Parable of american healing. Ben jealous has spent his professional life at the nexus of social change media and emerging technologies. Hes a former democratic nominee for governor of the great state of maryland, a former National President and ceo of the acp. Former executive director of the National NewspaperPublishers Association and for more than half a decade has been investing in social impact startups. While at the acp, jealous led a series of wholesale changes in how the organization used social media and related technologies to enhance its organizing. He is also a professor of practice at the university of pennsylvania. Jealous will be in conversation with april ryan. Ryan is a white house correspondent, the longest serving black female journalist where shes been covering urban issues from the white house for 26 years. She has been featured, in essence, vogue, cosmopolitan, elle magazine and other top publications. She served on the board of the prestigious White House Correspondents Association and is an esteemed member of the National Press club. April is the author of the Award Winning book the presidency in black and white. Also at mamas knee mothers and race in black and white. And most recently, black women will save the world. An anthem. Please join me in welcoming to politics and prose ben jealous and april ryan. Then its always good to be here at politics and prose. The premier bookstore in the nation. Yeah, we cant get better than that. I want to thank brad and alyssa for having us to talk, particularly in this moment, in this moment, for a time such as this. Never forget our people were always free. This is the part i like a parable of american healing, a parable of american healing. What does that healing look like . You know, the the the need for it is urgent. I live in pasadena, maryland. Its a town that the Washington Post has labeled the most racist town in our state. With that said, cathy hughes and i both live there and we both love it. So and the braxton family is from there, too. Yes. Amen, man. And and, you know, life is always more complex than the Washington Post likes to make it out. Put it that way. But during covid, you know, i really got to spend a lot of time with my neighbors walking our dogs and such. And there was a lot of casual talk about civil war and i decided that it was time for me to write a book that gave people hope and a sense of direction about how we actually pulled this country back together. I know what that looks like. I know what it takes because thats what the journey of my own family. My father was disinherited by most, so his family disowned and disinherited for marrying my mom. My parents had to leave maryland because their marriage was against the law and i grew up kind of on a bridge between the north and the south, black and white, even the old world, the east coast, and kind of the cutting edge of california. And my parents, ive watched them kind of healed themselves here, healed their own families. And i decided that it was time to to actually put a book in peoples hands that not just gave them hope, but gave them a sense about how to start taking the steps that actually allow us to pull this country back together, pulling the country back together after hundreds of years of trying to figure out just who we are, where we come from, as people are banning books, banning stories about true stories, about our history, etc. But in the midst of this, as you were talking about, just the genesis of you, i thought about trevor. Noah yeah, born a crime, you know, talk to me about the parallels because what people dont understand, we are just almost 50 years out of getting all of those rights where black and white people could marry, where we had Voting Rights, where we receive the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act that allowed us to go to restaurants on the side of the road, stay in hotels on the side of the road. And i think about this within black history month, i think about these laws that we had. All of them are not here now. And our challenge, like Voting Rights and affirmative action, is being challenged in the United StatesSupreme Court in this moment. But i think about what life was like before these laws were passed. I think about people like charles drew. Dr. Charles drew, the man, the black man who changed the dynamic of what we call the current Blood Donation system in this nation. He died because he was driving in North Carolina before the Civil Rights Act and he fell asleep at the wheel. He couldnt go to a hotel on the side of the road. He died in a hospital because his injuries were so grave that this is the man that created the modern Blood Donation system in this nation. His daughter was a city councilwoman. Charlene drew jarvis here in the city. And when he went into the hospital, they took him downstairs in the black part of the hospital. A white doctor recognized him and took him upstairs, but it was too late. And you talk about a parable of healing. Yes. And that wasnt long ago. So in this moment, as we watch Sarah Huckabee sanders and her response, i mean, it was it was more than harsh for some. For others, thats what they want in this nation. Shes the governor of the state of arkansas. She spoke of banning a latin exit, but yet shes talking about freedoms and and talking about the little rock nine. Who are we as a nation . Who are we . Well, you know, youre talking about trevor noah in south africa and apartheid and segregation obviously are kind of mirror images. Yes. And the anc was actually modeled on the structure of the acp when it was founded, but it evolved very differently the way if you take the same plant and you planted in different soil, it can grow very differently. For me, though, it was important to get back beyond the start of segregation, to understand like what we had emerged out of, because segregation was so unnaturally