Produced University History professor Randy Roberts examines the relationship between malcolm x and mohamed ali. On wednesday just blocks from the capital well be taking a tour of the Folgers Shakespeare Library in anticipation of the 400th anniversary of the death of williams shakespeare. On friday we are back at politics and prose bookstore for signs journalist report on the spread of Infectious Diseases around the world over the past 50 years. That is a look at some of the author programs look to be as programming covering this week. Many of of the events are open to the public. But for them to air in the near future on book tv on cspan2. Now, new jersey senator cory booker discusses civic involvement and recounts experiences that shaped his political thinking. He discusses his book, united, united with Robert George of the new york post. Host senator booker, united, here we are in the middle of the more divisive president ial election years ever on both sides and you brought the book called united. Why the title, why now . Spee2 . Guest first well, it is great to be here. Its great to be on the tv screen. I appreciate you being here and not making me feel in any way folic lead challenge. Host i shaved just yesterday. Guest make me feel good so i appreciate that. I ran for this office crisscrossed the state of new jersey and heard from people time and again, the lament that our country was divided and theres so much gridlock in washington. The lament about the lines that were dividing our country and weakening it. I really wanted to speak to that because so much my personal personal experience growing up in an africanamerican family, tending black church, but also living in an allwhite town i have been crisscrossing lines a lot. Working in inner cities, going to sanford, yell, it showed me as a cross the divide how united we are. Some of the leaders i had come in many coming from immunities like new york taught me the lessons of the urgency of breaking down these divide, or helping people rising conscious and understand the type that divide us our stronger than the ties that divide us. Host the book is like cinematic in terms of zeroing in on interesting people and interesting moments in your life. Tell us about virginia jones. Host she is a remarkable so that is revered in new york, even yesterday people were talking about her. For me i got my phd because of people like her. East harlem, but i decided to jump into newark coming out of law school and tried to find the most difficult street i could find and i moved in a place that was full of drug violence and and i move onto the street and my first reaction was, i was robbed my first moment there. Theres an old saying when you come to all the let you know when you are about to step into the dark space one of two things is going to happen, either you will find solid ground or the universe will give you people who will teach you how to fly. I met this woman who is tough and profoundly wise. She broke me down and rebuilt me. The first moment i had with her i went to talk with her, im cory booker out from Yale Law School and she just did not seem to care at all. With my arrogance i was you dont want my help . Host she had to lecture you. Guest she had to bless me and it did not feel like it was forthcoming. I remember this moment where she was frustrated with me and she took me to the middle of Martin Luther king boulevard and said what you see around you . And i described the crackhouse and a projects in a neighborhood and she said you can help me and she walked away and discussed. I ran after her and grabbed her and said what . And she said you need to understand that the world use the outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside. If you see darkness and despair thats all theres going to be but if youre one of the stubborn people, every time you open your eyes you see hope impossibilities in love, you see the face of god then you can be someone who helps me. And then she just walked and i thought okay grasshopper thats a lesson. Eventually i went back and i became correct now not i saw the problems i was victimized by crime but i went back now with humility and a willingness to surrender preconceived notions, surrender my agenda and plug into her and learn from her, she had me doing work in the beginning and i became like an apprentice to her and what was amazing to me is this woman showed a love and a grits and a capacity to care that i did not fully appreciate until i was writing this book but her son was murdered in this building, and yet she still stayed there and she was leading. I traced the arc in the book and she never gave up. When i get emotional now is that eventually we became partners in taking on something that got convicted in federal court. The buildings spiral out of control because the city comes in and it was being run by a political opponent, chuck james. At the end of this writing this book think and i had a story to tell but i wanted to go back and interview and track down everybody who may have been around in the 90s who could tell me what they observed because i know what i remembered safe and drug dealers, i went back to guys who are dealing drugs forgive me because there are much more than the worst things that they have done. So i find my coming out of prison, other tenant leaders, this is is what i found out about her it was very moving to me and she made me feel like i had to work really hard to earn her trust but one i heard from a leader and she said you got the story wrong, when you left one of your first meetings she turned to me and said that is my son. That so moved me. Then when im interviewing the guys were dealing drugs one of them said at one point, he intervened and alleged that they decided i was a threat and they were going to shoot me. Just a warning shot in the leg is that he put it. But they started tell me stories about how ms. Jones. Host this is when you had moved in to the projects. Guest she was telling these guys leave him alone and that she is aware that again got me very emotional here in and she was calling me family from the beginning. So this is a woman who really shaped me in some profound ways. Not only because