The Blues and National Anniversaries

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh air weeekend. I'm Tona Moseley in Los Angeles. This juneteenth weekend, two conversations about race in America and how the country remembers it Journalist Susan Sulney grew up in a black family in New Orleans, knowing one piece of family lore. great uncle had boarded a train to Chicago a century earlier and started his life as a white man. In piece for The New York Times, she traces what became of him and the secret that split her family in two. then scholar Eddie Gawe Jr.. Ahead of America's two hundred fiftieth, he looks back at the country's other big birthdays and what they reveal every anniversary, the nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face Book Critic Marine Corggan has a few spring releases worth adding to your summer reading list coming up on fresh air weekend This is Fresh air weeekend. I'm Tanya Moseley Last spring, when the news broke that the newly elected Pope had creole roots in New Orleans, and his own grandparents had quietly become a white family in Chicago. Journalist Susan Salmy recognized the story immediately Her family had lived a version of it Her grandfather, George, was a black bricklayer who raised his children in New Orleans his brother Edward was black too but a shade lighter light enough to leave for Chicago in the early nineteen twenties and remake himself as a white man N coming back Susan grew up with just one picture of him, as a young man, barely nineteen, propped on her grandfather's China cabinet Five Words and Crele did all the work of explaining Pass a block passing A century later, Susan set out to find the white family Edward built in Chicago and to see whether what racism had broken together Her piece in the New York Times is called A familyamily Secret No more. Susan Saulney Welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here Take me to the moment you saw the headline. about the new Pope I was at home in Washington, D.C. And I saw this news and like, a lot of America, I was stunned And I'm in touch with a lot of people in New Orleans over different social media channels or text threads, And immediately I saw an eruption of excitement. and I figured that's completely normal for a city as Catholic as New Orleans, you know. But what I began to see is that Hey everybody. He's got roots here He's crele. And I thought, Tony, you know the amount of misinformation That same night A historian in New Orleans, a very well known researcher who helped me on the story, who went on to do that, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans confirmed that news. So it was an amazing feeling Here's what you also recognized instantly, and I find this really fascinating. The Pope's family They didn't just have roots in New Orleans, They moved to Chicago and so did your great uncle Edward Why do you think you never went looking before the Pope headline For this particular story, about your family know, my grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectedveness for him He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky that Edward was doing, and when Edward left he was just a teenager or a very young man in his twenties My grandfather was the oldest and I think felt a real sense of well protection toward him. And that's the feeling that he passed down to all of us. We don't want this to get out. We protect Edward because black men who were found to be posing as white could face. all sorts of violence even debt in the Jim Crow era. So when I lived in Chicago I knew about it, but I didn't look into it at the time because I think I had a little bit of my grandfather's voice still in my head saying, Leave well enough alone What made this moment different, it's the conffluence of a lot of things. It's my mother's age. She's eighty five and she's losing her memory. And I wanted her to know what happened to her uncle and the Pope's announcement and the fact that this generation of Chicago cousins, this third generation They have a new attitude and a new spirit. and I I had a feeling that they might be open to hearing this information and sure enough, My hunch was right eturned your reporter's tools Tard the story, this family, you went back generationations starting with onene of the early settlers of your family, a French wine merchant who steps off a boat in New Orleans in eighteen thirty four Who was that first aggrange that you found? Chock De Grange came from the alpine region of what is now southeastern France And he prospered almost immediately selling wine in New Orleans and almost immediately enslaved. womomen and children. and hisis son went on to be one of the first men to volunteer to fight in the civil warar. So What I learned that I hadn't known was that my family on the French side, they were die hard defenders of the Confederacy And the extent of that had never been clear to me great great grandfather, the colonel. He was one of the first men to volunteer, as you said, in the Confederacy. And by the end, he had like a house that was eight thousand square feet, right? Eack then. a big house Yes And his hands were kind of And just about everything in New Orleans. tr Who was he behind all of that? He was a force in the city. He had amassed a lot of wealth and a lot of economic and cultural power. If you name a board or an organization from that point of time, you can almost be sure that he's on it. You know, whether it was the library or the volunteer firefighters or the French opera different Mardi Gac crews, the people who throw the parades. It seems as though from Reading newspapers at the time, he was very well known in the city. People followed him socially, wrote about when he went abroad and when he went on business trips. People were very much interested in his life. I think to some of the Confederate sympathizers who are still in New Orleans, they looked up to him in some way He had a very complicated life and I'm sure very complicated with relationship with his son once he realized his son was having been relationship with a black woman And that's your great grandfather, Ned. Yes. He starts a relationship with the black woman, which is almost unthinkable at the time. And what surprising details did you learn about that relationship, that family that he essentially built I think we know from history that a lot of white men had secret families or second family or perhaps