now i know it's raining outside, but when i come to the podium, i really enjoy a great round of applause. let's try it again. you know, we're not although you all are here in the room. there are a number of people who are watching c-span. we want them to get the full experience of being here in miami, even in the rain. we are very cheery about the book fair. i want to thank you for that kind introduction. you read it exactly the way wrote it. very well done. but i'm thrilled today to be to introduce today's authors. i'm going to come to the gentleman to my left in a moment. but before i get there, i'm going to start with robert samuels and going to ask to come to the death.

he is a national political enterprise reporter for the washington post, focusing on the intersection of politics, policy and people. he joined the post in 2011, after spending nearly five years working at the miami herald group working at the miami herald. okay, now you get it. now you're getting it. he is a coauthor of the book. his name is george floyd one man's life. and the struggle for racial injustice, racial justice. excuse me, along coauthor tolu olo rules keeper. i got that right. and if i didn't get that right, he won't correct when he comes up here. just so we're clear, which examines the tragically familiar events of may 25th, 2020, when george floyd was murdered outside of minneapolis

convenience store by a white officer. it also examines mr. floyd's family roots in slavery. sharecropping, the segregation of the schools. the overpolicing his community. and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. please join me in welcoming robert samuels. jones here to let me give the signal. yes. i don't know if you noticed as he was coming up, robert wanted to do my job to let me know that tolu is here, to. and guess what my script says that because he is the white house bureau chief for the washington post, which he joined in 2019 and where he has covered three presidencies he previously worked at bloomberg reporting on politics and policy from

washington, penn and florida and i just mentioned in robert wanted to make sure i knew he the coauthor of george. his name is george floyd one man's life and struggle for racial justice. please join me in welcoming todd. the. next is kerry greenwich. she is a historian at tufts university and the author of black radical the life and times of william monroe trotter, winner of the 2020 mark clinton history prize, among other honors and also the author of the grim keys the legacy of slavery in an american family. the latter covers the lesser known and enthralling stories of the black relatives sarah and angelina graham key, the grim

sisters who were and are revered figures in american history for rejecting their privileged lives. on a plantation in south carolina to become firebrand, anti-choice slavery activists in the north. the book thus offers a collective focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the black gretsky grim kids and deepens our understanding of the long struggle for radical and gender. please join me in welcoming. finally the gentleman joined me in welcoming all of his presenters is ellis coles. he is author of a dozen books on issues of national and international concern, including the best selling the rage of a

privileged class. he has served as a columnist and contributing editor of newsweek. editor page chief for the new york daily news and contributor and columnist for numerous major, including usa today and time. in his book race and reckoning from founding fathers to today's disruptors, he addresses chattel slavery and modern discrimination, exploring how pivotal decisions have established and perpetrated discriminatory. in addition to the rise of dissent formation that has plunged to morrissey into an ever deepening crisis. you're going to enjoy this panel. i now turn it over to them. get them all. a round of applause. and then what are those.

everybody doing? good, good, good. so we're going to tell you a little bit about our book and what we learned in researching the life of george floyd and his experience with racial injustice. we also want to read a little bit from our book as well. do you want to do it first? talk first. i think we should talk. okay. okay. i will read from the introduction of the book, which is titled flowers. give us a little bit of a flight of. the flavor of what we wanted to do with the book. i you, george floyd jr would

express the same sentiment to men women and children to relatives, old friends and strangers, to romantic partners, platonic acquaintances, and the women who felt somewhere in between two hardened hustlers and homeless junkies. two big time celebrities and neighborhood nobodies. floyd said the phrase so often that many friends and family members have no doubt about the final words. he spoke to them. he would end phone calls with the expression and sign off text messages by it out in all caps. all right, whatever, man. the cory lawson said when he first heard big floyd as he was known to friends say those words. i'll talk to you later, man. as the decades he came to appreciate earnestness, as they lost people to gun violence, drug overdoses, police brutality and other trap doors awaiting young black like them as they came of age in a harsh, often

loveless reality. deep. i love you, bro. floyd told his friend their final phone call in the of 2020. love you, too, man. lawson. by this point, we always said we were going to give each other our flowers before. we died, lawson recalled. and that right there lets you know what type of person he was. floyd's emotional declarations were nothing new to his siblings. as a teenager, floyd would give a stop to give his sister a hug and tell her he loved her before leaving his house with his friends just quietly enough to keep the other kids from overhearing. floyd had grown up singing love songs, karaoke style with his latonya. and when they spoke for the last time in may 2020, they reminisced about belting out her favorite tune, reo speedwagon to 1980. hit on loving you. and i'm going to keep on loving

you because it's the only thing want to do as. a young man, perry has family him, had outsize aspirations to become a supreme court justice, a pro athlete or a rap star. by the time his world came crashing down in the months before his death. he had been chasing more modest ambitions, a little stability, job driving trucks, health insurance still in his dying seconds as he suffocated under a white police officer's knee. floyd managed to speak his love. mama, i love. he screamed from the pavement where his cries of, i can't breathe were met with an indifference as deadly as. reese, i love you. he yelled a reference to his friend maurice hall, who was with him when he was handcuffed memorial day evening. tell my kids i love them. these words marked end of a life in which floyd found his dreams diminished, deferred and

