

black participation in the general election. They

33:01

were fighting it in the primary. These

33:03

were the trials of the Democratic Party,

33:05

not the Republican Party. This

33:08

was the way we're talking a lot about the

33:10

14th amendment. The

33:12

14th amendment and the 13th, 14th and

33:14

15th were meant to, you know, to

33:16

enfranchise and to create real citizenship for

33:19

black people. The creative ways that Southern

33:21

states got around it was to say

33:23

essentially, the Democratic Party, which was the

33:25

only game in town in the south,

33:27

the same way the Republican Party is now.

33:29

We're not saying that you can't vote because you're

33:31

black. We're saying that you don't meet the rules

33:33

of our private organization. And we're going to find

33:35

all these creative ways to make sure that you

33:37

can't vote because the primary is the general. Once

33:39

you win the primary, everyone's going to vote for

33:42

you in the general. The primary is the

33:44

power. We have forgotten that in American

33:46

politics. Now, Americans have forgotten the

33:48

power of primaries, the whole civil

33:51

rights fight essentially in the south was

33:53

about getting black people access to the

33:55

only game in town, the Democratic primary.

33:57

And if you couldn't vote in the primary,

34:00

It didn't matter what happened after that because Republicans

34:02

couldn't be elected. Now just reverse that

34:04

now, put the Republicans where the Democrats

34:06

were, flip the parties. It's the same

34:08

playbook. So I

34:11

think we've got to remember in order to progress

34:13

because we can't fight a demon that

34:15

we beat before but we forgot the formula.

34:17

Mm-hmm. Amen. Amen,

34:21

exactly. Can

34:24

I tell you one more Theodore Belbeau story? Yes.

34:27

Please tell me all about it. Talk amongst yourselves. You

34:29

have to talk to the governor. So Mississippi,

34:32

I believe, has only ever had

34:34

two statues of

34:37

governors in the Mississippi State Capitol and one

34:39

of them is Theodore Belbeau. And

34:42

they commissioned, after he died in

34:44

1947, which was a kindness, they

34:47

commissioned a German sculptor

34:53

to create a life-size bust of him, which

34:55

sounds big but he was very small. But

34:59

it's life-size and they put him in the rotunda.

35:02

And he, I mean, this is a man, before he

35:04

died, between when they sent him home from Washington

35:06

and when he died, he wrote one book. It

35:08

was called Your Choice, Separation

35:11

or Mongrelization. I

35:14

mean, the man was a cartoon

35:16

villain. And

35:18

I mean, separate and apart from the swimming pool and

35:20

the lake they built for him and all the

35:23

rest of it. But they've got

35:25

the statue of him in the rotunda. Nobody at some point

35:27

gets it in their head that maybe let's move him out

35:29

of the rotunda. They put him in

35:31

a conference room that nobody uses. They

35:34

then realized that they don't actually have a choice

35:36

to move him anywhere else because when they commissioned

35:39

the statue from the German sculptor, they

35:41

also passed a law that said this

35:43

statue of Theodore Belbeau is

35:46

never, under Mississippi State law, allowed to

35:48

leave the first floor of the Mississippi

35:50

State Capitol. So

35:53

they put him in this conference room but then ultimately they

35:55

start using that conference room. Who starts

35:57

using that conference room? The Black Caucus of the

35:59

Mississippi. legislature who to

36:01

their credit uses him as

36:04

a coat rack even

36:08

it is

36:10

still a problem that he is there

36:12

and some point somebody takes it upon

36:14

themselves to move him to somewhere else

36:16

on the first floor of the Capitol

36:18

and they find a storage closet next

36:20

to the elevator shaft and they

36:22

wrap him in asbestos blankets and they shove him

36:25

in the storage closet this

36:28

only happened in the last couple of years 18 months

36:31

ago they finally decided screw

36:33

the law we are moving him to the basement and

36:36

he is only just now been moved to

36:38

the basement and then on to the Mississippi

36:41

Civil Rights Museum but that

36:43

man has a weird persistence like

36:45

he's an esoph fable and

36:48

the fact that we I mean Mississippi is

36:50

suffering with even just the lead version of

36:52

him but learning those stories

36:56

is an important part of learning how people thought I

36:58

feel like today

37:06

we are we are in a moment where it

37:08

feels like the rule of law is on life

37:11

support I

37:14

feel like this went down the memory hole very quickly

37:16

but with the first criminal indictment of Donald

37:18

Trump announced there was a southern governor who

37:21

announced if they are going to try to

37:23

extradite you from Florida I

37:25

will direct state law enforcement

37:28

to block that extradition that

37:30

was governor Rhonda Santas of

37:32

Florida and if he's done well hasn't he

37:34

yeah he's and

37:40

if that feels fatal to the rule of

37:42

like defying court orders right it feels fatal

37:44

but we had it

37:46

before of course right this is

37:48

what your what this story

37:50

is with massive resistance to civil

37:52

rights rulings from the courts in

37:54

the south we have had widespread

37:59

defiance of the rule of law in

38:01

this country for years and years and years and

38:03

years, not bad laws, good

38:05

laws defied in practice. And

38:07

so while we're thinking about the rule of law and

38:09

the challenges that we have against it now, what

38:11

should we have learned from that experience in the

38:14

civil rights movement that teaches us more about how

38:16

to combat that threat now? Right. And

38:18

this was actually a core challenge that Medgar ever

38:21

faced was that you have court rulings

38:24

going to NAACP's way. They're actually winning

38:26

in court. Over and

38:28

over again. And the courts,

38:30

though all white, are

38:32

saying you have to grant black

38:34

citizens this right or that right,

38:36

right to access the bus terminals, right to eat

38:39

in the restaurant. You have to do it. And

38:41

you just see this massive creativity, the massive resistance

38:43

of finding ways to say we're going to defy

38:46

that. Defying Supreme Court

38:48

orders, which is the thing back then.

38:51

And for Medgar Evers, his

38:53

frustration was at the NAACP's answer to your

38:56

question, which is we'll just go back to

38:58

court again. We'll go back to

39:00

court and we'll do another thing and we'll win again

39:02

and again and again. The

39:04

challenge to that was young people in

39:07

the South and in the state of Mississippi. They

39:09

weren't interested in this strategy because

39:12

for them, they didn't have mortgages that

39:14

could be recalled by some citizens council

39:16

banker. They didn't have a

39:18

job they could be let go from. They were either high

39:20

school students or college students. And they

39:22

also had the bravado of youth. And

39:25

so their answer was we'll fight it in the

39:27

streets. We'll march, right?