of the things she said and her character which is really businesslike, shes a rough justice, but because of her symbol and her example. My lowest moments in those years i had elevators that didnt work roach infestations, all the hardships that for me as a young man were difficult for seniors, children were really threatening. What i found out and what i saw within her was an american character that is the best of who we are. In many ways her elegy to hold united this community has profound lessons for all of us. Host family is a recurring theme through this book, in fact you start with when you learned that your ancestry having gone on Henry Louis Gates program and it goes back to a slave master james who goes back to days of the pilgrims. Then flashing forward you talk about how one of your grandfathers was raised by a single mother, your father was raised by single mother. At that point they had the feelings of growing up as a pastor, you having grown up with two parents, there seems to be a theme of trying to identify the familial links of blood and non blood. Guest right. I saw the chapter i hate Henry Louis Gates because what he did to me was in his roots and partnering with john lewis is like partnering with superman. So is this really comical, humbling connection with this amazing hero. Then this odyssey of finding out that i could trace my lineage back to the earliest americans come into this country, that im directly descended from a white confederate soldier, direct descendent of men who fought in wars moving indiana native americans off his lands but at the same time im a descendent of slaveowners and slaves. This unbelievable tapestry that he revealed to me made me understand our connection including introducing me to my moms first cousin who never knew they were related to a black family because that was a time in the south when you had a lot of lost. Host you had white cousins. Guest so that expanded my view of family right there to know that i could be walking past folks and as louis gates said theres not a black person in this country unless they came in the flipside is theres many whites have black branches and their family that they dont know about. So that expended my idea family but the leap in the discovery was that we are is america a spiritual family much more than we know, we are all tied to each other and influencing each other every single day beyond our imagination. The common way that people give up their powers not realizing we have in the first place that we have power to touch and connect and influence that we dont know. So the story ends with my family now fighting a court case or legal efforts to move into a white town and as my father called it, its one thing and i dedicate the book to the people of this town but yet my parents had to rely on courageous white folks at the house and council. But i had listening to the stories growing up and im a reporter so i want to find the people there and interviewed them so i found this lawyer and i asked him, why did you back in the 60s get involved and he said i remember the day and i said you remember the actual day . And he said monday because the day before was a sunday and it was blood he sunday and i watched the bridge, john lewis and others on this bridge and i came and i said we need to go to alabama and they were struggling lawyers just starting out and realize they cannot afford to solicit what could they do right here right now to help out this Great Movement for civil rights. So they found the spare Housing Council and later they were given the file of my parents. So im not related to john lewis that i know of, not the whites of the black cement bridge. Christians, jews, others. But their actions sent ripples out that almost immediately change the course of my family. These are the ties in this country. My father was a growing up he would say to a single mom who eventually cannot take care of them that he broke that cycle of poverty which i show in the book because of the conspiracy of love. Because all these people understood they cant sell all the problems and all the outcomes but they would never allow their inability to do everything to undermine their determination to do something in this moment. In fact they understand the biggest thing you could do any day is offer that small act of kindness. That community of kindness and love broke the cycle of poverty. Watched my father into the middle class we set all the time im a hard worker, i made sacrifices to get where you but i only debt to all of these people who did that. So that is how we are related in this country. We have a myth of rugged individualism. An idea of selfreliance. I really respect those ideals but thats not what got us to the moon or map the human genome. It was our ability to recognize a common destiny that we need each other. Even the framers, you read the declaration of independence, there is a spirit of interdependence when they say we pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, our sacred honor. Its recognition that if were going to be successful as a country we need each other. We may not be blood brothers but we are brothers of cause and spirit. Host its a interesting story that goes in here, as i said you date your lineage and your greatgrandfather is james from the pilgrim era in your father is ended up taking them by james who running a funeral home he ruins work ethic from them so its from the slave time pilgrim to pilgrim that is kind of a fascinating, almost a perfect line. Guest ive learned in life that there is no such thing as coincidental. Theres purpose and everything and i do love that. Host one of the segments that jumps out is your visit to greenhaven when you are in law school i think its your first or second year at law school, we just take a quick passage here. From your interaction interaction with the convicts there is the obvious feeling, there but for the grace of god go i. I can walk out of the place instead of remain not just because of my own choices but because of the abundantly privileged environment in which i have bled. There is more to my discomfort than that, i was responsible, people were being put into this massive expanding facility