a mistress, But that's not the relationship he had with Minerva based on all of the evidence that I found He had a very open relationship with her. They were public That's what was different And when they had kids, he didn't hide them. He brought them around town in his buggy. He even brought them to places where his father was a patron, like he exposed them to opera. Ned and Minerva I had something special that I don't think I can even understand now They were both Catholic, they were both French speaking. and I think that Having those two things in common might have helped bridge some of the social gulf between them because you know, even if she was educated and a woman of some means They were not on equal social footing just by law in New Orleans So what they were doing was still somewhat risky and courageous What did you find out about Minerva Minerva's father was enslaved huge plantation south of New Orleans called Bellevue It was a sugar plantation And after the war, after the Civil War The widow who was running this plantation, I'm guessing it was just too much for her. So she started selling off parcels plantationation to people who had worked on it, including some of the formerly enslaved Minerva Davis' dad, smart man piece on credit bought a piece of prrime riverfront property So he became a landowner in eighteen sixty eight, and I have the records to prove it That is to me extraordinary. and imagine if that had happened across the board Now I' imagining he didn't have the cash outright The person who owned this plantation sold it to him on credit and said, I'm sure the land will produce and you'll be able to pay it off And he did. And so by the time Minerva was born, She grew up in a family that owned its land outright instead of having to be sharecropping or or worse. So She had the benefit of some education and a solid foundation, some stability in life when she decided to move to New Orleans, where she met Ned Degrrange Minerva does not live very long. She dies. t the age of forty one. of pneumonia. And Ned takes his children after he can't take them to his home of his white father, to an orphanage. And what does that set in motion terrible turn of events for these children who had been a happy family in Chermay at their mother's cottage on North Robertson Street, knowing their mother and their father. Yeah, Minerva's death caused everything to spiral Ned was all of a sudden alone with four black children in a city with segregated housing and his family is around nineteen twelve. And his family won't open the door to take in these children, despite having eight thousand square feet of space, I might add Um Once Ned's family rejected the idea of taking in the children and he was a white man alone with four black kids. turned to an order of Catholic nuns in the French quuarter who ran orphanages, and he proposed they take the children as boarders. Now I can't imagine the tears, the trauma, the screaming that must have been involved when these kids who had lived a happy family life with their mother and sometimes their father at a cottage inree were suddenly hand it over to an orphanage and The youngest two were quite little. The youngest, maybe just a little more than two. To be institutionalized at what was called an orphan asylum Just the cruelty of it, the awfulness of it. Honestly, once I realized what the place was called that it was the Lafon Orphan Asylum for colored boys, my stomach turned How did your grandpa, did he ever talk about his childhood when you were a kid He told me that after his mother died, he went to live with the sisters, and he put it in very gentle terms and Being a kid, I thought, o, what the sisters like in the sound of music or something like that That couldn't have been farther from the truth, right? The orphanage was pretty grim He didn't tell me the full story. No one did. And I'm guessing that he thought to himself Good would it do her to know about all the pain I've been through We're listening to my interview with journalist Susan Saly. Her recent piece in the New York Times is called A familyamily Secret No More more of our conversation after a break. I'm Tona Moseley, and this is Fresh Sir Weekend I now want to talk to you about is such an interesting step that happen next. You find Edward's family and set up a dinner in Chicago And you write that right up until the last minute, you weren't even sure you could go through with it. You even brought with you to this meeting notes on a piece of paper on how you were going to talk to them Tell me about What happened when you saw them? I was nervous going into that because I was raised by Grandpa George and that little voice was still in the back of my head saying Leave well enough alone thought, you know, if I could talk to you, grandpa, I would tell you that the world is a different place. and that this might be the time to do this. I have a feeling it is. So I walked to the restaurant and I looked around I asked the hostess if the Dgrranges were there, and I see three women who are already like zeroed in on me seem like they recognized me before I recognized them. and Once I laid eyes on them, I knew immediately as well One of the cousins sitting there says, Oh, she's with us. and she tells the hostess becausecause there was something about us that just seemed cousinly for lack of a better word Let's break this down a little bit. What's the story first off that their dad and granddad, Edward told them about his origins told them that he was from New Orleans that he was the son of a French doctor who had or relationship with someone, but then had to leave for France And different cousins on the Chicago side had different versions of story. None of it fit together to make any kind of sense They knew there was some connection to New Orleans. Deen, one of Edward's grandchildren in my generation she actually tried to reach out sometometime around Hurricane Katrina But she had an uncle who was disapproving of this connection. who shut that down, he made it clear that he did not want her to do that. The White Degrranges have a fascinating story all on their own because Your great uncle Edward's wife, Laura She was also passing So they were kind of partners in this cover story. Yes, they were bonded by marriage and their cover stories. Now I don't know if they met in the South or amongst the many consonsiderable number of white passing creoles in Chicago They