derailed in no small part because of the color his skin. i'll stop there. thank you. hi. i'm robert. it's good to be here in sunny miami. you could tell i was dressed for it. i'm going to talk a little bit about may 25th, 2020, because that day we thought we had seen what we thought would be the defining instance of racial discussions. and i'm not talking george floyd there when woke up that day, we heard the story about two people arguing in central park. one woman named amy cooper, one

named christian cooper. you all remember this, right? this was going to be the conversation that we had. so what happened that day? i was talking with a friend and things got a little intense because he was trying to say, well, legally, amy cooper, the white woman who called the cops and claimed that christian cooper might attack her, didn't do the right thing. i got very upset and i said, well, here's the thing. no, if police me tomorrow, my concern is that people would ask, what did i do to deserve? rather than wondering my soul, my heart, my hopes, my dreams, the people i loved. and i stayed home that day. but george floyd walked into a

corner store named cup foods. the world got to know george on the worst day of his life. his last his to the officer who murdering him resonated in the hearts of so many people. i can't breathe. but as told. and i went through dozens of videos depicting that day. there are so many things that he said that stood out and that he wanted to learn more about. he told the to go easy on him because he was mourning the death of his mother, the woman who crying out for that turned out to be true. he told the that he was afraid. go to the police car inside a police because he had just gotten coronavirus and that he was claustrophobic. that also turned out to be true.

and as george floyd was speaking his truth, he looked up and asked the question to the officer, that still makes me shake a bit. mr. officer. he said, why don't you believe me? why don't you believe me? within that single question it encapsulated the heart of our project. his name is george floyd because it was the question of a man begging be seen as a full human being. and the story of a society and an institution that did not see him that way. and as so many people began to, in his name, across the world, we knew that the life, the soul and the spirit of george floyd risked being lost again because we had lost the sense of his motivations and his spirit.

so told, you and i, we did what reporters do. we set out i went to george floyd square place, where he was murdered, where he gunshots. we had dinner with his family. several times accompanied them on some really hard days, ate their sweet. they got haircuts from george floyd's barber, who talked about his deepest turban. he went to church with his brother and tarot cards with his girlfriend, tarot card readings with his girlfriend, who was trying to make sense of it all. he walked the streets where he walked. we partied at the clubs where he partied till the dinner party. we cried with people who, watched him die. and in learning about this man, we learned he was a man that was

filled. hopes and dreams. we learned as a boy he wanted to become a supreme court justice because he believed he could adjudicate the law. we learned about his desire to be a football, his desire to be a truck driver. his desire just to get health insurance ends. when he got too many apples. he was struggling. and drug dependency. trying to find a job to be able to take care of his kid. and he walks into a rehab facility. that's called our turning point turning point was a place that was designed specifically to cater to the needs of black americans because we know so little about how to heal black americans with their particular struggle. so i'm going to read a part of that and then i'm going to hand

it back to tell you who's going to tell you some things. the first day george floyd walked his life skills class at turning point, he realized it would not be typical talking circle. the room was instead set up like a classroom and. the course, which was called black skin recovery, felt like just another chance at college. the classes, led by a man named woodrow jefferson. he was a diminutive former math with whose life had once been overtaken by substances. he believed that black might respond differently to, a setting in which they were treated as intellect tools because so many had been criminalized and stereotyped as uncontrollable, impulsive and stupid. jefferson would pay around the class, giving examples about mr. cool and mr. slick two types of neighborhood hustler is one enviable and assured the other

and subservient subservience. subservient. he then added two examples about how black people operate in the world, bringing up muhammad ali and uncle tom. one braggadocious and bold, the other obsequious and deferential. jefferson did not try to cast aspersions on any of them. he told the class that all four men were trying to figure out a way to survive in a world that provided them with limited options. all four men in some way were broken by racism, searching for a way to find dignity. look at history, jefferson said. have you noticed how people are always trying to profit off us own us? but what about you? how can you find you again?

how can you love yourselves again? it's about finding your purpose. one day, jefferson, a hand go up in the back. it was george floyd's. floyd. finally felt comfortable. feel expressing his personal struggles in a way that he had not been able to plainly say to friends. he talked about how he was that he never went pro. so much of his identity, his self-worth, hinged on the expectation that one day he would be able to play ball. and now body was a mark of pride and a constant reminder of his failures. the physique of a man who tried but didn't measure up. the thing that people most admire did and feared feared. you are lovable, jefferson told

him. you are important and your valuable. you're empowered. jefferson had men stand up. together, they repeated the mantra i am lovable. i am important. i am valuable. i am empowered. one of the things we wanted to do in this book was tell george floyd story as a uniquely american, a story that could fit in the canon of other american stories. in to do that, we had to go back very deep into history, into the history george floyd's family, into the history of the founding of this country. and so we went into the archives. and one of the things we wanted

to answer, why did george floyd come into world in deep poverty? why was he born into deep poverty? had heard the stories of how he grew up as young boy, using an outhouse and living in a trailer park and living in the kind of impoverished existence that is even out of the norm for for for your average, you know, in the 21st century. george floyd was born in 1973, but he spent a lot of time as a child pumping water in a house that did not have running water in, the farms of north carolina. we wanted to find out where that history came from. so we researched george floyd's family going all the way back to his great, great grandfather who was born enslaved in 1820, and his son was born in 1857. his name, hilary thomas stuart and was also born into slavery. but after the civil war, he was able to get his freedom. one of the unique things we found out about george floyd's family history and i'd love to

go into all of it, but i'll try to condense about 100 years of history into a couple of minutes. george floyd's great grandfather actually became quite wealthy from working hard as a farmer in the fields of eastern north carolina. he was able to amass about 500 acres of land over 30 years, which made him one of the wealthiest black men in his community. he was so wealthy that the white people that lived around him had a specific racial slur for him. they called him the rich n-word and he was well known for how wealthy he was. and he was targeted for how wealthy he was. and, you know, between the plessy ferguson ruling in 1896 and the looting of black wall street in 1920, george floyd's great great grandfather had his targeted at a time of racial terror in this country, where it was very common for people who had found wealth, who had found land to be stripped of that land with with very little recourse and we get into it in the book.

