a junior they they're like we need girls in the humanities yeah so i do there's a little bit like of this trendiness where they push the kids and then can't find the kids they need. and and i just wonder how much is that? okay on that wonderful note, let's call it a day. thank you very much. nice to meet you. heyall. and with that i, welcome to the stage sharon mcmahon annette gordon-reed. hello.

hello. greetings. so this has been quite the time for with this. both have been busy. mm hmm. it's been a busy few months. mm hmm. i thought we would start by talking about how you got here. i mean you have sort of an interesting trajectory. you were a teacher. and how did you end up at the new orleans book stage with a bestseller? a book about unsung but important people? yeah, that's a great question. i still ask myself that question pretty regularly. has that. yeah. when i was in college, course, i had no concept. that i would ever be on a stage like this. i've you know, thought i was going to be a teacher and i was. mm hmm. and eventually, when i finally left the high school classroom, i was busy doing other things, running other businesses, a

family and in 2020, everything in the world changed. right. we were we'd all come to the end of netflix. we'd watched every episode of the tiger king. and there was not maybe the only person who didn't watch it. and there was nothing else to do except argue with each other online. and i started noticing, maybe you're familiar with this. some people on the internet who were confidently. mm hmm. mm hmm. they were just out there. things that weren't even a little bit true. mm hmm. there was one specific moment where of my friends had posted something on facebook, and somebody replied her, alluding the fact that the electoral college was a university one could graduate from. okay. uh huh. where do you even begin? with something like. well, that's a great question. love to hear your take on how

how one might deal with that. yeah, i decided sort of in that moment, i can either argue with strangers on the internet, which we all know not the most productive use of or it's not it's not. or i could start making some videos, making some videos about how things like the electoral college work. hmm. and apparently that that ended up being popular. mm hmm. mm hmm. no, i don't have a good answer for why, and were teaching at this time. i had. i had left the classroom. you left me. you left me? yeah. yeah. so this was in your spare, and you see a spiritual leader at home with nothing to do. yeah, just in my spare. started making some little videos. i thought to myself, well, maybe somebody will be able to watch outside of the facebook comments that, somebody, you know, rather than arguing in facebook comments like maybe somebody will say watch this. yeah.

instead of arguing back and forth. and you just hoped to person by person, maybe combat the person in misinformation. i just education. yeah. maybe some of my of schooling and experience would useful to somebody i never any. there was no master plan. no. there was no there was no grand design of you know, if i make these videos, then i will have, you know, a number bestselling book in five years. mm hmm. you know, that was not, there was no master plan. it was just like maybe, this will be useful to somebody. so how do you get to videos, to the book? well, i kept making videos, people kept sending me questions. and as we were sort of in the run up to the 2020 election, which was a very fractious time in the united states. yes. there were a lot of questions about what's to happen. and i started getting requests,

local media stations, radio stations, tv stations. and i remember one one day it was probably a day or two before the election. the host of a radio station asked me how long this whole thing take because we knew that there were going to be a challenge potential challenges to the election. and i remember saying probably to three weeks. mm hmm. yeah. and the the hosts of the radio station were like 2 to 3 weeks. you know, like, that was an unthinkable thing that it would take several weeks to sort out. but i ended up being right. it did take several weeks to sort everything out. at a minimum. and if it might, just continued to continue to grow. i started workshops. january 6th happened. i started you know, i started book club and. i really did write this book sort of in response to my

communities. like what is the book that i think people really want to read and need to read in this moment? but it was a three year process. so there is a little bit of like prognostication into the of what what do i think people are going to want to read several years from now. and here we are. so why did you think people needed to read this? i mean, what i guess the connection between unsung heroes and misinformation. mm hmm. it's because tell me every by the thousands that they feel like who they are and what they do does not matter. and they feel like nothing that i do changes anything. nothing that do makes a difference. when reality history is full of people who whose efforts, even though they may never have had those sort of grand designs. i'm going to i'm going to change education for black children in

the united states. i'm going to make sure that women have the right to vote, even if they did not have grand designs for changing the course of history. they daily efforts of the next needed thing show us that who we are does matter and what we does matter. and many of these people continue to act as though they had hope, even if it was something they did not necessarily feel. mm hmm. and i think that is that ended up being sort of a message that resonated for people that we need to feel as though who we are. i think an innate human desire, you want to feel like you matter, to speak somebody, right? you feel one of you like you matter somehow and easy when you scroll social media and watch tv to feel like, well, this is we're just all going to hell in a handbasket. mm hmm. there's nothing i can do about