found each other somehow and they didn't let their children know and When I thought about doing this story, I really wanted to go beyond just saying passing happened because as a historical fact We know that Right? It's already been well documented. What I wanted to do was show the psychological toll. of that decision Edward's line. and on George's line And I thought if I could do that and to show the real lived experiences of an actual family, then maybe I'd be adding something to the conversation It's really astounding to read, especially the white side of your family in Chicago just always knew that they were not being told a complete story. They may have looked white But one detail that I thought was actually sort of funny was told another story. So they're passing, but Laura, one of the sons told you that she was quite a good gumbo cook apparently. and it stayed with him. the taste of that gumbo long after she had passed away He told me that he went from restaurant to restaurant looking for the taste of his mother's gumbo. I mean, w, doesn't that just hit you He was unaware When he was growing up eating that gumbo, he thought his mother was a white woman from Chicago. J found a good recipe, I guess, and to know how to But he said he found the taste of her gumbo once on a camping trip. along the Gulf of Mexico And he had no way of knowing at the time, but he was very close to where She was actually born. Susan, how do you hold the fact that These people that provided lives for you, and I'm thinking about you and your newfound cousins They held so many secrets. They held so much back from you while also trying to provide a good life for all of you I try to not be judgmental about what they did in the past, right? differentifferent time, different place, harsher, much harsher circumstances than I've ever faced And what I appreciate that my grandfather did, he modeled a kind of composure and grace and dignity that we don't see enough of these days He could have been bitter and angry. He could have taught us to hate But he was just a very humble working class man. He came home tired and dirty with brick dust all over him I don't know if you saw the picture of him walking my mother down the aisle in the article in a tuxedo It looked absolutely regal to me. I think the lesson he tried to teach the family was It matters what society takes from you, but they cannot take away your dignity H lost brothers and sisters, lost his parents, Grandfather rejected him They never took away his spirit his ability to create a loving family or his dignity. And that's what I choose to focus on Now that this story has been out, what have you heard from people as far as how they're thinking about this and their own lineages been Incredible to see people encouraged by this to ask their own hard questions and to look at their family trees blank spots or the gaps with critical eyes or more loving eyes, you know, I think Our attempt to heal has shown the possibility of it I see through my cousins eyes now and their' white midwestern eyes and when I talk to them, I try to explain the way I look at things through my black, southern eyes. And you know what Everyone is seeing more clearly now. D. Can you give me an example of that Yeah, we talked about white privilege one day and What it meant to have it? What it meant not to have it And I think the first generation of kids from George and Edward You can see the difference most clearly there Let me explain this Edward Junior college and law school and became a partner. in Chicago, a law partner. George Jr out of school at thirteen to help his father lay bricks to support the family So look at the different life trajectories. between George who was black and his son and Edward who was passing for White and his son byy the third generation, We got together and we look at each other and're like, well, you know, you're a professional person, I'm a professional person. It it seems like we're living really comfortable lives made the difference. And I think my generation had the benefit of things like the Civil Rights Act of the Voting Rights Act. of programs like affirmative actction that were looking for potential and merit in places where they hadn't looked before If we gained any ground to be on somewhat equal footing now, I think because of a lot of the things that ur parents generation fought for my parents generation, bllack people in the South Going into this, I didn't see how resonant the story would be with our times right now today. in that we're seeing some of these things that made all the difference to my generation U being diluted, being attacked Most recently, the Voting Rights Act, which was the signature achievement the civil rights movement. You know, my grandfather was disenfranchised. so There are so many things about the twenty twenties that look uncomfortably to me, like the nineteen twenties I get hope from the fact that we were able to heal this family and the responses I saw across the internet, other people who cheered it, applauded it, said, we want more conversations like this. We want to do more of this kind of thing O here where I am, over there where you are, there was sort of like I got the feeling that people were ready for something like truth and reconciliation. You know, because that's really what we did, the white degranges and black Dgranges. we had a moment of truth and reconciliation And that's something that America as a whole has never done. has never done about its racism problem You end your story with your mother finally being able to speak to her first cousin, Arthur in Chicago Tell me a little bit about that phone call So from the moment I discovered that Arthur existed I knew I wanted to get them together We're talking about an eighty five year old and a ninety five year old, right But it was just so stunning that my mother didn't know she had a first cousin who could have been in her life, you know And she was so happy to hear him when I said, guuess what? I found you have a first cousin. One of Edward's children is alive in Chicago and he wants to talk to you And you know her face just flushed. and she was like, I have a cousin, you know. And similarly, when I visited Arthur in Chicago arms were just outstretched toward me and he said, I would love to know your mother. And so We thought about having him come to the reunion in New Orleans, but he wasn't doing well healthwise. so He