39:30

We'll march on the segregationists. We will sit

39:32

in the library and refuse to leave.

39:34

We will get arrested and we'll just use

39:37

our bodies to resist. We will slow down

39:39

the progress of this economy and make

39:41

it impossible for people to live

39:44

a peaceful, quiet, segregated love. And

39:47

Medgar was siding with them in defiance

39:49

of his bosses who were very

39:52

angry about it. And so he's torn.

39:54

His actual job is to do what

39:56

he's told, which is to sign people

39:58

up, register them to vote, People were

40:00

too terrified to do, the adults were

40:02

too scared, and to sign people up

40:04

for NAACP memberships where people would get

40:06

fired if they joined the NAACP. And

40:09

the kids are saying, no, no, we're going to march.

40:11

And he was saying that I'm going to bail you

40:13

out of jail. When you get locked up, I'm

40:15

going to bail you out. And there was just

40:17

this sense that the only thing you could do

40:20

was do your own version of massive resistance, physical

40:22

resistance to tyranny. And so that

40:24

kind of was the big question in

40:26

the South. And Dr. King,

40:28

who Meagher Ever's deeply revered

40:31

and wanted to replicate the

40:33

movement and what he did in Birmingham and what he

40:35

did in Alabama, he was trying to do that

40:37

in Mississippi. King had the same idea, which was

40:39

that the only thing you could do when you

40:41

have people who are defying the Supreme Court of

40:44

the United States is to

40:46

force them to watch the violence

40:48

that they're willing to perpetrate on

40:50

television. That if you're going to

40:52

do this to us, we're going to make

40:54

sure it's heavily publicized. And

40:56

one of Meagher Ever's big beefs with

40:58

the way that black

41:01

Americans had reacted to

41:03

their subjugation was

41:05

the silence, was the fact that when someone

41:07

was lynched, they sort of just melted into the ground.

41:10

No one talked about it. No one protested

41:12

about it. No one said anything about it. And

41:15

he said, we need to make sure that whatever

41:17

is done to us is done publicly, that we...

41:19

He founded a newspaper to make sure that that

41:21

happened. And so I think that King

41:23

and Meagher agreed that the only thing you

41:25

can do when you get to the point

41:28

where people are willing to defy the Supreme

41:30

Court of the United States and subsequent court

41:32

orders is you have to physically resist and

41:35

you have to physically resist in public so that

41:37

people have to feel the shame of what they're

41:39

willing to do. And

41:49

I think that's a great thing about the way that we've learned

41:51

history. I feel like the easy way to learn that history is

41:54

to learn it as if there was a synthesis. That

41:56

there was the legal strategy to get the good court

41:58

rulings, and then there was the the direct action

42:00

strategy and they were synthesized. They came together and

42:02

they were all working for the same thing. And

42:05

part of the pain of the story

42:07

of Medgar Evers is that that was

42:10

not an easy marriage. And he was

42:12

a person employed by the NAACP, which

42:14

was focusing on the litigation strategy.

42:16

And he was in sympathy with

42:19

and deeply involved with and organizing

42:21

direct action. And he, at

42:23

the moment that he was killed,

42:26

was prepared to be getting fired and had

42:28

been warned that he was going to be

42:30

fired. And this was itself, its own

42:32

kind of sacrifice and its own kind of

42:34

bravery and leadership to be the one

42:36

bridging the gap between those two very difficult strategies.

42:38

Right, and if you think, and this is the

42:41

reason that, I say again, it's

42:43

ordinary people who do these things. So you

42:45

have this man who not only is worried

42:47

about getting fired, whose

42:49

wife has now had their third child, he's got a

42:51

nine year old, an eight year old and a three

42:53

year old. She's left her job, she

42:56

was his secretary. She was working as

42:58

his secretary when he first got the NAACP job.

43:01

But once she has there, once they give birth

43:03

to the third child, she stays home. So

43:05

now there's one income. They've got

43:07

a mortgage, they've got two car payments, they've

43:09

got bills, they've got to pay the rent.

43:11

He's a foreign insurance salesman. He could barely

43:13

afford to pay his insurance premiums. And

43:16

so he's economically stressed. And

43:19

his marriage is stressed. Because

43:21

Merle Evers is saying to him, you

43:24

don't have to do this. They don't even

43:26

wanna protect you. They won't pay for

43:29

security for this house. They

43:31

won't pay for protection for you. You can barely

43:33

afford to keep your car fixed up. And if

43:35

your car breaks down on the road, you're gonna

43:37

get killed by the client. And every

43:39

time that I pick up the phone, it's

43:41

either some terrified black person who is trying

43:44

to ask you to come and identify a

43:46

lynching in their family. Or it's

43:48

some angry white person saying they're gonna blow

43:50

this house up and kill me and

43:53

kill you and kill our kids. And

43:55

so he's got family stress.

43:58

And so I just, you know, I got... So invested

44:00

in this couple and in their just

44:02

normal lives, just thinking how would you deal

44:04

with that? And there was a time when Merle

44:06

did say to me in one of our interviews,

44:09

she was surprised he didn't have a heart attack

44:11

because he was so stressed out. And

44:14

when you're doing all that and your bosses are

44:16

also all over you and saying, I don't like,

44:18

I don't agree with what you're doing and you're

44:20

going to get fired if you don't stop, but

44:22

you deeply believe in your heart and your soul.

44:24

This is the only way to liberate your people.

44:27

I can't imagine being him. I can't imagine having

44:29

to do that. And for her,

44:32

for Merle, by the time she really buys in,

44:34

when she really says, you know what, I'm going

44:36

to be down with this. It's

44:38

at the point where their home is firebombed and

44:40

she's the one at home with the kids and

44:43

she's the one who has to get the garden hose and put it out.