it. like that. it's really easy to feel that way. and i really wanted people to see that and these are just a few stories, the many thousands of people who have changed the course of history just by continuing to put one foot in front of the other. mm hmm. so this is about telling ordinary people that they matter and to show to show by giving the examples of others history that we don't that are unsung and we don't know. so how did you. so i'm interested in how did how did you decide who you were going focus on? mm hmm. if they' how did you know them. some of them. i mean, it's a great question. a lot of them i discovered, you know, just in passing. mm hmm. and i just sort of made notes, their names. i was interested in, you know, like. well, who is that person? her name? just sort of, like, peeked a little pinged a little something

in my brain. you know who's that? and i would make little note of them and then try to research them later. there were some people that i would have loved to include in the book but couldn't help. no. who didn't? who would you like to have included and couldn't and why couldn't you include them? i mean, know there's a there page. everybody can't be. yeah. although it's you know, it's not a newspaper in the sense of you get 12 inches, you know, you you can make it longer if you want. but ultimately, some of people that didn't make it into the book were people who i just couldn't. flesh out their story in the way that i wish that i could have there. in particular, women who whose stories were just never recorded during their lifetimes. there's there's even an aspect of one of the stories in the book. about a woman named anna jeans. and i became convinced pretty

early on when i was introduced to antigenes, i became convinced that her family was involved in the underground railroad. mm hmm. and you? all of the pieces made. like what? what are some of these? they live in the right place at the right time. are they're a wealthy quaker in philadelphia during sort of the height of the abolitionist movement. i can put some of her brothers. she's the of the youngest of six living children. i can put some of her brothers in the room with other famous abolitionists like william. i can see that they donate to the cause. i can see that they attend the you know, like the philadelphia abolition society. so all of that and again, they're wealthy. and so if you know william still personally job it is to raise for the efforts and to publish his newspaper. there's almost no chance that you're not being asked for

resources in that scenario. if you have a wealthy family who aligns with your beliefs, you're going to be asked to contribute. and one of the other things that i found really interesting about jeans was that the jeans family, as quakers, they are very simple, modest lives, but they have a country and at one point they almost completely abandon their country estate. they just kind of stop going there. and there are newspaper reports of a break at their country estate in people steal a painting that anna had had on the painting she had done. and some of the, you know, investigative reports this break in, because anna wants this painting back. she doesn't care about the other stuff, the house, but she wants her painting. some of the other investigative reports talked about how there was food on the table as though people had left in hurry and so

to it it just made my little spidey stand up right like the poor hops the jeans family was that was choosing not to go to their summer home and letting other people conductors on the underground railroad use it as a safe house. why else there be like a meal prepared on the table? we're not talking about just crumbs in the kitchen right. so that is ultimately, like, those are the pieces of the puzzle i have. but ultimate key because anna jeans was she was single. she was childless. she didn't want to draw attention herself. it was against her religion to draw attention to herself. yeah. so there are almost recorded papers of hers or of the rest of family's. the papers that we do have letters that she wrote to somebody and then that person kept it. but they're ultimately least

that i can find after years of looking not a smoking gun that says and we abandoned steeply our country home to allow people to use it for their ground railroad or we escaped formerly enslaved people. stay with us at our home in philadelphia. there isn't a record of that. and ultimately that's true of lot of the underground railroad. of course, there's a huge lack of written, written records. it just in general for a variety of obvious reasons. but that's just an example something i mean, i would have loved to have have had to like tie that up with the bow that would have like i worked hard to make that happen. you know, i had research librarians at all of these universities pulling all of the correspondence they could find that involved her and that part of the narrative is sort of excluded the book because there

no resolution. yeah i could have just said here's my evidence this but i can't prove it. yeah. and ultimately i felt like that felt too little compared to other things that you have where you do have fleshed out story. right you could have it that that wouldn't really be fair to the other. to the other. yeah. and it just felt a like bogus the answer, you know, like a little unfinished. now, do you like sleuthing? i do. i do. are you a good sleuth? yes. yes. i love sleuthing. i feel like a women general are excellent internet. why did she change her picture to be just her and her kids? what happened to her husband? i have two girls that write like we have all been on the facebook where we're like, hmm, start scrolling. where did he go? and then, yes, you like sleuthing. you like writing? i do. well, i. i do like to write. i do so much.