but essentially because george floyd's great great grandfather did not know how to read, he was taken advantage by unscrupulous business owners who gave him these very complex business contracts and essentially allowed themselves through some of the unique financial instruments they were able to use to strip him of his land. and then the tax did their thing when when that was done at, the end of the early 1920s, george floyd's great great grandfather had all of his land away, and he wanted to pass that land down to his descendants because. he knew his father had never been able to pass anything down to him. none of his ancestors had been able to own anything because they had all been enslaved. and he he knew that that's what he needed to do in order to build a legacy for himself. and he had that taken away from him. and we found out that over the course of the next generations leading up to george floyd, we see a family of sharecroppers, a family that worked hard for decades upon, but was not able to amass any kind of

generational wealth. they were born poor. they worked hard for decades. they died poor. and that's why george floyd came into the world poor as he did. and one of the things we wanted to answer was for people who think that slavery was such a long time ago injustice. the civil era was. it was a long time ago. we see in the 21st century, the river river, reverberations of that of injustice in the life of george floyd, who came into the world as son of someone who was a sharecropper. not only that, the great, not only the grandson and the great grandson, but george floyd's mother as a child worked as a sharecropper in the fields, north carolina. and so we wanted to showcase how that impacts someone's life when you're starting that far ahead. and i'll just end with one of the words of wisdom to george floyd's mother. having grown up, that level of injustice imparted him growing up. and she said, in america, you are already born with two strikes, and as a result you have to work twice as hard because no one is going to look out for you and. very sadly, as found over the

course of writing this book, those words ended up being very prescient because in george floyd's life, whether it is in the housing system, the educational system, the criminal justice system or the health care system, we found him running into these obstacles, these institutional barriers, these instances of systemic racism. and we see them cropping up and over again. but we wanted to also find the origin of all of that and to do that, we ended up going back deep into history and finding that the origin of george family is the origin of many families in this country that worked hard. but unfortunately, because of racism we're not able to get a fair shot in, a fair shake. and so we hope people read the book because there's so much more in in there that we can't get to this this evening. but we did think it was very important to be able to showcase that this book is a work of history. it's an american story, and it's a story that is uniquely american. and george floyd's death was a uniquely american, but it was important for us to also know

that his life was uniquely american as well. thank you so. well. wow, what an american story. what an american story i'm proud of. you guys are able to pull that together and a hell of a couple of weeks we've been through and i'm not even talking about the stable genius who acquired twitter and has been and then and then decided to bring the other stable genius back on to twitter. all that i have to say about that is thank god that this man i'm talking about the guy who bought twitter is not a u.s. citizen, was not born a u.s. citizen, cannot for president because we sure as hell want to deal with that anyway. when i say that this has been a hell of a couple weeks, but i mean, is that we did indeed have

that big red wave we were waiting for. but luckily it can find itself pretty much the florida. and. it seems that a good of america decided. they weren't quite ready to end this american experiment with democracy. and as an experiment which, as we all know, has going on for quite some time we used to think we knew when it started i mean before the 6019 projects screwed everything up we pretty much agreed that the. 7076 was when this this dream this democracy launched itself with the with the signing of the declaration of independence. of course. and then, you know, the 69

projects that. well, no, that's not quite right, is that, you know, you you got go back to 69 when the first africans were brought to jamestown. and that's really when it started, because that was the essence of america. and i won't get into the long discussion that, but i would like to suggest that maybe there's another that makes sense for the beginning of this american journey. and maybe that date is neither. 16, 19 or 1776. maybe it's 17 05y 1705 yes. 1705 was when the virginia legislature declared that it was perfectly fine for a white man who own does black slaves to kill them if he killed them and discipline disciplining them for not doing their work correctly. and if, in fact that happened

they should be treated as if that that accident occurred. in a sense that defined as america, the early america, much more than the declaration of independence, which despite the word is all men are created equal. no one really paid attention to that because i think we knew they all knew that it wasn't meant to be true which was reaffirm by the famous or infamous, you know, dred scott decision in 1857, which was preceded the precedent that the predicate for that was that virginia legislature, which all in all but declared that the white that black people no rights, that black folks were that white folks were bound to respect, that way of thinking.