couldn't make that trip We decided, let's get them on the phone Faceetime and just let them have a conversation So that was the moment Hello, Hello, Linda. Hello, Arthur and little kids who were meeting for the first time, you know, they had just the cutest conversation and I heard the tone of regret almost immediately Arthur when he said something along the lines of I'm sorry this is happening so late in life, and I wish we had done this a long time ago And I know she felt the same way But you know, that catchphrase that was very popular in the family, I guess that's what came to mind when she said, you know, I would have liked that too, Ce Lavi. Beautiful but bittersweet. Yes. Susan Saly, thank you so much for this remarkable story and thank you for your time It was my pleasure Thank you, Tana Susan Saulney's piece in the New York Times is called A familyamily Secret No More Critic Marenne Corgan, Summer Reading sometimes means catching up on the books she missed earlier in the year Here's her short roundup of some spring books I love reviewing books. But sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory The conveyor belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be wrapped in a review Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring James Lazdon, the familyamily man, came out the first week of May, which is when I read it This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasden wrote for the New Yorker is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alec Murdoch twenty twenty one murders of his wife and adult son. Then came the real life plot twist A little over a week after Lazden's book was published Murdoch's conviction was overturned because of jury tampering A retrial is being scheduled Rather than rendering the familyily man obsolete, This new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdoch case including suspicious deaths and embezzlement Lazden is a true crime writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague, Janet Malcolm Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative Lasdon is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery. The Mystery of evil Harriet Clark's debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May has been getting tons of deserved praise The novel draws explicitly from Clark's own background Born in nineteen eighty Br was eleven months old when her mother, a member of the Radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men Flarark's maternal grandparents got custody and she visited her mother in prison for almost forty years before she was paroled in twenty nineteen ark's main character, Susanna, is eight when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis Every week Susanna is taken first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own to visit her mother in the children's center in Hillcrest Prison. Susanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence Listen Each week, my mother fixed and refixed my hair. I slept and didn't sleep. Around us, women counted down to release But my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward interest in looking back We were, as I saw it Free of the past and free of the future Carnival Day, friendriendship Day, birthday day, the holidays followed their own llting rhythms And eventually, we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life All the while I was reading the hill I kept thinking of EL Dctor's The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope But like doctoro interrogates the cost of parents' radical commitment on their children as well as how the world itself shifts radically Fom generation to generation. Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason Mary Costello's slim novel, A beautiful Loan Howouted as a devastating story about relationships came out in March No, I thought back then, not another Erzat Sally Rooney in time for Saint Patrick's Day But one empty afternoon, I picked it up. reading Mostly because the present tense narration of the main character, Anna struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence Here's nineteen year old Anna, summarizing how Paul An elusive older man sheallll eventually marry keeps her enthrall to what she calls this oscillating life In the middle of the night, he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me and in an urgent, desperate voice says, I love you in the morning He makes no reference to this. And I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words? The Beautiful Lone spans twenty five years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog The writings of Camu and Young and the practice of Islam Like the other two books I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal beach read but it would be perfect for a wash out of a summer weekend Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University She reviewed The Family Man by James Laston The Hill by Harriet Clark and a beautiful looan by Mary Costello Coming up, we hear from Eddie Glaude Junior, historian scholar, and author of a new book called America USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries I'm Tona Moseley, and this is fresh air weeekend. My guest is Eddie Glaude Junr. He's a historian and professor at Princeton University and a familiar voice on the country's hardest conversations about race and democracy He's the author of Begin Again, lessons from the late James Baldwin, and we are the leaders we've been looking for Those books look clearly at this country's failures but still held ono something hopeful But his latest book set sentimentality aside It's called America USA, how race shadows the nation's Anniversaries Glw takes us to the country's big birthdays eighteen seventy six, nineteen twenty six, nineteen seventy six, and now the two hundred fiftieth and shows us the same ritual each time The nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face He goes back to eighteen seventy six, the centennial, with Frederick Douglas watching the promise of emancipation come undone And he argues that what happened then is happening again now It's a book written in grief and rage, and underneath both, a stubborn kind of love of country We spoke earlier this month in Seattle on stage at the Cascade PBS Ieas Festival a day longong gathering of journalists and thinkers hosted by Seattle's public media station Here's our conversation I am so honored to be in conversation