because some people are you know, as a historian, some people who love the sleuthing are not so happy about the writing. and there are people who love the writing and not too happy about the sleuthing. i like to do both of them. yeah. so i just wondered. yeah, i do like it. it's one of those things though that i feel better for having done it than i do during the process of it, like working right. you're glad you did it. but i'm not somebody who's wow, it was so fun in the middle of doing it. mm hmm. mm hmm. that's kind of how feel about it. yeah, i'm glad. i'm glad. i did it. you're glad you did. you feel? yeah. there's a sense of satisfaction. yeah. have you had hunches, things and they've worked out? yes. i mean, there are a lot of dry holes that you're going dig, but it's really when it all comes, it's a really unique kind of brain tangle when you can when you get to some kind of satisfying story. so so where did this come from? i mean, did you learn this as a teacher or are there things that you learned there years of teaching that help you with this process the writing, the

research or just thinking of people to write about? yeah, the sleuthing, i think is just like an an innate curiosity. i'm just like a very curious person, but i i've always enjoyed compiling facts, you know, like that is very like uniquely satisfy in my brain, even as a child, i grew up like a block and a half from the library. i would go to the library and check books on a topic and then devise a curriculum for my younger siblings. oh, sure. they loved that. oh, they loved it. it was great. i remember once devised an entire curriculum. i was maybe eight or nine years old about first aid. and i, my younger siblings to i wanted to teach my younger siblings how to apply a turn, a kit and wanted to have like your your eight. yeah. and your younger siblings. younger siblings. i was like, we're doing

tourniquet practice. yes. and my my sisters not into that. they didn't they wanted to do other things and i remember my barb being like hmm i don't, i don't know that we need to practice tourniquets. so that's probably not, we don't need to have a five year old cutting off the circulation in somebody else's arm. so but there's just there's always been something about idea of like i have learned all of these things and i have compiled them in a way that makes sense that i can disseminate others, even if you're an unwilling audience, apparently still. i'm still willing to force it upon you, even when you're a child. so i think, you know, like looking back at my life i can see the breadcrumbs of this. that's just how my mind works and i enjoy it. so you really left teaching and that's not i mean, you're just out of the classroom. that's right. and you are still i'm still

teaching for failing to learn out of waiting audience metaphorically turning do you miss the classroom. yes, i do. i don't miss to grade all the papers. mm hmm. are there any teachers here? the same thing? yes. i don't miss i don't miss the oppressive bureaucracy there. i don't know any teachers who are like, i love the oppressive bureau ocracy. everybody, like, just leave me alone and let me do my job. but i but there any teacher will tell you there is such a unique satisfaction in the light bulb moments for students, you know, like that. helping them learn something is there's just nothing like it. so i do miss that. and sometimes you're teaching on the internet, it feels more like you're talking to yourself alone. a room which is why being able

to do events like this is fun to be able to see that, oh, i'm not just talking to myself in a room. there are people on the other end of the line. but i do. i miss being in a classroom mostly for that reason. yeah. yeah, there are some things satisfying about that for sure that i but nobody's doing it because the the paychecks have a lot of zeros at end. yeah, right. yeah, yeah. so when you so you going to write a book and there was a point before you'd written a book ever and the point where you started, how you plan this, what was, what was your of action? did you know how many that you were going to include? did you know you know who you were going to include before you started? because a lot of times, i mean, i could start a book and as i'm writing it, new things are coming along. it's evolving as you don't gather all the material and then just sit down and write. how did you how did you plan this out? and did you talk to people about how do you write a book or?

did you just do it? yeah, i, i have a lot of friends who are authors, so i interviewed tons of authors. okay. i, i'm very interested in other people's writing process, you know, because a lot of people are superstitious or they unique quirks about, their writing process. i'm sure you some about your own writing process so that's i've spoken many authors about it but most of them will tell you just get started just writing you can always come and revise it you can always come back and edit, but you have to just start. but i would say that i feel i felt many times throughout this journey almost a sell a sense of analysis, paralysis where i just like i like, i don't know, everything there to know. there's more learn there's more to know. and the the stopping point of where i have a gathered enough

information and it's time to start actually writing that has always been tough for me. do you know what i mean? do you know where you're like, i've now come to the end of what i need to know about bob and i'm going to start writing bob's story that that is always like a difficult hurdle for to motivate myself to get over for whatever reason, because partly because i enjoy the research process so much that it's, it's almost like talking yourself into changing gears and it's like admitting, okay, well, i think i have enough information. and when you're somebody who loves to learn things, admitting that, you know, i don't like, i don't know that i ever, ever feel like i know enough and. no matter how much i have learned about something, i don't feel like i ever know enough so that that's one of my, like, personal challenges to overcome when it comes to the writing process is feeling like you're going to have to start writing,