sterile. Like, my mom was 14 when she made her first white friend. Thats insane. In a country that has many white people as well. You can live in the space so black. And my father similarly, you know, the presumption was that up in maine, he wouldnt have had any black friends and most of his friends didnt. But his father had crossed that racial barrier as a doctor. He was the only white doctor who would do. House visits into black communities up there. Thats why they actually grew up with a bunch of black friends. But that was my mom. It was very you know, she found herself dating my dad. It was like he proposed to her at the end of the first week. Wow. And she was like, hold up. Like, i didnt plan on, like, going on a date with a white guy, let alone marrying one. And he would ask two more times in two weeks, and she would say, yes, theyve been together for 66 years, 66, yeah. She broke up with the black racecar driver after she said yes. So it was it was a whirlwind. Yeah, it was a whirlwind. It was yeah. It was a whirlwind romance. She has she has no regrets, but when i when i got back beyond it, into the time of slavery, into the period between the end of reconstruction and the start of jim crow, what i realized was the lesson that dr. King was trying to teach us at the end of his life, that race ism. Yes. Is everything we experience as black people are people of color. And yet it is also a wedge that is driven to divide people and keep them from uniting. Thats what he was trying to teach us in the poor peoples campaign. That was the point. He was assassinated. And then i stop for a second and i said, dr. King was an assassin and desegregation effort. He was assassinated trying to unite the poor, black and white of all the black panther leaders who were assassinated. Fred hampton was the one where the police planned the execution. It was like the most aggressive, the most horrendous of all of them. What was he trying to do . You night the young patriots, poor whites and the black panthers before for medgar evers, there was harry moore and harriet moore, 1951. And we choose to remember harry moore is maybe his most famous. I was president of florida, acp, blown up by the ku klux klan along with his wife christmas night, 1951. One of their daughters left in college park when i was president , i met her. She was 80. She was still a shell of a, you know, really just tremendously transformed by the fact that her parents had gone to bed on christmas night and then they couldnt even find a tooth there. Was that much dynamite. But what we forget about harry moore is he was also the president of the florida Progressive Party. He had registered a million voters the year before. He was trying to unite poor folks, black and white and and when i got back into to the period before jim crow, my mind started exploding. April, like every two days, i was doing research. And this is this goes way back. You get into the confederacy. You i mean, its this this book goes way back. But keep going. Im sorry, because im into history like this. I mean, look, first like like the first thing, im like, just unsettling me was i figured out that robert de lee was my cousin and who else . Who else is your cousin . Cheney. How long were you in Barack Obamas cheney . Thurgood marshall. I mean, and Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson and and apparently james hemings. Sally hemings. Yeah. Apparently, her kids because were because were cousins to Thomas Jefferson. Right. I used to i used to joke that my family was was black like in the jeffersonian model of blackness until i figured out he was our cousin. And i was like, this is a joke. Its just its what a what it was, right . And so there were but there was a couple of moments that really kind of blew my mind. The first was i had the will of the last man to own my grandmothers paternal side of her family like her grandfather, her great grandfather. And there were no other enslaved people mentioned in the will except for my grandmothers. A great grandfather. And while it didnt free him, every line that in that paragraph was about protecting him. And i said to henry louis gates, jr. I said, skip, like, help me out here. What am i looking at . And he said, well, based on the dna, based on this and some other records, best we can tell, the owner understands that his enslaved man servant is his six year older brother. They would have been raised in the plantation household together. And while he doesnt have the courage to free him, hes trying to make sure that hes not tortured in his old age, that hes not mistreated when the owner dies because the owner knows that hes dying. And his older brother will live longer than him. Well, that just opened up this whole world, right . Because, again, i had viewed all of history against the backdrop of segregation that my mom had been raised in. And like the walls seemed like they were, you know, fierce and thick and there was no and all of a sudden its like, wait a second, the slave owner understands that a slave is his brother. Hes trying to protect him. Well, my grandmothers grandfather would have been the owners nephew and he walked out of slavery at the last day of slavery. Virginia, the battle of appomattox. He walks out and half. Hes 17 years old and tommys doubled that age. Hes leading the black republicans in virginia and im like, where do you get that hubris . Youre born a slave and youre becoming this statewide political leader. And black people were republicans. Yes. Well, its the mass. And that was the Progressive Party at the time. And. This is all part of the equation. Theres all sorts of reasons. But one of the factors must be that he understood that the men that he shared blood with, the men who had led the commonwealth, that had to be part of it. You know, in other words, the knowledge that your owner is your uncle, that hes a proud and outspoken