finally end it on paper least, you know, with the 14th amendment which was passed that was just ratified, at least passing in 66, ratified in 68, which for the time put, put this idea that all americans were equal and were entitled to equal rights, and it launched it unparalleled period. our history where you saw black high officials, you saw black lieutenant governors, even a black governor for a second. you know, you saw blacks, senators, you saw black folks at all levels of political society and summit that at high levels of society itself. and that lasted all of four about a minute or about 11 years when the the grand compromise of 1877, which made a republican

and rutherford hayes president in exchange for the republicans given up giving up the dream of reconstruction getting troops out of the south and effect forcing african-americans to go back to what was slavery in all but name. and then we have to really go to the civil rights movement of the fifties and the sixties. when that began to change. and that, of course in the landmark legislation of the 64, 65 and 66, which changed that. and in law but that was around the same time that the goldwater had the i yeah the insight that the republican party to change you know in 1861 goldwater famously declared that the republican party which you know

at that time black folks by and large was typically outside the north were not were allowed to vote of that republicans ought to go looking, as he put it, hunting where the ducks are basically the whole southern strategy that the republican party at that time began in a very dramatic way to turn its back on the very idea of integrating blacks as part of that part of american society as part of that society. and that's when the groundwork was laid for the evolution of the republican party, which ultimately delivered to us donald trump. that's 250. so years of history in like 5 minutes. but that's that race and reckoning is about is about the decision that we made as a

country that delivered us to this point where we are now. and i'm going to read a little bit of that, if you will, allow me. in 1965, abraham lincoln, ibram lincoln, martin luther delivered a famous speech on capitol steps in montgomery, alabama in which she asked and i'm going to start reading the second how long will it take? and he was asking, how long will it take until that dream of equality was actually realized in this country? and the answer to the question from the stage is how long? not long, because no lie can live forever.

how long? not long because you still reap what you. so how long? not long. because the arc of the moral universe is long. but it bends towards justice. that final phrase originated with theodore parker, an abolitionist minister from the 1800s, whose version was i do not pretend to understand the moral universe. i cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of i can divine it by conscience and from what i see, i am sure. it bends toward justice. that sentiment is wonderfully hopeful, but in truth, i'm not sure how they are. the moral universe bends. it seems to bend every which way often rewarding those who seem to least deserve it. the arc of u.s. democracy, on

the other hand, is pretty clear. groups that were once considered minorities are in fact gaining a larger and larger share. that's not going to stop in the foreseeable future. and it will in fact mean change, not in the way some fear, but in the sense that we are ultimately going to have to acknowledge that the united is not just white nation and we're to have to stop making such a big deal out of something that shouldn't matter. so called people of color see race somewhat from the way whites do. it's not that we're smarter, but we're smart enough to know that. we are not the problem. we know from having the consequences that bigotry is not a good thing. and instead of running from acknowledging it, we have no choice but to face it. indeed, americans of all colors have increasingly come to recognize that racial

discrimination makes no sense. and it seems that each generation is more enlightened, at least on that matter, than the one that came before. even before of the elders among us seem to be learning what toddlers seem sense intuitively that. the differences of race are trivial and nothing worth fighting about. there is a motto or multiracial array of people who want to be free of the preconceptions of the past, who recognize that acknowledging the importance of racism past and present is not the source of our division, but perhaps of our deliverance, and who accept that a society that refuses to acknowledges missteps is likely to keep going down. the same dark path. one day we'll be free enough. this racial sickness distant enough from the evil spawned by do collectively and creatively focus on what really divides us and why so people support an

economic political order that grants nearly 40% of the country's wealth to 1% of the population that pays the ceos of so-called fortune 500 companies more than 300 times what their workers receive. that provides a few moguls with enough money to buy private shuttles, which they can joyride into space, and others with barely enough to pay their bus fare to work that promises survival of the fittest. health care policies that leave many americans unable to pay for their kids or their medical care. since dawn of time, powerful people have excelled at deflecting blame and responsibility away from themselves and toward those who are least capable of defending themselves. perhaps when we stop focusing on so-called so-called so-called ethnic differences, we can focus on what we do about that. thomas jefferson had a country

to build and realize that it would not be built largely in the real lives. it would be built largely on the backs of enslaved people. so he justified it treating people with animals. why simultaneously articulating the philosophy of liberty and freedom but things have changed today there is no human bondage to justify the reasons for the founders rationalizations. they no longer exist other than to cater the insecurities of those who are determined to blame their problems on people who had nothing to do with those problems intelligent. people are coming to see that catering to the unreasoning resentment is killing us, which is why i believe that we can see beyond the horizon a day when this particular source of the vision will no longer exist. what is more worrisome is another divide that has become impossible to ignore. that is the divide between who accept facts and those who do not, between those who respect science and those who prefer not to. between those who try to weigh long term consequence and those

who don't as has become unavoidable, clear the outcome of some of the major issues. us has a lot to do with our ability to put preconceptions aside and they just reality. the founders didn't much believe that ordinary people were good at doing so, which is why they built so many safeguards in this republic, why they separated the masses from real levers of political power, what we don't elect presidents directly, and why it took the constitutional amendment to get directly the action of senators as political scientist demetrius carley puts it, the founders saw democracy as equivalent to tyranny of the majority or even mob rule. they preferred what they called republic because in a republic, a government delegated to a small number of citizens, the small number will be able to refine and enlarge the public views and their wisdom the best discern the true interests of our country over the century, over the centuries, the united states has moved closer to the