even though you feel like you don't know enough despite fact that you feel like you don't know enough, you're going to have start writing. yeah. so i mean, yeah. so what did you start with? who did you start with? and is there some i mean, obviously there's order to the people, but is there some thing that you wanted to convey by who you started with? you end with. hmm. i put them together. are these just great lives that you wanted to show and just just got started writing? was there a plan of action. is this one. yeah there was sort of a loose plan that did you know that did change over time the book that i actually writing is not the book that i ultimately wrote. it's not ultimately the if start the book i signed a contract to write and my publishers were extremely flexible and that's always good. you know what, scratch all that. what was it? can you tell us it was

originally? yeah, maybe so. maybe a book that i write someday. but not now, which is book about government for grown. like how government works i feel. there are some people who could use. maybe now is the time, maybe i need an express writing you mean like something next month? yeah, next in the next three weeks. i'm writing a book hot off the. i photocopied it at home. that was. yeah, that was, that was what i was thinking like i can tell some interesting stories from, from history and of use them to illustrate some of bigger, you know, governmental that the united states has. how did we get the institutions that we have and? as i was sort of turning in chapters to my editor, she you know, she was like, this is great.

i love. and then i sort of turned in a chapter that was about virginia randolph, who is one of my favorite characters in the book. and she was like, this is all great, but i really this. and so her know her enthusiasm for, her as a character and her enthusiasm for the stuff that i was ultimately to sort of dig up about her book me into pursuing sort of a different angle together and virginia randolph is somebody that i'm particularly proud of because she she has there's a school named after her in in henrico county, virginia. there's a small museum dedicated to her on school's campus. there's like a little statue of her. she's in, you know, the virginia virginia encyclopedias think, yeah, but i was i i have never i

was able to. quite a bit of virginia's own writing that, i don't think has ever been uncovered in the way that i found it was. i found mention of some educational journals that she was a writer for that were completely out of print. they're digitized anywhere. and i had to locate copies of these very, very niche education national journals. we're talking like from the 1920s era locate of them at a rare book dealer and have them sent to me and, you know, hoping that perhaps her writing was in these because, you know, they're not they were not well indexed. it was. i just knew the name and you know but the time period that she was writing for this journal and she writes a tremendous of

her own stories in these educational journals that again, have never been digitized. and i don't i've never even seen evidence of them at, you know, at her tribute museum, for example. so that very satisfying to me for her to be able to make a three dimensional character out what was mostly just a small encyclopedia entry. uh huh, uh huh. that to me is like very satisfying. like, she's alive in my mind. so you got to this project because you're turning all this material for this book and you give the story of virginia randolph and so did you immediately. was there any hesitancy about switching gears? was not. and so now so enthusiastic about it that you knew it and i was like, if you like this, i love it. yeah. like i, i was thinking i was going to have to convince her that this was a good idea. and ultimately she had enough

faith in me, like we've my editor and i've had conversations about this where she was like, we didn't know what were going to get, but had faith that it was going to be something good. so that's that is like a tremendous amount of confidence as an author who's, never written anything before or at least a book before, for an editor to be able to say was was really a gift. if had persisted in writing the book that i was writing before, maybe it would have been fantastic. yeah, hard to say, but this really was hopefully the right book at the right time. so. but you had a persona by then, right? you'd never written a book, right? but you had you done the podcast. doing the podcast, you are an influencer and you have to explain to me what that is. yeah. and you know, so you had a presence. i mean i had written a book before but there's a, there's an

audience. there would be an audience. that's right. and so you think about people who might be becoming authors themselves. would it be worth it to cultivate ahead of time, do you think? has that how how meaningful or important was the fact that you were a personage before you even started writing that? i know this is like a big thing in publishing, right? is often people with existing audiences often get, you know, the best book because there is a perception that well they already have a bunch of people who know who they are, want to support them, want to buy their book. aren't there was this talk about their work there's a demonstrated audience what they're writing so it's understandable from a perspective why they would seek out people existing audiences. but i also hear from people that it's, you know, like a tremendous frustration for them. like, am i supposed to a year making videos on the internet,

you know, in order to be able to write a book. so can you be of a super writer without being, you know, having a huge audience on the internet? this book festival is full of those people, right? so it's entirely possible. this is just sort of a different a different way to think about, to think about writing book. and because i had an existing audience, i was able to sort of tap into what is it that people are looking or hoping for or want to read as opposed to guessing. yeah. which is sometimes what people who are not out the internet being in fluence are which maybe they're they're there's an audience for as opposed knowing there's an audience for. yeah. so and it doesn't always work though there are many people who have tremendous social media presence, absolutely presences. but write a book and your twitter followers or your ex well, twitter followers or blue

sky or whatever. you're on instagram doesn't necessarily translate. doesn't mean somebody to go and say, that's right, 20 and 30 bucks on your book just because they're following you. i think that's true. yeah. so it's to consider, but it's not a panacea. yeah. it's not going to end. no. you know it's not, it's not a guaranteed success for your book and it doesn't mean that you can't have a wildly successful book, you know, like some of the biggest books of the 20th century, the authors had zero internet followers. so could be successful either way. but i do think that, you know there's this idea in publishing now mean publishers make all of their money on a very small number of titles. and my publisher told me that and she said, you know, penguin random house that they lose money on 90% of the books that they publish. they lose money on 90% of the books that they publish, which is a very weird business model.