in my name and until now i have given it little thought. In criminal cases it is the Perfect People versus or the United States versus. I realize now that we are the people and we are the United States. Peoples liberty taken away, there freedom sees, prisons built and filled again. Now i knew i marched right in and saw key part of the whole, the good, the back, the truth, truth, the lies, how system works and how it fails. What i saw here was another theme this balance between individual choices for which we have to face up to but also the idea of a social responsibility. Can you speak on that. Guest that is the balance between individual responsibility and the ideals of interdependency. I was told by parents that you have to balance those. You have to know that you are responsible for your actions. You are responsible for how your success or failure. You cant lose that understanding. It has to be part of this understanding that you are also interdependent and the things that you have relied on, the things that you have benefited from our blessings that have been yielded by others. So my parents were relentless. My my father joking with me growing up, i was a 18yearoldyearold kid with a lot of swagger, as president of my cap class, football player, my mother would look at me and say dont you walk around the house like you hit a triple, you were born on third base. My father would remind me the blessings i was enjoying, anyone who, anyone who called himself american i dont care what your struggles are, we are better to be born in this country regardless of circumstances than any other place on earth. We are are reaping the harvest of other folks. So the next step in understanding that is the idea of just taking responsibility. When you dont like something in the world i dont care it is mass incarceration or the environmental contamination and not just flint but many towns throughout this country that are facing challenges that plaintiffs facing that are hurting our children right now. I would say that you have a choice to make. You can accept things as they are or take responsibility for changing them. If you know that you are where you are because others took responsibility, even if it did not affect them directly but they took responsibility for civil rights or labor rights, then to be a patriotic american and who swears an oath that we are going to be a country of liberty and justice than you have to be one of those people who steps up and take responsibility. One of my friends who read the book for me at a glial who has written some books that have challenge me, call me out. He calls out a lot of liberal blacks but he told me there so much a death in this book and there are a lot of stories of tragedy one of the young men that died i talk about his decision led him to his coffin. But our decisions did to and thats one of the more painful chapters to write in what joe specht is one of my favorite. Host its like a fatherson issue where the sins of the father on the sun. And thats the title of the chapter, fatherson. Its really me and my father and his son and his father and we are bogged and then his eventual murder and adjust to stabilize me at a time when i was just weeks into the Mayors Office and suddenly it made me reexamine. Host this is a young man who you bonded with in the projects. Guest and the part like with hughes my father we are both raised by a single mom or he was so i bonded with him and it reminded me of my dad and his charisma, his humor, and god have put it right in front of me and then he started hanging out in the lobby of my building and i started coming home and seeing gains and smelly marijuana. It wouldve been in oculus, the marijuana smell is common in my college but we all know we live in america that the Justice System and drug war is fought differently in different areas. Host he didnt get away from it at stanford, nobodys stopping him from coming home from parties. No one saying whos the guy youre paying part four. Theyre just not facing the same Justice System. Blacks and whites use drugs the same amount, no difference. They actually deal drugs the same, some studies show young whites sell young white cell a little more but blacks will be arrested 3. 7 times more than someone who is white. Shocking disparities in our drug laws which means hassan and his friend did not have a margin of error in the way that my College Friends who flaunted drugs did ecstasy, marijuana, you name it, i thought being use. So i thought theres a crisis i need to help these guys but then we are busy people, were professionals, im going to be the mayor of the city and its my dream job in it so important because im going to be an important person i can help people. After doing interventions with the kids i got so busy that i didnt have time to follow through on the mentorships. They were still so gracious and kind to me. I get elected and Death Threats so they put Police Officers in my lobbying kids dont hang out where theres cops. I didnt see see the kids and didnt see them until i got sworn in and days into my time as mayor i was responding to shootings. Responded to one early on the scene and theres a body covered up and this is a lot of things i regret i didnt ask the names of the boys. Human beings on the pavement and i didnt ask the name. I just went went about ministering to the living. I come home that night and i see the Police Report read it now and see the kid a son and put it right in front of me is now dead. So i begin that chapter with the dissent of a community into a basement of a funeral home that i likened to descending into the bowels of a boat and i couldnt handle it, i felt felt like i was choking grief and guilt and i really start the story of these men, two fathers, two sons as i sit and i am am weeping in the Mayors Office at a time when im the most powerful ive been in my life but i feel the worst and i feel like a failure. Host that is striking because its not usually something that politicians on up to. When they feel even if it is not their own faults that they have somehow failed. You show a vulnerability that you dont often see among most politicians. Are you at all concerned that people will feel s