ideal of a true democracy, where, at least in every voice has a right to be at the same time issues have become more complicated. the more difficult the facts to follow. the disinformation has become epidemic, where we a dangerous point where much of the public can't bothered with the task of getting to the truth and therefore puts trust in political propaganda and conspiracy theories while dismissing self-evident facts. the challenge the larger society is understood that the most serious danger to the democracy lies not in our differences, but in failure to see beyond them. a large group of americans has bought into a very specific and odd idea of democracy complete a new bill of rights that includes the right forgo wearing face masks to an epidemic which implies the right to spread diseases, the right to buy and bear powerful military grade weapons, which implies the right to recklessly endanger the life of ordinary citizens and

children the right to reject duly elected leaders in deference to defeat at candidates which implies the right to ignore the will of the majority, the right to dismiss the evidence. global warming and science in general, which the right to kill the planet and pollute the environment, the right to lie about and whatever they like without regard to any harms that doing so might cause. and the list goes on. the beauty of this new bill of rights is that it requires no process stratification. it just requires willingness to jettison the ideas that rights come with responsibilities and that democracy belongs to more than the annoying few. so thank you so much. hard to follow of these wonderful books. so thank you so much.

i will start by saying that this book comes out of the work of black women historians who have come before me, hannah and jones rodgers, jennifer el morgan, ty, miles and deborah gray, white, paula giddings, martha jones, just to name a few and, i'm going to do a little bit of a storytelling, but i'm going to start talking about the genesis of the project. 2016, 53% of white women voted for trump. oft repeated statistic, and i was working on my first book about radical newspaper editor william monroe trotter. and one of the things i kept coming across when i was researching my first book was the name of drinky dry and casey, but not in relationship to the white graham sisters.

sarah green, key born in the 1790s, and her little sister angelina, born in 1805. but in reference to archibald henry graham, key african-american, born in charleston, 1849, his brother james graham key, born in charleston, 1850, and archibald is daughter angelina. well, drinking born in 1880 and famous as a leading black woman playwright of the 1920s. and so when i was doing research, i kept on coming across. all this history surrounding them that i had learned as a child from my grandparents. i remember asking my grandmother in second grade. i learned about the graham sisters. so the white sisters, i asked my graham mother, well, are they to the drinking that we talk about? because they were very into like black history? and she said, well, of course were. and i said, well, why don't they write about them together? and she said, well, people don't like to talk about that story.

just look at thomas jefferson. and this was the eighties. so before wonderful work of previous historians, including annette gordon-reed and so as i was working my first book, 2016 happened, 53% of white women vote for donald trump. i started to think, what is the story that historians are not telling given that i'm doing all this research and i keep on seeing these emails using newspaper coverage of the black key brothers and barely mention in these contemporary and by contemporary i mean published 1901 to roughly 1930s, these contemporary use of trotter newspaper articles. the graham key brothers. why didn't i see connections between the key brothers, black and the graham sisters and why and when graduate school did. i only see references to the grimkes sisters, white and references to the graham as to the graham brothers black. and so i begin to reflect on the

relationship that many of these myths that we're talking about on this panel are talking about these ideas of, what america's myths itself ultimately lead to in terms of the damaging effects that can have over the long term. and i started to look specifically this myth as a microcosm of the grim, key family story myths of exceptionalism in the black community, that all that it takes is hard work and money and achievement, and we can escape the ravages of racism ness in the white community in the united states that, slavery was not that bad. if it was, there were a few outrageously violent slave holding people and as a woman just told me in charleston on thursday, my family owned slaves. but they were very kindly slave owners. just thursday. and so i began to be concerned with my book addressing these

issues, placing the lives of people who these myths affect in a very real way. at the center of the story. so i'm just going to start with a brief story of the of the grim case, i think sort of becomes a microcosm. their life. i mean. 1906 angelina. well, jim keith, the playwright, arrived in charleston, south carolina, for the first time in her life, despite the fact that her uncles, her grandmother and most of the adults in her life had been born there. and she was there for the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the avery institute, the first accredited secondary school for people in charleston. if not the south, originally called the tap in school after the new york abolitionist who founded it avery had long been a source of pride for charleston. the first heads of the school were freed. black brothers thomas and frances cardozo descended from those who angela and his grandmother, nancy weston, to as, quote, colored westerns and

quote, they an influential web of family and kin who led charleston's free black artists in in the decades before the civil war, grandmother nancy weston not free until union troops reclaimed in 1865, which and her own three sons, angelina's father and both of her uncles, given the laws of parties secretary ben from were also enslaved, but nancy weston insisted to both her sons and her granddaughter, quote the greatest blood of the south flows your veins. and by this she meant not only the colored westons quote, but the white grumpy family who claimed to own them, the quote unquote colored west and she told them helped found. and avery, in 1866, nancy sister was the mother of the cardozo brothers. and now, 40 years later, angelina's father and uncle returned to charleston as the most famous grim kids in the country to congratulate the avery institute class of newly minted black teachers that spring of 1906.