it's a very strange business model. like if you went to target and target was losing on 90% of what they were selling, they paying you for to take 90% of what they're selling and then 10% of their products they hope will work out. that's a weird business. and so that is i just like that's a little hard to get your mind around but on the other hand they actually as long as there small handful of you know the john of the world the j.k. rowling's of the world that's keeps publishing companies in business. so i do think in some ways there is a certain amount of freedom that comes in knowing that that like they actually don't expect that my book to be harry potter right they don't actually expect

that i will you know sell million copies of whatever it is the expectation is they just that most of the time they gamble and lose and they still choose to publish things though they know they are not to make money on them because they think the ideas are important, which again is a weird for profit business model it is, but it's run by or for the most of the time for of its history. it's been run by people who love books. yes, themselves. yes. the intellectual and that they see that there's something business is always important, but there's that aspect of it. there's something more there's something more telling. and they see themselves contributing to the culture in a way. great, because books. books last much longer than almost anything else, right? we are still reading books are thousands of years old. yeah. so there is this sort of lasting to a book that doesn't exist, magazines or with newspapers or

with social posts. and i think many publishers think that that's an important contribution to a yeah. so back to virginia randolph. so you've got her chapter that you send off, then you are going down a different direction with this book how did you get the next person. mm first how did i virginia how did she come to your attention and how did her. i'm trying to figure out how you picked these people. yeah. to be. well, virginia randolph was somebody that i encountered, when i, i actually encountered virginia randolph after i became with anna antigenes because antigenes funds a lot of virginia randolph's work. so i like made a note of her name. just do whatever, just lodged itself into my mind. so many of the people are actually related, at least in some tangential. yeah, there are, you know,

relation elements to, you know, the sort of arc of the book that begins at the founding of the country goes up until the 1950s. each one sort of leads to the next. so network matters. yeah, even for people who are unsung they must they are connect plugged in somewhere that allows them to do the thing that's right makes them for it. so yeah. yeah. i think that's. yeah. so a lot of the people i truly did find just when they were mentioned in some little obscure offhanded way where they were not the subject of a different book. i was. and it caused me to go a rabbit hole. clara brown is great example of that. i had seen mention that she was in depicted on a stained glass window in the supreme court of the state of colorado. and i was like, that's unique. there aren't that many human figures aside from religious

figures who are depicted stained glass windows, period. and why would she be on a stained glass window in the colorado supreme court building that just like piqued my curiosity? so i would say i was introduced to each of these people in different ways. there's not one way that i found each one of them, but i, i would say the sort of a special relationship or affinity for each of them, they each sort of fill a different little little piece of my piece of the puzzle, you know, the american story in my mind. yeah. so what do you have to do for each one of them? but what are of the things that piqued your interest enough for you to say all right, i'm going to write about this person. i mean, because there are a lot of people who are interesting. yeah but as you said, you may not have as much information about them. but how did these people what out about claire? i mean, what made you say this person has to go into this person has to go in. yeah well i needed each person

to have some kind of satisfying arc of their own right. so they are connected in some way. but each one has to have a satisfying little story that i can tell about you before. we sort of connect it to something else. so that was an important criteria that each person needed to have sort of that satisfying. it doesn't mean they're all happy, but some kind of resolution that satisfying to read at least some of the people who ended up getting. i would really like to include another example is emma lazarus. oh, i would have loved include if you guys, you guys know who emma lazarus she's a poet and she is the person who wrote the famous poem that is now at the bottom of the statue of liberty. give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to. there's not a lot of stuff about her there is a lot of stuff about her. she was well known in her lifetime. so that qualify her not as an unsung person.