44:46

And there's just a point where she says, you know what, what

44:50

else can we do? What else

44:52

can we do? He's not going to stop. They're

44:54

not going to stop. So I'm not going to

44:56

stop. It's

45:03

also just the sensitivity and the depth

45:05

with which you tell how

45:09

much she knew it was coming and how

45:11

much he knew it was coming. May 20th,

45:13

1963, Med Grevers

45:15

is miraculously granted, as you tell

45:17

the story, granted TV time, equal

45:20

time to respond to

45:23

segregationist critics of the movement. And he gives

45:25

a 20 minute speech on television

45:27

in Jackson, Mississippi. And

45:29

you talk about how Merle knows

45:31

that racist segregationist, Clarion Ledger has

45:34

already printed their address. And

45:36

now everybody who has a television will see his face. And

45:39

they know that this is the end. And within 10 days, their

45:42

home is firebombed. And by the middle of

45:44

June, he's dead. And

45:46

for them to know it's coming for them both to

45:48

know it's coming and

45:51

for him to persist is a

45:53

form of heroism, but also

45:55

a form of tragedy that

45:57

I honestly don't know how to process now. I

46:00

mean, you made friends with Mrs. Evers through

46:02

this process. I

46:05

can feel you crying writing that chapter

46:08

and feeling for her and knowing that she knew it

46:10

was coming. How

46:13

did you process it and how did you factor it

46:16

into your friendship with her? Well, I cried

46:18

a lot writing this book. I

46:20

think the saddest story that I

46:22

remember writing was the

46:24

one where, and she's a housewife of the 1950s, 1960s

46:27

housewife. She does all the cleaning,

46:30

cooking, and ironing. So this is context,

46:32

you know what I mean? Where Merle

46:35

irons a set of shirts, crisp

46:38

white shirts for Medgar to go to work

46:40

that week. And he says, it's

46:42

so sweet. Thank you. I appreciate it, but I don't think I'm going

46:44

to need them. And

46:47

there's a point at which he starts feeling

46:49

fatalistic and saying fatalistic things. And where they

46:51

both kind of saw where this was going.

46:54

Because the NAACP had told him when

46:57

his neighbor, who was a member of the

46:59

NAACP and his other friends, had said, you

47:01

guys got to get this guy protection. He's

47:03

being followed by the Klan everywhere. His phone

47:05

is being tapped. You got

47:07

to do something. And they said, we've got better things to

47:09

do with our money. And

47:12

the sense of being abandoned

47:15

and also threatened with your job, I think at

47:17

the end he was just exhausted. And

47:19

the hardest thing to write really was

47:23

what we knew was coming. But

47:25

it comes in this really extraordinary moment. He

47:27

had done the TV speech. He

47:30

had said things about the kind

47:32

of world that he wanted to see

47:34

created in this country. And then

47:36

President Kennedy gives a speech on

47:39

June 11 that is very

47:41

similar and that uses some of

47:43

his words. I remember he had been peppering

47:45

Kennedy with telegrams after telegram for telegram. I

47:47

spent a lot of time in

47:50

the Library of Congress. I got my Library of

47:52

Congress card. I'm a super nerd. I was so

47:54

excited. I took a picture

47:56

of myself with it. You bury me there.

47:58

Guys, I appreciate the other meat. I was like, please.

48:00

But I mean, and some of the fattest stuff

48:02

to read there were the telegrams and the sort

48:05

of increasingly desperate communications between

48:07

Medgar Evers and the White House.

48:09

Saying, you need to send the National Guard here.

48:11

You need to send, you know, you

48:13

guys are sending Russian observers to go and look

48:15

at them. Send them here. Let the

48:17

Russians come and see what we're doing here.

48:19

You know, he was increasingly desperate. And so

48:21

Kennedy gives this speech. And

48:24

in the meeting after the speech, it's supposed

48:26

to be like a triumphant moment because he'd

48:28

won Kennedy over. He'd won this

48:30

president over who starts using some of his language,

48:32

a fellow World War II veteran. He

48:34

got it. He gets it. But

48:37

in the meeting afterwards, he's told by his bosses,

48:39

you will end the street demonstrations immediately.

48:42

There will be no more street demonstrations.

48:44

There will be no more marches. There

48:46

will be no more public optimism that

48:48

it's over. And we're cutting off the bail money.

48:51

And the bail money, we're cutting it off. It's

48:54

done. And so he leaves this moment

48:56

when it should have been his most triumphant moment

48:58

dejected and that's why he gets killed. Because this

49:00

was a veteran. This was a man who was

49:02

like, he was not Dr. King. He was not

49:04

about that life. He had guns all through his

49:06

house. Okay. He was a, he was not

49:08

a nonviolence. He didn't believe in that. He

49:11

wasn't. And

49:13

it wasn't. But he, and

49:15

he had a system that he had developed as a

49:17

military man, even with his kids, like doing drills with them.

49:20

If you hear a gunshot, you go down on the floor,

49:22

you get your brother, you go out, lay on top of

49:24

him, you go into the tub because that's the place that's

49:26

safest. And he had taught the kids what to do if

49:28

there was a shooting or a firebombing in the house. That's

49:31

how serious it was. But that night he was so despondent

49:35

after this triumphant Kennedy speech that he

49:37

just starts, he makes mistakes and

49:39

he makes fatal errors that

49:41

are the reason that this fellow World War II veteran

49:44

was able to kill him. You've

49:46

mentioned a couple of times while we've been talking

49:48

a variety of economic warfare that

49:51

I learned a lot about from your book. And

49:54

when we think about the civil rights

49:56

struggle, I think we all know about

49:58

the famous black boycotts. You

50:00

know, obviously the Birmingham boycott and the others that

50:02

have received so much attention. I

50:04

didn't know as much about the Jackson movement and the

50:07

boycott there, the black shopping boycott in the Delta and

50:09

places like that. But there's also

50:11

this other side of economic warfare, and you've mentioned it

50:13

a couple times tonight. Banks

50:16

foreclosing on the homes and

50:18

businesses of activists. So

50:20

in the wake of the Emmett Till trial, the

50:23

banks and the financial organizations that

50:25

had made normal home loans, normal

50:27

car loans, normal business loans, normal

50:29

personal loans to the black community,

50:31

just like they had to anybody

50:33

else, targeted

50:36

activists who had participated in trying to

50:38

get witnesses to come forward for the

50:40

Emmett Till trial. And they foreclosed on their homes

50:43

and foreclosed on their businesses. And that is how

50:45

Charles Evers moves to Chicago. That

50:47

is how even very well off black

50:49

activists in Mississippi end up leaving and going to

50:51

Chicago to get out because this form of economic

50:54

warfare is waged against them. And I

50:56

was thinking about this because

50:58

in Tim Snyder's

51:00

book on tyranny, lesson 14, one

51:03

of the lessons that he warns about

51:06

and that he describes as happening in

51:08

all sorts of authoritarian countries in front

51:10

of all sorts of different types of

51:12

tyranny is to not give

51:14

tyrants the hooks on which to hang you. And

51:17

he advises, one of his lessons from the

51:20

20th century is clean up any legal trouble,

51:23

clean up any financial trouble, clean up anything

51:25

that anybody can use against you because the

51:27

nastier, the phrases he uses, the nastier rulers

51:30

will use what they know about you to push you around.