coven cousin. To robert e lee has to be part of your factor in understanding who you are, because edward david bland, my grandmothers grandfather, would run against his white cousin and beat him. And then election after the end of reconstruction. And that was the next thing that kind of blew my mind was we were always taught basically, like, you know, there was a civil war, there was reconstruction. And then there was like jim crow, but nothing happens in an instant. There was a period of transition in between and. When i realized my grandmothers grandfather had run for office in 1880 and reconstruction ended in 1876, and the terror of the klan had been unleashed for four years. And when he would run for reelection, six people would be killed in that election by white supremacists. I realized id stumbled into this kind of like ive been taught a fiction. Ive been told he was a reconstruction statesman. He was a statesman after reconstruction. And then the only thing ive been taught about him is that he helped start Virginia State university. And so as i dug in, i what i realized was a it was after reconstruct action b he led blacks out of the republican party. C they he, he went into partnership with a former confed at general. I just kept getting weirder to create a third party called the re adjusters and they took over the virginia government for about four or five years. The governorship, both houses, both us senators and i was like, well, who is this general and who are the re adjusters . Well, the re adjusters were response to the plantation elite, trying to reassert their control over the state now that the former confederates have been re enfranchised and the and the plantation when a bridge too far they said this civil war debt is onerous. Were going to have to shut down the Public Schools to pay for it without thinking for a second that the former confederate soldiers, the men who didnt own slaves but fought to defend slavery, have been relying on those free Public Schools for more than a decade for their kids to back then, women couldnt vote. These men, both the democratic party, just have their own party, their own party and their name register comes from their demand. Readjust to the terms of the civil war debt so we can keep our Public Schools. Well, it was the black reconstruction statesmen that started those schools and so as the leader of that group of people, my grandmothers grandfather, edward david blaine, approaches general William Beeman and says, lets strike a deal. We want to keep those schools. Ill lead blacks into your party and then youll have enough power when the dust settled that they had a party about 40 white, about 60 black, a majority black party whose principal leader was a former confederate general, whose deputy was a freedmen and and they take over the State Government. Now stop me. If anybody ever taught you there was a period in American History when johnny reb and the freedman got together and took over State Governments and then you got to ask yourself, why didnt they teach us this . This is what theyre trying to keep us from going. Now. And its because the walls of jim crow came up right after that epic. And what would be more threatening to jim crow than the notion that populist needs the need to educate children and feed families was enough for people to get over the hurts of the civil war and unite what would be more threatening to jim crow and future generations was to ratify and make law the promise of sherman. Yes, to bridge wealth. The wealth gap to to have homes, have ownership, to be free in every sense of the word. And when we talk about that, that promise of sherman what was it wasnt a meal, but what was it was 40 acres. 40 acres. Yeah, 40 acres. Yeah. Well, and this is the thing, right . Like, what are those, those registers do and like that for you for five years that controlled the, the government just in the four or five years they saved the free Public Schools, they radically expanded virginia tech, making it what it is today, the working persons arrival to uva, they created Virginia State, the first public hbcu south of the masondixon, and gave it the mission to train black teachers. And they quadrupled the number of black teachers while they were in office. They abolished the public whipping post. They raised taxes on corporations and led the state from a budget deficit into a budget surplus. And they abolish the poll tax. And it was that last one that kind of blew my mind again because the poll tax was woven into the virginia constitution in 1902, you and i were taught, oh, the poll tax was an assault on black political power like that demonstrate did during reconstruction to make sure that would never come back. And it certainly was. It it suppressed 80 of the black vote. Yeah, but you know who else it suppressed 50 of the white vote. And who specifically the poorer whites who couldnt afford the equivalent of 50 bucks today to cast a ballot and who were they . The ones who are most likely to have joined the re and helped the blacks take over the State Government and how long had they had the right to vote . Only since the 1840s. So . So white men who own no land were enfranchised in the 1840s. Black men were enfranchised in the 1860s. And by the time you get to 1880, theyre teaming up and taking over State Governments. And by time you get the 1902, they pass a poll tax to make sure that essentially all of that power is wiped out, essentially outlawing a populist, multiracial movement. Postreconstruction. We saw black men who were in congress, right . Yes. So it is real. But with all of this, as you last year, it was just last year, 2022, you were out out of the white house fighting for voting, right . Yes. Bringing church choir boys and Martin Luther king. The third year and listening to you had fun. I had to cover it. But but and they were going to they loved going to ja