i don't know if she's unsung. i also know that she dies very young. she dies very young. of what we know today is probably lymphoma. and she dies, you know, like sort of the end of her life is challenging for her. and ultimately, there just was not the incredibly satisfying arc of this. this would be a sorry, this would have a downer. yeah. you know what's is how that poem becomes gets to be on the statue of liberty. that's interesting part of the story for. yeah. and ultimately she she doesn't even she's not the reason it's on the statue of she dies years before it's put on there. and one of the things that i think is interesting it is that that it is the descendants of hamilton who responsible for getting that that poem on to the statue of liberty. that, to me is like i love

making those kinds of connections. and you're starting the book with alexander hamilton and then you can bring the descendants of hamilton back in. and this idea of like, you know, the statue liberty sitting in new york harbor, bring in his descendants. that is interesting oh, that would have been a great hook for for a chapter for it. but in the end, she does. at the end. i don't it wasn't enough of emma lazarus his personal development that i felt like was it didn't he didn't the strength of some of the others and and you said at the beginning that whole that not the whole purpose but one of the purposes of this was to serve as these people to be as exemplars for ordinary citizens here. and it's not because the story's carried forward other people in certain ways that that's not that doesn't fit what it is the message you're trying to say. yeah and again it doesn't make her story not worth telling because it is telling. i think it's very.

yeah, this was very interesting what you just said. i love emma lazarus. a story and i spent a long time researching malaysia this is family tree her her her family was very influential in newport rhode island and her her ancestors actually were friends with george washington and attended a synagogue that george washington spoke at and you know like there was a personal connection there. so i find that that aspect of the story interesting. anyway, don't get me started but it's spend the rest of the time talking about emma lazarus. yeah. no, but i mean, just one more thing. i mean, it was a tough to give it up. i mean, there's a there's phrase for people who are not writers and i'm you've heard it. you must kill your darlings. yeah that there are these things that you're writing they're passages that are you just can't get past it is destroying the whole thing. and finally you just have to say you got to go. yeah. now i saw by having a file called outtakes, so i put them

over in outtakes. and so don't feel like i've actually destroyed them but they're living somewhere else. was it difficult get rid of emma or the other people that you may have thought of? i mean, how long did did you did you struggle over it or was it that now this is just not working? no i really, really wanted especially that story about antigenes, man. i really want you want it. i wanted it. but you're right. my editor was like, just copy, paste them into another document. and then be there if you want to come back to them, you know, like the mental hurdle of you're not deleting them from history. sharon you know, as though i am the arbiter of history. you're not deleting them from history you're just moving them into another document. so it is hard when you have spent years something and you become personally attached them. it is difficult.

there one character though in the book that refused to okay and that the page in a share a me my editor like i don't know if we need that i'm like we do the pigeon. and she's like you know she had won most of the other battles she's she's like what if we put the pigeon in a footnote no the pigeon is not relegated to a footnote and i will you that i not long ago i i was walking through the airport on a moving walkway and a man in a military uniform was walking past me in the direction. and he had my book in his arm like and he like grabbed my arm and started like walking backwards on the moving to like, keep up with me, you know. and he was like, i love that picture that was what he said

you know like the man in the military uniform i'm and that is why we kept the pigeon and why we to just for moments like that that. that's right. so my personal interest in the pigeon story outweighed outweighed what any of the other factors. yes, yes so the pigeon story, it was there a particular person that i mean, we we love our children equally. but is there any one that you really, really thought this is fantastic. this is favorite. hmm. i mean septima clark. it's one of my favorites in the book. i really do love her and know you think about people people ask you like who do you love to have dinner with? you know, everybody says abraham lincoln, right? and that would be that would be interesting. you wouldn't turn. yeah. i'm not going to say no but she's that i would love to watch her story. i mean. yeah, yeah. so september clark is, you know, born at the end of the end of

the 19th century and she becomes a teacher because her mother told her that she did not want her to be a domestic worker, that that was too was easy for domestics as they were called, to be exploited. yes. that things would happen to them in the private homes that law enforcement would never care. they would get their wages withheld or they would be exploited from a wage standpoint. there was nothing they could do. she wanted her her daughter to have a job that more steady and more, you know, outside of a private. so she pursued one of the very small handful jobs that were acceptable for women to pursue becomes a teacher and. at the time she was not allowed as a black woman, was not to teach in charleston public schools. she lived she was not even allowed to teach in the segregated schools for children. she has to leave the city of

charleston and teach on one of the barrier islands off the coast of south carolina. and when she gets to first school building, the school building is extremely dilapidated. it does not even have glass in the windows, you know, there are like shutters kind of hanging by a hinge. and really her choices in that moment to either close the shutters and keep the bugs out. and then we're going to learn in the dark or leave them open, get eaten alive and at least have some sunlight coming into this classroom. and of course, the school tremendously lacking in resources, didn't have books or, you know, any of the the children would need. and above the door to the school was name of the school which was promised land school and it occurs to that it certainly would not have seemed like the promised land to september but she had hope that what she was

doing would matter and she was in a time of tremendous adversity, in a place that did value her as a as a full participant. and she couldn't change all of her externals circumstances. and this is true of so many people that i find in history that despite their external circumstances, they continued to act like what they did mattered. and september takes part in a number of important lawsuits involving the naacp and involving equal rights in a classroom, being able to teach in in classrooms in charleston, being paid equally, you know, equal qualifications, equal job, equal pay at the time, even made more than female teachers.