51:35

And seeing that at work in this

51:37

story, seeing that at work in Mississippi,

51:39

Snyder is warning about that having happened

51:41

in fascist Germany. I

51:45

wonder if you have been thinking about that in terms of

51:48

the future in this country and

51:51

the ways we need to build up

51:53

our own resilience and

51:56

high profile people among us such as yourself

51:58

need to. protect

52:00

ourselves and make sure that we have people who are not just

52:02

in solidarity for us, but looking out for us. Absolutely.

52:05

And to build on your

52:07

point, think about,

52:10

again, none of the

52:12

playbooks are new. People just roll out the same ones

52:14

over and over again. Think about what's happening

52:16

in Jackson, Mississippi now. Where

52:19

Jackson, which is an 80% black

52:21

city, which is the

52:23

capital of Mississippi, has

52:27

been, the rest has

52:29

had the control of its own water

52:32

system seized by the

52:34

majority of white and Republican government.

52:37

And they've attempted to seize their control of

52:39

their own policing and imposing

52:41

a capital police system on

52:43

them. And there's violent

52:46

policing is,

52:48

it's violent in Mississippi like it is

52:50

almost anywhere, nowhere else. I mean, it's

52:52

incredibly violent. And they're essentially

52:54

saying that black people must not be able to

52:56

govern themselves in Jackson, that they cannot be able

52:59

to govern themselves. Go to

53:01

Tennessee, very similar. The two states that

53:03

they're targeting with trying to steal from

53:05

them control of their own resources are

53:08

the cities of Memphis and

53:10

the city of Nashville, both of

53:12

which have black leadership in the

53:14

state house, the Justins, Justin Jones

53:16

and Justin Pearson. Right?

53:19

They are the representatives from

53:22

Memphis and Jackson. And so

53:24

what they're essentially fighting their

53:26

majority conservative white government for is

53:28

control of the resources of the

53:30

city of Nashville and the county

53:33

where Nashville is, which is the

53:35

most prosperous. It's where the bills,

53:37

it's where the money comes from.

53:39

But they don't want that in

53:41

control of black people. You're

53:44

seeing what's happening in states where

53:46

they're deconstructing DEI. To

53:49

the extent where even there's a lawsuit

53:51

against Howard University to try to

53:53

not allow Howard University to control

53:55

the influx of black doctors to

53:58

demand that they make Howard

54:00

University's medical system no longer majority

54:02

black. This

54:05

is a systematic attempt to wage

54:07

economic warfare on

54:09

a group of people, particularly in

54:11

Southern states, who have the numbers

54:14

that if they voted at scale would

54:17

flip elections. This is not

54:19

about conservatives or

54:21

white people not liking black people. And

54:24

I'll just say very briefly, one of the things that

54:27

my editor cut down a lot, but I still sprinkled it

54:29

through the book because I had a whole chapter on it and

54:31

he's like, no ma'am. I

54:34

had a whole chapter and in-depth history

54:37

of the history of slavery and

54:39

the post slavery era in

54:42

Mississippi. Because Mississippi was

54:44

the richest state in America when

54:46

we had slavery because it's cotton

54:48

is the most rich, it

54:51

comes from the richest soil. This alluvial soil

54:53

creates the highest grade cotton on earth. The

54:55

queen of England loved Mississippi cotton. Having the

54:57

Mississippi cotton label meant that you had the

54:59

best cotton in the world. And they needed

55:01

a massive labor force to produce this cotton.

55:03

So they had one of the largest numbers

55:05

of enslaved people. And

55:07

so after slavery was done, three

55:10

states that Mississippi, Louisiana,

55:13

and South Carolina had majority black populations

55:15

because they imported so many Africans and

55:18

bred so many Africans in their chattel

55:20

system because they needed a massive labor

55:22

force. Well, what happens when you then

55:24

end slavery and reconstruction says that

55:26

every man, no, women couldn't vote, but

55:29

that every man could vote. But

55:31

the majority of your state is

55:33

black. And in the case of Mississippi, it's 55%

55:35

black. What

55:38

you get is a successful multiracial

55:40

democracy because the black and tan Republicans,

55:42

which was a coalition of radical Republicans,

55:44

which used to mean something different back

55:46

then, and black folks

55:48

got together and created things like

55:50

free public schools, access

55:52

to healthcare, trying

55:55

to educate black children who had never

55:57

gone to school in their lives, actual

55:59

school that... wasn't closed during the

56:01

period when you were killing the field. They would

56:03

actually close the school so black kids could work

56:05

and be child labor. Those

56:07

things really changed during Reconstruction and changed

56:10

Mississippi for the better. Ending

56:13

that and ending black access to the ballot

56:15

was about that. It was about reversing

56:17

Reconstruction. And what we're seeing now

56:19

in the South where it's the

56:22

most intense is it's looking at the

56:24

places that have large numbers of people of color.

56:27

Texas, Arizona, Nevada,

56:31

Mississippi, South Carolina,

56:33

North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, which is

56:35

one of the highest percentage of

56:37

black people in the country. And

56:40

so the systematic ways in which they're

56:42

trying to demoralize black voters

56:44

and demoralize brown voters and

56:47

demoralize white liberal voters and

56:49

demoralize LGBTQ voters, it's

56:51

about reducing

56:54

the percentage of people who will be willing

56:56

to or able to participate so that they

56:58

can win. That is the way fascist governments

57:00

thrive. To

57:08

make it worse, I

57:10

do feel like we are in, in

57:13

this election cycle in particular, we are

57:15

in an era of newly, in our

57:17

lifetime, newly overt,

57:20

out and loud

57:22

electoral racism. And

57:25

I mean that not like, I'm discerning

57:27

racism in something that you're doing. I mean,

57:29

no, like just being out loud, proud racist.

57:31

I mean, the Steve Bannon in Europe addressing

57:34

conservatives in Europe saying, you will be called

57:36

racist where it is a badge of honor.

57:40

It was a Trump administration official

57:43

running ads in Florida saying that

57:45

the only real racism is racism

57:47

against white people. And

57:49

what white people need is white racial

57:52

solidarity and a government that finally works

57:54

for white people. I

57:56

mean, they're running started, they,

57:58

they, they ran ads. to this

58:00

effect in Florida and they've now written

58:02

it into policy for what would be

58:04

the incoming Trump administration as part of

58:06

Project 2025. And

58:09

you see it in right-wing culture too.