however, as angelina spent the days after avery's graduation touring the city again for the first time, she help but reflect on everything that remained unsaid behind the celebratory parade, which was organized in the brothers honor and behind one little fading sign that said grim keys, haberdashery. and she heard people found fascinating in the archive. when i was reading it, she heard people in the street whispering that the cabot actually belonged to the failing grimm, the white grandkids who had embraced the confederacy during civil war and whose fortunes had fallen by the end, by the end of reconstruction, when the only public indication had that the white, grim kids and the black families had been there were indeed her fathers who were there being celebrated. and little sign that was in disrepair. that said once home to a great dynasty, by the time she returned her return to her own home with her uncle and her father, she told a friend that she couldn't but feel, quote, a

sense of foreboding. there was a tale there to tell indeed, she wrote to this friend. but said, alas, i will never decipher it. it sweeps over me heavily how i wish. she concluded that it was a story we would tell ourselves both wealthy -- and the poor, both the white and the black. but it will be a curse of our country, i fear, she said, that we never speak its name again. when i first started working on the grimm keys, nana key's words shaped my approach to understand this family's long, complicated and, i would argue, uncomfortably familiar story. like many african americans at the turn of the last century, particularly the so-called colored elite, or w.e.b. dubois, as talented, tells nanowrimo as angelina grimm, the younger one was called, was the granddaughter of both the enslaved and the enslaver. yet she was also the grandniece of two of antebellum america's most famous white women. sarah grimm key and angelina grimm key weld were two of 13

children born to one of the wealthiest and most politically influential slaveholding families in the south. lowcountry. during the 1830 or so, the goes the sisters earned acclaim amongst new england's anti-slavery for daring to speak publicly against. quote, the peculiar institution in which they'd been raised. in fact, sarah's 1838 treatise letters on the only equality of the sexes and angelina's 1836 pamphlet, an appeal to the christian women of the south. both of those became canonical in the anti-slavery and women's rights movement in 1838, after nearly a year of touring the north, speaking on the duties of white women in public reform, angelina graham became the first american born woman to speak before a state government when she, the massachusetts state legislature, on the need for immediate emancipation and women's right to political representation. after the white angelina, the radical anti-slavery activist theodore dwight well, the

sisters moved rural new jersey where they raised angelina's children, where they ran a series reform or organizing integrated schools and they continue to hold women's rights activists like anthony and elizabeth cady stanton, known as, quote, the first founders of women's rights to their first biographer, gary lerner. the group sisters were lauded by their contemporaries for supposedly disavowing their birthright and supposedly sacrificing their wealth to support, quote, the cause of the slaves. these, of course, were the facts that we know but i had many questions again after 2016 and of course, before 53% of white women voting for trump. how was it, for instance that? angela and sarah and angelina and sarah grimsley perfects, quote, horror and feelings of deception and, quote, when they discovered their black nephews were while reading an article in the national anti-slavery standard. so the story it's after the civil war, cookie brothers made their way to lincoln, pulled

themselves up by their bootstraps. the university, they're lauded the press. and sarah and angelina, who are retired and elderly, see their name in the press and go to meet their there. their nephews, according to the grim sisters, this was first contact they'd ever had with their black nephews. according to angelina as well. she and sarah were horrified to discover that they existed and could not believe that their brother henry, the boy's, was a bad slaveholder. he was always such a nice boy, they said. we believed that he would never do such a thing. it was this horror that led them. or so the story goes to meet the brothers, to welcome them into their home in hyde park, massachusetts, and to eventually help pay for their education, first at lincoln and then archie's tuition to harvard law school, from which he graduated in the 1870s. but according to of the available historical records letters, diaries accounts by family and acquaintances, all of which available in the archive,

henry grimsley was a particularly brutal and sadistic slaveholder, so brutal, in fact, that the authorities in charleston were called twice, urging him and pleading with him to stop beating his younger black half brother archie in the the civil war. he picked up the boy, threw him down the street and beat him up and down, coming street until the authorities told him to stop as a child. apparently henry delighted in banging slave boys heads, door jams, causing one enslaved man named stephen permanent brain damage, which eventually that the white grandkids begged sarah angelina to bring him north. this eventually meant that the black man made his way to new jersey, where the grimacing sisters only response to his disability again caused by their brother was, quote, he is lazy. he has the responsibility of a free -- man and he is of no use to us. so that was one question i had. where did that come from then? there was the matter of the grimm brothers themselves, men who ascended the ranks again.

dubois, his talented 10th, only to reveal in private letters, diary and diaries and public speeches, their disdain for. those they referred to as, quote, the -- masses raised by their mother, nancy weston, to see themselves as exceptional to believe that they were, quote, colored westerns and that the greatest blot of the south again flowed to their veins. both frank and rg used the derogatory language that sarah and angelina used when talking about the lowly to describe what the brothers as, quote, the creeping and quote looming in respectability of the majority of the colored people and quote as pastor, the 15th street presbyterian church for instance, frank transformed the institution founded by john f cook as the first african presbyterian church in washington, dc. in the 1840s, he transformed it from a welcoming congregation of, quote, all classes of colored people into a bastion of post bellum color politics, to use the words of one of its most

famous parishioners, the senator blanche bruce, one of those black senators who was elected. i mean, as we just heard about, although grimly transformed 50 street presbyterian into a vibrant center of civil rights community activism, he also his parishioners, particularly black women, forbidding them from teaching in the schools if they were to become permanent members. and the church publicly criticized what he referred to as working folks, shiftless ness and their tendency to, quote, hang bare arms out of windows and, give the white citizens every reason to distrust. similarly, as to the dominican republic, archie often referred to the dominican peasants as, quote, incapable of self-government and, quote, in need of economic interventions from the yankee businessmen. here, he sounded more like a racist white northerner overseeing the confiscation of freedman's land in the 1860s than a black man dedicated to racial equality. finally, there is the question of how the grimkes all of the grim kids during the black women