so she takes part in a number of lawsuits. of course, having done that, she catches the eye of, you know, the school board as somebody who is trouble. you know, she's suing them over and over. and in the 1950s, during the red scare, there was a concerted effort to cast the civil rights movement as communist communism. the communist. and that was certainly true of the naacp. its a communist organization is what they wanted. people believe. so there came this sort of edict from high that said you're you have to forgo your membership in the acp if you want to continue working in the school in in charleston public schools and said, i'm not going to do that. i'm going to it's a matter of conscience for me. i'm going to continue to maintain my membership. and she did that knowing that

she was probably going to get fired. and she was she was fired and she says, it just gave me more time to devote to my activism. you thought you were going to shut me up by firing me from the school. now i have all the time in the world right now i even more time than you would you want me to have she goes to she moves away becomes an instructor at highlander folk school and which is an organization that has sort of short term like weekend or week long you know residential where they train as many civil leaders and had septima clark not been willing to to keep her membership in that organization and get fired, she would not have gone to highlander folk school and she would not. had the opportunity to teach

rosa parks and she would not have had the opportunity to teach john lewis. and, you know, some of the big, big names of the movement were taught by september. clark, who had sort of sacrifice her teaching career, her public school teaching career on the altar, the civil rights movement. and, you know, september gets her just desserts in that some day. she's elected to the charleston cook school board. and there's there's no better. there's no bench talk about arc. yeah, that's right. i will get elected this someday. but the thing that i, i keep coming back to and i haven't even gotten all of september's tremendous personal and personal struggles struggles. one of the things that i keep coming back to when i think i think about her is, you know, she lives a long life. so there are pictures of her speaking at a podium and she's

an older woman and she is and next to her is a is a gray rosa parks and standing behind her this was in the late fifties, early sixties. standing behind her is martin luther king. right. so she everybody who was important, the movement knew who she was at the time. and i find part of what's interesting about this sort of study of history is why don't we know her name why why don't we know who clark is if she is in many the mother of the movement, she is she helped start citizenships all over the south helping helping people gain the right to vote, helping people gain literacy skills so that they can the right to vote and ultimately this network of citizenship schools that throughout the entire south there's there ends up being hundreds and hundreds of them and they collectively thousands

of people onto the voter rolls what about it what about her story it has you know made her not one of the important figures in in the books in the textbooks. and that to me is an interesting point of inquiry. how do how do some people get elevated to extremely important roles and how to some people how are some people sort of forgotten about or unsung. at the end of septimus life, people ask her, what have you learned? and this at this point she had already been on the school board and she'd made a lot of enemies in her life because she was. stubborn, right? she's not willing back down and people didn't like that they wanted to be able to control all women especially i was going to say that this is there's a

gender yes aspect of yes. that she refused to be by people and so consider only she there are a lot of people who really dislike her. people ask her, what have you learned? and she says, i have learned that i can work with my enemies because they might. a change of heart at any moment. and i, you know, like i don't like that answer and yet i do. then why don't you like it? i don't like it because i don't want to work with my enemies. you're enemies, right? you're my enemy for a reason. i like you the. i don't. i don't want to have to work with people i don't like some of the people you know. and i make it sound like i have a million enemies. but we all, we all at least have imaginary enemies. maybe they don't know they're your enemy, but in your mind they are right like that.

that's real. i don't want to work with you. but the idea that they. i can work with them because they might have change of heart at any moment, but she had lived long enough and done enough in her life to keep people. yeah. had she had a change of heart at any moment? this was not a plotted tude of like, well, maybe they'll change their someday. pat you on the head she had lived it she had lived people who got her fired from her job who then became a supporter? she was on the school board. yeah, she had seen people actually have changes of heart and one of the ways that she is able to help people have a change of heart is by sticking with that. right. like how are people supposed to have a change of heart if you will not interact with.

and i know this is a it's a challenging topic because we don't want people to feel well, you have to stay in an abusive relationship ship or you have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm like. there is sort of a balance to be here, but notice what steps macaque doesn't say. i let my enemies move my house right? sleep in my bed with me. i gave my enemies all my money. know like there's there is a difference between working with them to do something important on behalf of others and letting them you personally right like those are two different ideas that i think sometimes. people today struggle with you think yeah i think i think if somebody if we would view them as an ideological enemy again an imaginary enemy of like i just really don't like you.