58:12

You see people like Elon Musk at

58:15

Twitter endorsing pseudo-scientific

58:17

racism, all of this quackery

58:19

about IQ and pseudo-scientific racism

58:22

that's all newly popular among

58:24

the tech-row right-wing. This

58:29

stuff is not subtle and

58:31

it is not something

58:33

that you need investigative journalism to figure

58:35

out. This is out

58:37

and proud and so that's an important

58:40

distinction because it means that exposing it

58:42

or trying to put a spotlight on

58:44

it doesn't necessarily work because

58:46

they are not ashamed of it. So

58:49

what do you do with that? And by

58:51

the way... No,

58:56

I mean, and they weren't then either. You

58:58

know, one of the things that's so fascinating, if you go back and

59:00

you watch in the 1950s, people

59:03

being interviewed on the street, I love man on the street interviews,

59:05

but when you look at man on the street interviews from the

59:08

1950s and 60s, you know, CBS

59:10

news reporters would go up to a

59:12

random white couple and they were very open

59:14

saying, we don't want the N words in

59:17

our schools. I mean, they weren't ashamed

59:19

of it then. They didn't think this was embarrassing and

59:21

they also saw the power of television as something that

59:23

could work for them. And there was

59:25

always this idea among white supremacists that, well, we're

59:27

right. And so if we can just

59:29

get the media to stop being biased against us

59:32

and we can just say our thing too on

59:34

the media, we're right anyway. So it'll be obvious

59:36

that we're the morally right people. And it was

59:38

only when the media started actually realizing, wait a

59:40

minute, there is a villain and a victor here.

59:42

We can't be neutral or be, you know, sort

59:44

of both sides, the ideas of racism that you

59:46

started to get this idea that the media was

59:48

biased. Like that's where that comes from. So

59:50

I think what you do with it is that

59:53

you actually have to speak louder, you know, and

59:55

I think you also have to explain to people,

59:57

we, we both talk a lot about democracy on

59:59

our shows. a lot. But

1:00:01

I think somebody said to me at a talk that

1:00:03

I did recently, you should explain what

1:00:05

that means. And I was like, that's a really good

1:00:07

point. Because it's just a word that we

1:00:09

say a lot that I don't think people necessarily know

1:00:11

what that means. DMOs, the people. It

1:00:14

means the people get to decide. Well,

1:00:16

how are the people deciding when 40% of

1:00:19

Americans vote in a primary, and then everyone is

1:00:21

stuck, you know what I mean? And then everyone's

1:00:23

stuck with whoever that 40% choose

1:00:25

in the general, and then like 60% vote

1:00:28

in the general. Well, that means

1:00:30

that DMOs did not decide that. That

1:00:32

isn't democracy. You know, we are a

1:00:35

very low participatory democracy right now. And

1:00:37

so what we're seeing is a disconnect between

1:00:40

people and power, where

1:00:42

a small number of people have really gotten good

1:00:45

at finding ways to exercise minority rule

1:00:47

and power, and where the majority of

1:00:49

people have become demoralized. And

1:00:51

so you're seeing very low voter turnout in

1:00:53

places like Louisiana, in places like Florida, I

1:00:56

was in Broward County, it was one of

1:00:58

the bluest counties in Florida, and one of

1:01:00

the worst turnouts, 30 some odd percent. You

1:01:02

get a Ron DeSantis in because, you know,

1:01:05

they say he won a great victory,

1:01:07

what a million people didn't vote that

1:01:09

voted in the previous election. That

1:01:12

is subtraction, not addition, and that's not democracy.

1:01:14

So I think that maybe what we do

1:01:16

about it is that we have to start,

1:01:18

I think, speaking more loudly, and I think

1:01:21

more specifically about what we mean

1:01:23

by defending democracy, and not just saying that

1:01:25

we should do it. I

1:01:34

have one last question that I want to ask before I

1:01:36

cede the questions to all

1:01:38

of you. And that is,

1:01:42

you're talking about demoralization. The

1:01:45

other thing that happens as a

1:01:47

democracy is threatened by an authoritarian movement

1:01:51

is that politics gets not just

1:01:53

boring or demoralizing, but dangerous, that

1:01:56

there starts to be violence that's

1:01:59

associated with it. with individual candidates

1:02:01

and individual political movements where you

1:02:03

expect there to be paramilitary presence

1:02:06

at political events. When people

1:02:08

who are doing normal political things, whether

1:02:10

it be registering to vote or voting, we

1:02:12

saw this in the South, right? This

1:02:14

is the part, this is some of

1:02:16

the most dramatic elements of the civil rights story, right?

1:02:19

You start to see violence being used

1:02:21

to prevent people from doing the very

1:02:23

mundane day-to-day work of democracy. And

1:02:26

so doing the basic stuff as

1:02:28

a citizen becomes an act of bravery. And

1:02:31

that leads to heroism, but it also

1:02:33

leads to very small numbers of people

1:02:35

participating. And we are not in

1:02:37

a place right now as a country of 330 million

1:02:40

people where we can count on a few heroes to fix this

1:02:42

for us. We need mass

1:02:44

participation. While

1:02:49

people are demoralized and people

1:02:51

are increasingly afraid. And

1:02:55

I have learned so much from you. I

1:02:58

want to know what your message is to

1:03:01

people watching us right now, people in

1:03:03

this theater right now, people are looking to you as somebody

1:03:05

who understands this history and who understands these politics

1:03:07

better than anyone I know. How

1:03:11

do you tell people that it's

1:03:13

okay to do it? It's okay

1:03:15

to feel afraid. You need to do

1:03:17

it anyway. And in fact, you must. It's

1:03:20

the most important question because the system

1:03:24

that we have inherited from

1:03:26

our very imperfect founding father

1:03:28

slave owners is

1:03:31

one in which participatory

1:03:33

democracy is the only thing that can save us. There is no map. The

1:03:35

courts aren't going to save us. We all know that now that Clarence

1:03:37

ain't interested. Clarence ain't helped.

1:03:42

God love them. As they just... Bless

1:03:45

his heart like they say in the south. He

1:03:48

said, I just want to go on trips. And

1:03:51

Alito's like, I'm going with you and get somebody rich.

1:03:55

What I say about it is remember Rosebud

1:03:57

Lee. Rosebud Lee is somebody

1:03:59

that... You know, I learned about in

1:04:01

doing the research for this book, Rosebud Lee's

1:04:03

husband, the Reverend Lee was doing the simple

1:04:05

thing and meeting the political violence. He was

1:04:07

registering people to vote in a

1:04:10

state in which fewer than 6% of black people were registered

1:04:12

to vote in the Democratic primary. You know, you

1:04:14

had to register as a Democrat to have any

1:04:16

power at all because Republicans, again, had no access.