in their lives. despite archie's support for women's suffrage and frank's public reputation for supporting the national associate of colored women, frank married charlotte fortin, a fourth generation philadelphia abolitionist and public intellectual. in her own right, but discouraged her from continuing her public writing after the couple's first and only child, a daughter named theodora, died in infancy. although privately devoted to lottie, called her lottie and proud of her past accomplishments, frank feared that, quote, the exposure of a pastor's wife could jeopardize what he called the ultimate goal racial, racial, respectable and racial respectability at all costs. there was also the matter of an agreement that woman who traveled to charleston for the first time in 1906. what did it mean that lottie spent all of her life, her uncle and her father's about her past? why? she asked her father if the

grimm sisters had been set. kind owners. why didn't her grandmother ever learn how to read? why? she asked her father's father and her uncle. did they never talk of charleston, except when arrived there at the age of 26? when nana was a young girl and had sexual relationships with women. her father, uncle and aunt were adamant that, quote, this is not the way of a colored girl of respectability. again, he repeated in multiple letters. respectability. respectability at all costs. finally, when angelina fell in love with a man, an attraction that rg frank and her aunt should have been happy about, given their rejection of her sexuality, archie threatened to cut her out of his life forever. the black man, he insisted, was, quote, too dark. his work as a musician, quote, entirely unsuitable. the grim kiss legacy of slavery in an american family explores these complexities of what the scholar saidiya hartman

slavery's afterlives. it asks questions that are as important today as we weep the effects of late stage capitalism and the failed promises on the civil rights and obama era. there important today as they were in the brothers time. how does the racial and sexual violence of southern slavery continue to affect families, communities and the ways in which black people communicate with and understand our blackness? what was the real cost of birthing a post bellum quote unquote colored elite from the rampant exploitation of enslaved black women by slaveholding white men? and what does it mean that capitalist accumulation supposedly, economic success and professional achievement have never been enough to deliver us from america's racial abyss. thank you.

john. questions? sure. we can do that for a while. you're going to moderate? yeah. so we're happy to take questions in in book fair style. there's a live mic in the middle of the room. if you queue up and come up, you can be in dialog with the authors. be shy. look, kerry. i had just finished reading the invention of wings. look familiar. yes. and i found your book. and thank you. this is answer so many questions that i had when, i was reading it to the wings because that book literally made me cry when i just read about the treatment of slavery of slaves.

but your book, it's like it's like watching the of oz and then watching wicked seriously. so thank you so much. well, thank you so for reading. the invention of wings is a is a novel. excuse me. that was written a few years ago, a bestselling novel that fictionalizes the sister's life life. thank you so much. my question is directed to the authors about george floyd. thank you for filling in many of the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of who he was. i guess my overwhelming feeling in hearing his story was just that of profound sadness of a generations of loss.

but what strikes whenever i see video images of george floyd and in whenever he speaks spoke. was profound love and kindness and i was wondering whether words he had every right to be very angry and very and but whatever i see in the media whatever he spoke was was filled with love so i was wondering where did that come from? that's a good early. yeah. you're perfect. that's a that's a really good question you for engaging the text like that. one of the things that ella and i had to wrestle with was nature of hope in the united states, because we see so many people

who are in george floyd's life and so many people were moved to march after his death, operating under this idea that the country could be a better place. it raises the question about why that's like that, why we're like that. right. for the floyd family and i think many black who live in this country, the alternative to hope is a way to plead right. there's something that's almost a defense mechanism about it that operates that allows folks see the sunny side of things. one of the things that was really important to telling me, we started this process was we were very conscientious of writing something that exploitative of black pain or looked at trauma as something that should entertain the mass. and we wrestled with question a lot and we learned at every turn that the answer to that

perennial question, the solution to that worry was the story of george floyd, because we saw in his work, these are the things he wrote. he signed the ways that he related to people that he never fully gave up on the promise of the country. so we tell folks that we don't simply write the story because george floyd died. right. we tell this story because we got to live. and when we got to live. we had the doctor to duty to make things better. that's what the that's the philosophy about the floyd's we're operating under. excellent reading by all of your books are just way out there. but the question is, for most tacos, what's much misinformation does.

the information that just seems to be spreading all over the place how do we get it under and how do we find out what is true and what is fiction that could easily become a two hour long discussion? i think that there just a couple of realities that are worth acknowledging. i mean, that the impact of social has been huge because social media and i'm going to generalize here, but communicates in large measure, in very short, abbreviated and very emotional ways and in polarizing ways. you know, and it makes it very easy. to one people for people isolate themselves and only see what they want to see and to it puts,

you know, some crazy nuts sitting around writing stuff in his pajamas on a level with the washington post because all get delivered in the same way and there is just this glop of stuff, you know, that comes that. people are so that puts a huge responsibility us as individuals and a responsible that many of us are not prepared to assume, which is pay a lot of attention to the sources that we are we're reading. and i think it also puts huge burden on educate others to to teach in such a way that they students something not only about research and verifying, but also about critical thinking. we have a serious critical thinking problem you know, in this country and the better we get at that, the better it's going to be. but the part of the acknowledgment that there are some people who don't want the