we think to ourselves, i would never work with. yeah you know, delete block, whatever it is we are natural proclivity is to not interact with them at all and i do think that's natural in the human but we have you know big brains allow us to set aside some of our natural instincts for the greater good. and she's a fantastic of people who sacrificed their personal wishes for the good of everybody and i think some of us would well, to remember this idea that i can work with my enemies because they might have a change of heart at moment. it's a bitter pill to swallow in many ways.

it really is. so do you think this is a person only thing? what i wanted to ask in studying these people are some common. so common or they about what they do that makes them special or doesn't have to be. but did you notice similarities? yeah i mean they have you know, varying personality types of course and different strengths and they you know, a accomplish different things. but i sort of a common thread is that none of them sit around waiting somebody else to do the work for them none of them sit around. they're proactive they're proactive. they you know, i like to say that history favors, the doers and not the critics, they're the people who are out actually trying things and doing things as opposed to just talking about things. even if they have no evidence

that what they will will matter someday, they continue to move forward with the with the hope and the faith that what they do will matter someday, even if it only matters to a small you, even if it only matters to a small of people. it helps me to think about how many of these from history that, you know, i, i enjoy studying. many of them don't out to create massive systemic change. they know that doing something for one person that wish that you could do for everybody that that matters. people like virginia randolph i'm sure she would have loved to completely overturn known the systems of segregation. i'm sure she would have loved to

have snapped her fingers and had equality for everyone. i mean, in fact, i know she she would have liked that, but she was not going to let what she couldn't have in that moment stop her from doing what could just educating the children in front of her and educating teachers to educate children in front her and you know, because she just continues to do this and she has a very, very long teaching career. teaches until the 1950s. wow. because she has such a long career and she keeps going. the cumulative cumulative effects of her efforts really can't be overstated. she ultimately trains thousands of who have impacts on tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of children and those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of children go on to have hundreds, thousands or

millions of their own children, you know, like her day to day efforts, even without the fourth out of here's my grandma. master plan of how i'm going to revolution how's education in the south her efforts have had a profound impacts on millions of people who don't even know it who don't even know it. you know i once did the calculations about harriet tubman, who external circumstances were all terrible. and, you know, she's she's not a character in the book, although i love her. all of her harriet tubman's external were terrible and ultimately helps free somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 enslaved people. and then during the civil war, she helped save around 500 people kind of in one fell swoop during her time assisting in

assisting the union. and if you do the math of the number people that she rescued and how many generations removed, we from them today, which is not that many. right. we're talking not at all. not at all. we're talking about, you know, 150 years ago, the number of people who are alive today, whose ancestors were helped by harriet tubman, number in the tens of thousands. even if we don't you know, i don't have the family trees say here are all the people alive whose ancestors helped by harriet tubman. but just taking a small average of people how many how many average descendants somebody might have had? it's tens of thousands of people today impacting. the world whose ancestors were helped by harriet tubman. so what harriet tubman did was one person at a time. she did for one person what she wished she could do for everyone

who was enslaved or for everyone who was fighting for the union in the civil war. and nobody would. at harriet tubman's efforts today and be like, you didn't fix white supremacy, right? we wouldn't say that about her. we wouldn't that lame right? nobody thinks that we all admire her and her efforts so that to me and you can see that with everybody in this book that what they did mattered even if they didn't know it in the moment. it's really important you know i to end here. we're in an interesting time this kind book might get on the nerves of certain people. mm hmm. that i'm waiting special to drop that's going on here. are you hopeful where we're going or is this?

a sort of a clarion call? every individual person to do what can do in their space for. oh, i mean, because three years ago, i would have asked you this question at all because it would have been unquestioned to me that this would be that lots of people would welcome. but right now. we're not in that moment. i know you think about that at all. yeah, i do. and i think it is it's more important than ever for us to know that who and what we are, who we are and what we do matters. and it doesn't mean i can personally wave a wand and fix everything, even if though i wish i could. usually the person claims to have all the answers wants to be a dictator right. they're usually not the person to listen to. the person who's like, i can fix everything that's has not historically done well. but the good news is that

there's nobody coming to save us. and that might not seem like good news, but in actuality it is. it's actually good news because that that we get to do it for ourselves, that we get to be the people that we are waiting for and that ultimately gives me a lot more hope than waiting for somebody to ride in on a white horse with the plan. well, thank you very much. this istonight. i am delighted to welcome john lechner celebrating the release of death is our business mercenaries and the new era of private warfare. john lechner is a journalist and an independent researcher, consultant to ngos and