1:04:19

And the way that Democrats at

1:04:21

that time kept people, skipped black people from

1:04:24

voting was through political violence. And

1:04:26

Reverend Lee was taking, you know,

1:04:29

petitions for black folks to simply

1:04:31

register to vote. And

1:04:33

he was shot dead by a Klansman who

1:04:35

pulled up to the side of his car and aimed

1:04:38

a gun at him and shot his jaw off. And

1:04:42

Rosebud Lee made a decision that was

1:04:45

very brave. She said, if

1:04:47

you're going to do that to my husband, you're going

1:04:49

to see it. Everyone's going to see it. And she

1:04:51

had an open casket funeral for her husband whose face

1:04:53

has been shot off. And by the way, the authorities

1:04:55

at the time said they believed it was a car

1:04:58

accident. And then what happened to his jaw was that

1:05:00

his fillings flew out in a car wreck so

1:05:02

that they didn't have to arrest anyone for

1:05:05

his killing. That open casket

1:05:07

funeral is where Mamie Till Mowgli got

1:05:09

the idea for what she did with

1:05:11

Emmett Till. So the

1:05:13

first thing I will say is that, you

1:05:15

know, really brave and courageous people take inspiration,

1:05:17

right? They, you know, they

1:05:20

duplicate kind of the brilliant inspiration of

1:05:22

others. And that's what Mamie Till did. That's where she got

1:05:24

that from. But

1:05:26

the other thing is to remember that

1:05:28

political violence is what kept Mississippi from,

1:05:31

is what kept black Mississippians from voting. It

1:05:34

was Charles and Medgar Evers trying to go

1:05:36

and register to vote and

1:05:38

having 200 white men with guns

1:05:40

face them down and threatened to kill

1:05:42

them if they tried to register. And

1:05:45

Charles and Medgar saying, we got guns too. And then

1:05:47

Medgar saying, you know what, maybe it's only four of

1:05:49

us and 200 of them, we should go home, but

1:05:51

we'll live to fight another day. They did end up

1:05:53

registering, but they weren't able to vote in that election.

1:05:55

And that was in the Theodore Bilbo election. It

1:05:58

was Theodore Bilbo saying the best. way

1:06:00

to keep a black person from voting

1:06:02

is to visit them and work the

1:06:04

night before. And using tremendous political violence.

1:06:06

There was a congressional testimony, there was

1:06:08

a field hearing in Mississippi in which

1:06:11

the members of Congress had tried to understand what had

1:06:13

happened in that election. I mean, black people were terrorized

1:06:15

out of voting. What I would say

1:06:17

now is that we don't face that level of

1:06:19

political terror, but the level of

1:06:22

terror that you face now is real. And we should

1:06:24

acknowledge that it's real. When you've got

1:06:26

Proud Boys and Oath Keepers showing up in

1:06:28

Arizona with long guns, it's intimidating. You know

1:06:30

there are mass shootings and you see

1:06:32

people with visible weapons at your polling place

1:06:35

or outside where you're trying

1:06:37

to count votes when you're having Ruby Freeman

1:06:39

and her daughter, Shane Moss, threatened with death

1:06:42

and kidnapping and all of the rest just

1:06:44

for being election workers. This is a time

1:06:46

that is very much like Megra ever's time.

1:06:50

And so we have to ask ourselves, how did people at

1:06:52

that time respond to that? What did they do when they

1:06:54

were faced with the same things we did? You

1:06:56

know what they did? They voted. They

1:06:59

voted anyway. And

1:07:03

because they understood that as King said,

1:07:05

you may not be able to get the racist

1:07:08

sheriff to stop being racist towards you or change

1:07:10

his mind, but you can vote him out. And

1:07:13

in the end, I think what people have to

1:07:15

remember is that the vote and using the vote

1:07:18

is actually the strongest and most

1:07:20

powerful tool that you have. And

1:07:22

maybe you vote in numbers, maybe you vote

1:07:25

absentee so you don't have to go and

1:07:27

face those gunmen. Maybe you get all

1:07:29

of your church friends or all of your

1:07:31

group chat or all of your friends to

1:07:33

organize, you know, convoy where you can all

1:07:35

drive together. You start using

1:07:37

your community, using the community that you've

1:07:39

built up around you and you find

1:07:42

ways to get together and be brave,

1:07:44

but not voting ain't the answer. Yeah,

1:07:46

it's just you're seeding it to the

1:07:48

other side. And what they want

1:07:50

desperately is for you to not participate and

1:07:52

for you to become, for you to give

1:07:55

up in autocratic societies and

1:07:57

societies that are fully gone. elections

1:08:00

like in Russia, but they aren't real. They

1:08:02

don't matter. And when we start to believe

1:08:04

elections don't matter, we're on our way to

1:08:06

being them. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

1:08:16

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love of home. We're going

1:09:18

to take some

1:09:20

questions from the

1:09:23

audience. We're going to have

1:09:28

Reverend Al Sharpton come out and

1:09:30

join us again. He's going to

1:09:32

fact check everything we just said. Rev,

1:09:36

thank you so much for joining us.

1:09:38

Thank you. First of all, did we

1:09:40

get anything wrong in that discussion? No,

1:09:42

I think you got it all right.

1:09:44

And I think that, you know, what

1:09:46

this book did, I almost had to

1:09:48

go to therapy because

1:09:51

I think what Joy did that

1:09:53

has not been done as well

1:09:56

is bring the human side of

1:09:58

what those that fought these. rights were.

1:10:01

And last year I went

1:10:04

and spoke for the 60th anniversary

1:10:06

of the assassination of Medgar and

1:10:09

Merle Evers was there. And

1:10:12

I've never told this in public. I

1:10:14

told it to her. And

1:10:17

you know how regal she is. And she

1:10:19

took my arm and says, you ought to say

1:10:21

that in public one day. And

1:10:26

Medgar got killed at 39 years old.

1:10:29

A lot of the reason that the

1:10:31

250,000 people showed up

1:10:34

in the March on Washington in 63

1:10:36

is because Medgar had gotten killed and

1:10:38

that energized that March. Dr.

1:10:41

King got killed at 39. Malcolm

1:10:44

X got killed at 39. And I

1:10:46

was, I grew up in

1:10:48

a movement a much years

1:10:50

later. And I started here in

1:10:52

Brooklyn when I was 12. I became the

1:10:55

director of Jesse Jackson's group here when I

1:10:57

was 13. John Lewis and

1:10:59

Jesse Jackson told me one night, you

1:11:02

don't understand we're the first generation

1:11:04

of leaders that lived past 40.