with you for so many reasons I've had the pleasure of talking with you many times, our first time though, in person with each other. And I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book. And let's start with the very first page. Sure Before I started reading, I want to just say how honored I am to have an opportunity to talk about this book And this moment with you is so meaningful to me. U So here it is Bterness at the bottom of the cu I do not love America and never have. Eespecially now It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground in the life lived in a particular place in time and in memories that take up residence in the heart I suspect Love of Country is shorthanded for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are Things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be James Baldwin was right Whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it. And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place and of what it might become But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color that somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one's skin determines your value You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself Not because you are obsessed with white people, but because you want to live. that you are not A in word Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, We elected a black president and vice president, look how far we've come Stop complaining. I hear them say You teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country And I trust what I know What I've seen and what now sits in the pit of my stomach One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading from the same man who wrote begin again. Because in Begin again, which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair And in this book in particular, I felt optimism of a truth teller of a freedom fighter It was gone. Yeah. am I right in that feeling in the same way that Langston Hughes we felt in his later writings and in James Baldwin? Yeah, so in so many ways, I'm arguing with with Jimmy In notes of a native son Baldwin says, you know, I love my country more than anything. Ands because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly to paraphrase I never begin there It didn't begin there U Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi. You know, Mhm. But Unrageful There are moments when I'm battling depression becausecause the country has done this again At the end of the beginning, I said, Well, you know, we have to make a choice Right. Will we do this or that and We have a choice to put this moment behind us and And look what we did And now People have to raise their children In the midst of this They've guted the Voting Rights Act the redrawing districts We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption, a second lost cause And you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion And so what I was trying to do With this book was kind of wr some security underneath my feet so that I could actually get this rage under control. to get them My sadness, my melancholia under control Why anniversaries is a way to look at this country's relationship with race? You could have chosen court cases, you could have chosen lots of different ways. What is it about our nation's anniversaries that allow us to see problem so clearly So at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself And so here we are in the two hundred fiftieth and look at the kinds of the contours of the story. Just don't look at the UFC arena. for the G American Fair or the Garden of Statues of Heroes They're going to tell a story. It's going to be a particular story about you know the saintliness of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. And each of these anniversaries The country is struggling and grappling with this contradiction. In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view. The boyys is in nineteen oh three Wote the souls of black fol. And in the souls of Black folk, he says that Black folk see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. This is what he called double consciousness But I believe that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation. that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom. and as a white repepublican And to hold those two things together can't really without contradiction. And it deposits a kind of madness The heart of the country And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary nineteen seventy six, nineteen twenty six nineteen seventy six And by God, two hundred and fifty years later, twenty twenty six I want to spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other. So eighteen seventy six in nineteen seventy six because the dis remembering of the two, I feel like is so potent. It tells us so much. So eighteen seventy six is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy. Yeah It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out this cycle Why is it that we're always returning to this? What's going on And one of the ways I've resolved it is that or I haven't resolved the cycle of the way in which I describe it is, okay, if America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it Well, you fines it by assuming that white people are possessed freedom to give and to take away Oh let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable When I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality. This is my reading of James Baldwin. Baldwin will say, I happen to love and I say this, I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white and then they're white people The point is that we're all we all bear the burden of racialization We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves, right Pople believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. And so what we see is anti slavery movement, right? Folk are fighting against slavery. and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality and liberty and democracy and the like And then once the Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that enslaed the thirirteenth Amendment, what do we get? this debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship. So you see folk who were once Ati slavery suddenly beces fol who are arguing against expeending citizenship to black folk. So eighteen seventy six is this moment. Douglas is Frederick Douglas is grappling