truth, who don't want to clarify, why right from wrong, we just want to see affirm what they already believe. and we are in age where that is inevitable and. they will find that affirmation. and god willing, i'm i mean, most of my previous book this was the history of the first amendment. it was a book called the short life and curious of free speech in america. i believe very much in free speech. but what i don't believe is that free speech corrects itself automatically. i don't believe that good speech necessarily out bad speech and i'm fully aware that the first amendment, which people loved to cite, though, many, many don't understand what it says and does not declare, that companies cannot moderate their content does not declare there cannot be

rules defined to govern. how a community governs itself. and think we need much more of that. i think we as citizens need to be much more outspoken about that. i mean, that's only a small part of that answer. but i think, as i said, i think a big part of the answer is ultimately, you're going to fall on us as individual issues because we're going to be hit with all of this nonsense. and it's going to be up to us to try to make sense out of as best we can and fund the humanities. right. i mean, that's that's that's a blunt way of saying it. but, you know, the the horrible thing is and not to get too much on the soapbox, you know, students are not in i teach college students are not getting critical thinking because we've cut english we've got drama, we've cut any kind of semblance, an education that is designed to make you think. right. and so support the humanities. support books and support libraries because that's i mean, that's the only the only way.

and and that's what i mean when i say that that alone could be the subject of a of very long dialog. thank thank you all for your presentations and your work. i was sitting wrestling with this question, but the last question has encouraged me to go ahead and ask it. i honor if you decide not to answer it. and this is for authors of the book on george floyd's life. i really thank for your efforts in telling his story and attempting to uplift his humanity. but i'm struck by the fact that your work is also competing with a media project that is doing something different. i will not name it. i wonder if you have any critique based on the deep work you have dan done on telling the story of his life of, that other project, either specifically or more generally when it comes to telling the story of the lives of people from trayvon martin to

mike brown to freddie gray, all of whom seem in death to invite the of why they were killed. why is that a pattern? how does your work contrast with the specific alternate narrative of george floyd's life? thank you. thank you so much for the question. i may be a little vague in answering it, but i try to try to do my best. i think for us, where we're a journalist, we work at the washington post and our role often is to seek for the truth. and so we welcome other efforts that are interested in seeking truth, but when it comes to misinformation that counter to what we're trying to do. and so it's very to have everything look like it's on a level playing field. but one of the things we had to do in order to make this project work was do a lot of research, talk to a lot of people. they were more than 400 interviews. that's probably undercount of what we had to do to try put together this narrative.

and so we wanted to be able to be able to stand on on this research and say that everything that we wrote can be backed up. it's factual. it's backed up by interviews it's backed up by research is backed by archival information. and so it's hard it's hard to do that. it's hard to put that kind of work. it's not as hard to just put something out there just for clicks or just for eyeballs. and so it was important for us to make sure we wrote something that would stand the test of time. we wrote this in a kind of pressed amount of time, but that didn't mean that we didn't spend, you know, hours on end trying to check every fact and have people read behind us and make sure they were fact checking for us and making sure that, you know, this was a vetted effort. this wasn't something that, you know, people were going to come back and say, you know, you got x, y, z wrong. now we're we're human beings and we're not above mistakes. but we wanted to make sure we every t and dotted every and

made sure that we were doing the in the right way. and so we can stand, you know, behind the work that we did and make, you know, made sure that it was backed by research and backed up by evidence and and written with a lot of nuance. you know, we wrote about the good, the bad, the ugly but we made sure to write it in the context, which a lot of times the context is stripped away. people want to drive a narrative and journalists, we didn't come into this with specific narrative that we were trying to push. we weren't trying to, you know, push for specific policy goals, know there's a place for that. and it's important to have that. but, you know, our role restrictions in a certain way. but also frees us from from some of that to really just be able to focus on the truth and that allow that to be our guiding light. and so that's what we tried to do with this book. you know, we know other people are going to come this and other issues from, different angles. and so as long as the is sort of the guiding light of other and we're all for it, but when you get misinformation, when you get

people trying to take advantage of a situation or trying to confuse people or try to justify things that should not be justified, that's where you get into a lot of trouble and where it becomes difficult for. even a book like this, to have a space itself. because one of the things that robert and i run into all the time is people coming at us with misinformation they've heard online or that they've heard elsewhere, either about george floyd, about his past about the black lives matter movement, about any number of things may be adjacent to our book. and so a lot of times it's becomes incumbent upon us to reeducate people, tell people that this is what we found in our research and that makes it harder to. get people to understand sort of the get through the door and understand. we were trying to do with our book if they already come in with a notion based off of misinformation that had clouded atmosphere. so yeah, i'll put a little bit more sharp of a point on this because i want to be very clear about it, it's very important to us we go through in the book

with incredible detail the nature of how george floyd died, the way we know that this is not something was an overdose of any sort. we go through that we go through the discussions his drug dependency people who are very bold and they trusted us with that information we don't run from it because it's important to understand the context of which in which sorts of things happened. and often time on. now elon musk's internet people ask us, well, did you interview the woman who he apparently assaulted as if we are not journalists and would not the job seriously. the answer that question is yes. we did also they did not. so when we go through the story and we talk thinking about folks in nuanced ways means all of it

because we tell this story in a full way we get a better understanding of who he is and who we are. we're not afraid any of that stuff. so i'm sorry. we're to have to cut off the question here of the time, c-span. but the authors are here to continue the. there'll be authors signing the second floor pass the elevators bookstore for sale at desk outside. i'm sir about that time. thank you so much for coming out. thanks.