1:11:07

And I don't think people

1:11:10

understood until your book

1:11:12

brought it. I mean, I really

1:11:14

almost had it with her where

1:11:16

people's families lived every day expecting

1:11:18

to bury their loved ones. And

1:11:22

the human side of it you told because

1:11:25

it was a family thing. And I think that

1:11:27

this was a beautiful book for

1:11:29

history, but it also told the story

1:11:31

of a woman that every day looked

1:11:33

at her kids saying, your dad may

1:11:35

not come home. Joy,

1:11:39

question for you. What

1:11:41

made you decide to do this book? And

1:11:43

did you travel to Mississippi as part of

1:11:45

your research? Well,

1:11:47

thanks for the question. What made me decide to

1:11:49

do the book was was Merley was Miss Merley.

1:11:53

So I had interviewed Miss Merley for

1:11:55

my weekend show at the time, AM Joy, if

1:11:57

anybody remembers that one. And

1:12:00

I had interviewed her remotely, you know, but

1:12:03

and Rev will tell you it's very different

1:12:05

meeting her in person so we

1:12:07

flew out and this is I think in 2018 and She

1:12:10

and Maxine Waters were together as a

1:12:12

panel Representative Waters

1:12:15

and then afterwards we just kind of got to

1:12:17

talking us girls and she started talking about Medgar

1:12:19

and It was

1:12:21

in such a profound like personal

1:12:23

and like present way and

1:12:26

I said to her miss Murley you sound like a you

1:12:28

know Giggly schoolgirl talking about your boyfriend like

1:12:30

he's been dead for almost 60 years

1:12:32

and she said in her beautiful resonant

1:12:34

voice Medgar ever

1:12:38

Was the love of my life That's

1:12:42

pretty good. It sounds you sound you

1:12:45

got it you got it And

1:12:47

when she says that to you It

1:12:50

would you would be hard-pressed not to want to write a whole

1:12:52

book about And I

1:12:55

did travel to Jackson the second part of the question

1:12:58

We spent a lot of time in Jackson to do

1:13:00

this book. We went on the block where they live

1:13:02

It used to be called Guine Street They changed the

1:13:04

name now to Margaret Walker Alexander Avenue cuz miss Margaret

1:13:06

Walker Alexander a great literary figure in her own right

1:13:09

Lived at the end of the block was kind of

1:13:11

the queen of the block and then the next block

1:13:13

over is named for Medgar Evers We

1:13:15

interviewed the neighbors many of whom still own those

1:13:18

homes. So miss Murley's best friend

1:13:20

lived across the street We interviewed her and she's

1:13:22

passed on now. She showed up to this interview

1:13:24

She was in her hospital bed because she was

1:13:26

90 years young and fresh and

1:13:28

she had on her fabulous red lip and a high heel

1:13:32

She was fabulous And

1:13:35

we interviewed the next door neighbor The mom was

1:13:37

also very ill but the daughter who witnessed the

1:13:39

assassinate who witnessed the aftermath of the assassination was

1:13:41

15 at the time She and her little sister

1:13:43

we interviewed her we interviewed their best friends down

1:13:45

the street I mean, this was a very cohesive

1:13:48

block and they're still there So

1:13:50

we spent a lot of time there the Evers family

1:13:52

gave us tremendous access to their archives We

1:13:54

basically just went in myself my two researchers

1:13:56

and my assistant Sean who's a she loves

1:13:58

genealogy and stuff in the forum of us

1:14:00

and my husband Jason, we all just were in

1:14:02

there just in these archives. It was incredible.

1:14:04

They gave us just full access. They let

1:14:06

us in when it was closed and we

1:14:08

were the only ones in there and we

1:14:10

could go through boxes of everything, everything from

1:14:13

their high school records to their marriage certificate,

1:14:15

to letters they'd written, to all of his

1:14:17

communications and we were allowed to photograph

1:14:19

it and take it back and then sit with it.

1:14:21

And I really sat with it for like a year

1:14:23

of really just figuring out what do

1:14:25

I do with all of this material. But yeah, we

1:14:27

did a lot of Jacks and a

1:14:29

lot of other Jacks. Medgar

1:14:32

Evers would provide for today's youth. You

1:14:37

want to go? So

1:14:40

at the time, what Medgar Evers was telling

1:14:42

the youth at the time was, you've

1:14:45

got to be smart if you're going to be out there because

1:14:47

you're going to get hurt. They're

1:14:49

going to hit you with batons. They're going to

1:14:52

hit you with fire hoses. They're going to get

1:14:54

violent. So what he actually literally taught them was

1:14:56

how to physically defend yourself. So he did a

1:14:58

lot of drills with them about how you actually

1:15:00

protect your body from the blows that he knew

1:15:02

they were going to take. He was concerned that

1:15:04

they would get harmed. And

1:15:06

he also taught me how to be strategic. He

1:15:09

would do things like, I'm going to

1:15:11

open these NAACP youth councils, but we don't want

1:15:13

you to get suspended

1:15:16

from school for being in the NAACP youth

1:15:18

council. So we're going to call this

1:15:20

one the NAACP Youth Club. And

1:15:23

then sometimes the NAACP youth club meets, sometimes

1:15:25

the NAACP youth council meets, sometimes the NAACP

1:15:27

youth committee. But it's all like different names.

1:15:29

And he would name things different things to

1:15:31

keep it moving along so that

1:15:33

people could be strategic. So what he

1:15:35

would say is that as for young

1:15:37

activists, be strategic, be prepared

1:15:40

for any violence that you

1:15:42

might meet, and stick together.

1:15:45

Because that's the other thing that these young people

1:15:47

did. And one little story there that really moved

1:15:49

me was James Chaney, who was the Chaney in

1:15:51

Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. He was in

1:15:53

one of these NAACP youth

1:15:56

councils. And his first act of activism was as

1:15:58

a 15-year-old. pinned

1:16:00

an NAACP tag that he made

1:16:02

on his shirt and got suspended.

1:16:05

So he didn't he didn't just jump into the

1:16:07

movement when he was with Goodman and Schwerner. He'd

1:16:09

already been an activist like our own Reverend Sharpen

1:16:12

since he was a kid, a

1:16:14

very young kid. I think

1:16:16

Medi Evers would say, based on

1:16:18

how he lived, to make sure

1:16:20

that you are fighting for the

1:16:22

end result. Don't get caught

1:16:24

up in the drama of

1:16:26

the moment, but make sure the

1:16:28

drama is used toward an end result.