with this. He's an example of these freedom stnatues, these people who believe that they can give freedom and to take away. He was born in slavery. you know, he escaped. he witnessed Lincoln signed the Emancipation proroclamation, the ratification of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments, and he lived long enough to see Jim Crow He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness All And then he would say, and he said in eighteen seventy five, I don't want your arms. I want justice skeptical of people who want to do something for us as opposed to with us And so eighteen seventy six is this extraordinary moment, Tona, when the country engages for the first time after the coronners of the Civil War in a national remembrance of his founding and it engages in this horrific at scale this remembering Fredick Dougl was actually invited to be on the Dais with President Grant He's trying to get in. This is in Philadelphia, not in Phadphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yes. He's trying to get in He shows the Philadelphia police officer his ticket puts him on the Dais. The officer says there's no way an N wor should be on the Dais with President Grant. He would not allow him in. If it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conchlin, I believe who sees him and then escorts him in. Frederick Douglas would not have been able to even enter the exposition. Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time. They sit him on the stage and he cannot say a word. He's just there. Silent. So there's this dis remembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over fifty three thousand black people dead by the end of the nineteenth century The country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project My mama I want to take us now to seenty because this is a time period where you and I are alive, We're coming of age How old were you in nineteen seventy six? Eight. You were eight years old. Yeah It's the bicentennial And u The question has shifted by then. This is the apex of white flight. the thick of desegregation fights and It's the first time as you write in your book that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history The question isn't whether bllack freedom should be retracted, it's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial. Can you talk briefly about that? Sure You know, it's just I remember as well I have a photo, I have a vague memory of me being in red, white and blue pants U yeah kit shey seventy six byicentennial celebration was, you know, from red, white and blue whoopie cushions to to a range of things But this is this is a celebration really of white ethnics in nineteen seventy six. Remember nineteen twenty six, there is this real intense debate around immigration And this is such an interesting point in history because this is where immmigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make. And as black people, we sit very squarely in that because we're representative of what the journey of the country itself. Yes. But you know, nineteen twenty six, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the S wholeo countries of Europe. The clan can't stand They are as much against Irish Catholics, Catholicism in particular as they are against black people in the nineteen twenties. But by nineteen seventy six their children are claiming the revolution as their own. Black folk are still large and we're in this moment of deep dissensus, Tona. Water Gate. Vietnam, Black power. the Back stud SDS, there's all of this deep suspicion and skepticism about the country. And so the bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's going to bring us together over and against all of this conflict and discord that's defined the decade of the sixties and the early part of the seventies And is this the first year? Because in nineteen twenty six is the first First time Negro History Week is celebrated. In nineteen twenty six, nineteen seventy six, Negro History Week becomes Black History Month. President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week and then Black History Month There's this debate Because bllack fol are still struggling. A't we to celebrate this Because what's happening is that instead of disappearing black history Black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness You call this book an eleogy Pitched in the note of the blues But I want to know er quickly why the Blues is the right form of the story of America at this two hundred fiftieth anniversary. And I'm going to double this question as well to ask you what you will be doing on july fourth or july fifth Um America has to grow up Kent. can no longer Hide and it's adolescence You know, when grown folk act like kids They're monstrous M often than not And so keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence and what the blues does, The blues takes you to the heart of the problem It offers a tragic sense of the world We don't have to be all angels The devil and the angel is in us all we need to do is to look in the mirror So we need to grow up because if you don't grow up, you can bomb Iran and then tell somebody else to fix it If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites and not hold anybody responsible, right? be You can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent The country has to sing the blues And you know what We've deposited it there since we got here. thing you talk about too is We aren't just a part of of history of American history, we are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is. It's on our tongue. It's in our food We have your country no, no, we in the fullness of our diversity make this place swing. So on july fourth and july fifth We need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own. Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. When you say I do not love this country, actually, this book is a love letter to America You got me Yes, Thank you,indly. Eddie Glaude is the author of America USA, How Race shhadows the Nation's Anniversaries Freshir Weekend was produced this week by Susan Yakundi Fresh year' executive producer is Sam Briger Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorak, Lauren Prinzel, Theeresa Madden, Onique Nazareth, Bea Challiner, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzaales Whistler Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Musley