1:16:31

And I think that that sometimes happened to

1:16:33

me when I was a young activist, that

1:16:36

we get caught up in the drama that

1:16:38

we forget. Is this working? Like George

1:16:41

was talking about voting. That wasn't dramatic

1:16:43

enough for a lot. But at the

1:16:45

end of the day, that's what makes

1:16:47

the difference. And you know that

1:16:49

Medi Evers never lived to see the Voting

1:16:52

Rights Act, but he

1:16:54

was the one that made it possible.

1:16:56

So you may not see the results,

1:16:59

but your strategy must be to

1:17:01

lead the results. And like right

1:17:04

now, we're living in a time that

1:17:06

is tumultuous. But the one thing I

1:17:09

thought about, you know, I have rallies

1:17:11

every Saturday morning, I had quarters and

1:17:13

one of the Central Park Five guys

1:17:15

was there this morning at

1:17:17

our rally. And I told him

1:17:19

the irony is as depressing as

1:17:21

some of this is, Rachel. Donald

1:17:24

Trump will start on trial in

1:17:26

the same building. He

1:17:33

will start on trial in

1:17:36

the same criminal courthouse that

1:17:38

he called on the death penalty for the

1:17:40

Central Park Five. So

1:17:44

those few of us that stood by

1:17:47

the Central Park Five sit back and

1:17:49

watch. That's the building we marched for

1:17:51

those kids on who exonerated. Now he's

1:17:53

going to have to sit there and

1:17:56

watch a jury picking prosecuted

1:17:58

by black prosecutors. that

1:18:02

we voted and elected. If

1:18:05

you had ever told Donald Trump that a

1:18:07

black prosecutor in Georgia, a black prosecutor in

1:18:10

New York, and a black woman federal judge

1:18:12

in Washington. And

1:18:18

while youth of Salam is

1:18:21

served on the city council in

1:18:23

Harlem. This

1:18:30

seems like a fitting following question. Does

1:18:34

it seem we will keep our democracy?

1:18:39

You want to go for it? I

1:18:44

think we have to get it to keep it but

1:18:49

I think we will get what we

1:18:51

fight to get. And

1:18:53

I think that if we look

1:18:55

at the fact that they are not going

1:18:58

to do it and they never did. If

1:19:00

there's one thing we can learn from Merle

1:19:02

and Melvga is that you get what you

1:19:05

fight for and you got to be willing

1:19:07

to do more to get it than they

1:19:09

are to keep it from you. Amen.

1:19:14

Joy this is for you. What

1:19:18

advice would you give to young black ladies

1:19:20

who want to get into journalism today? So

1:19:27

when I was young and a nerdy

1:19:30

kid who loved watching the news. You're still young. I'm

1:19:33

still young. I'm still young. Thank you. And

1:19:35

I'm still nerdy. I appreciate that. You got to have your

1:19:37

friends around you. You got to have

1:19:39

good friends. Have good friends. That's one piece of advice.

1:19:42

I didn't really have a role model for being

1:19:45

a journalist. I actually didn't intend to be a journalist at all.

1:19:47

I'm supposed to be a doctor. I'm Caribbean. But

1:19:51

I loved Gwen Eiffel.

1:19:53

I absolutely loved Gwen Eiffel.

1:19:57

Because she was the one person who I saw who

1:19:59

looked like me. and looked like my mom and I was like,

1:20:01

she was amazing. And I met her in 2015, I

1:20:03

am answering your question this way, watch this, they

1:20:05

say in church, watch this, watch this, I'm going

1:20:07

somewhere. And in 2015, I'm going

1:20:09

somewhere, I was in Selma,

1:20:11

Alabama and my

1:20:14

peripheral vision is terrible, I'd never see anyone, and so

1:20:16

I see across the street, I'm like, that looks like

1:20:18

Gwen Eiffel, so of course I start running, I start running,

1:20:20

running at her like a Muppet and I, Gwen

1:20:23

Eiffel, oh my God, I hear the greatest person I've

1:20:25

ever, you're my idol, yada yada, and she

1:20:27

was so kind, she turned to this mad woman who was

1:20:29

running at her and she opened up her arms and

1:20:32

gave me the biggest hug. And

1:20:34

so I say that to say, my advice would

1:20:37

be, Gwen Eiffel for me,

1:20:39

I used to run track, I was nerdy but I

1:20:41

was sporty shorty too, okay, I had some athletic ability,

1:20:43

so that kept me from getting in real trouble. And

1:20:46

I used to run third leg in the relay, it's

1:20:48

a 100, you each have to run a 400, and

1:20:51

then you have to hand off, and the

1:20:53

hand off is the game. The first

1:20:55

person sets the pace, for me that's a Gwen Eiffel,

1:20:57

that's somebody who sets the pace. The

1:21:00

person who picks up the pace has to keep the

1:21:02

pace, you can't lose the pace, I used to run

1:21:04

third leg, you have to set up the next person

1:21:06

for success. And then the closer has

1:21:08

to close. And if all four of those people don't do

1:21:10

it, y'all know who ran track, you ain't gonna win, okay?

1:21:13

My advice to young journalists is know

1:21:16

who your starter is. Who is that

1:21:18

person that's your Gwen Eiffel, that's your

1:21:20

inspiration? Find a way to

1:21:23

be, to benefit from the inspiration of them,

1:21:25

whether you get to meet them and hug them or

1:21:27

not, but learn what they did, learn all about

1:21:29

what they did, learn about who

1:21:31

that pacer was after them. How did the

1:21:34

next generation of people after Gwen Eiffel get

1:21:36

in there? Figure that out, if you can meet

1:21:38

one of them, and you can get one of them in your

1:21:40

life, and get mentorship, do that. But if not just learn it

1:21:42

yourself, but then when you get

1:21:45

anywhere in that door, your

1:21:47

job is to hand off. Your

1:21:50

job is to put that baton into the

1:21:52

hands of someone else who might not have

1:21:54

an opportunity. It's your obligation not to slam

1:21:56

the door behind you. It's your obligation to

1:21:58

see this as a... race not

1:22:00

you finishing by yourself because none of us do

1:22:02

this by ourselves we have

1:22:04

to have people willing to help us let

1:22:07

us in the door hand off to us and

1:22:09

then when we get the baton if you don't

1:22:11

hand it off karma will

1:22:13

hand you back right back where you

1:22:15

started Rev

1:22:59

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