Really misrepresented what was happening in terms of the regiment . Well, i think i mentioned that the name hell fighter stuck in part because of the band being representative of the regiment. And it was, it not only was a representative of the regiment that came topsy anonymous with the regiment came to be synonymous with the regiment at some point. In fact, a scholarly book, this person writes that James Reese Europe was the leader of the 369th. Not just the band, but of the 369th. This character and he is supposed to be lean the warrens brother and someone mentioned he won this he wanted to kill me now to have improved core and she wears a and i go into a lot of detail about the symbolism of that bill that is the end of any discussion of a combat role of the 369th. And theres a magazine Bill Williamson is reading that says is recognizing the great accomplishments of blacks is to the world of entertainment. That is paraphrasing but if blacks couldnt be lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. It is all about entertainment and that is what the film is about all flow the 369th introduces the film and in fact it goes from showing actual footage of the parade to this sort of sound stage view and it devolves literally in the middle of the film. A couple of black face minstrels but the dance at the armory or whatever it is has these black women dancing to whenever and with sunflowers on the backs they are in black face. The other interesting thing is all the black women are light skinned and the black men can be a variety of shades but black women have to be light skinned. That is the entertainment world, got you again. Let me tell you about the department store, 1934 there is a boys got of boycott and bernsteins department store, dont buy weekend work. They settled but guess what the agreement entails . We will hire black women you got it already, since before you could only be janitors, the law elevator operators that they have to be light skinned. That is the truth. Thank you everybody. Professor, thank you so much and we want to thank our audience for coming out. Thank you, Professor Green of the english department, and the director of the center for black literature and all of our senior military personnel, thank you for coming out and again, this is a Pivotal Moment in our history. We are able to tell our story for real. And not leave anything out, the good, the bad, the ugly. It is all in the book so you need to go and get the book, teach this to your children. We are going to bring it to our teachers so they have it as a resource. Keep this story going, keep this story alive and make it possible for other stories to be told. Thank you again for coming out. We hope to join you again on another evening and thank you to cspan caretaking the time to come out. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv is on facebook, like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers. Watch videos and get uptodate information on events. Facebook. Com booktv. Welcome to jackson, mississippi on booktv, named after the nations seventh president , andrew jackson, the city has been mississippis capital since 1821. With the help of our Comcast Cable partners we highlight jacksons history with local law this and learn about its literary scene. She loved jackson. She felt she knew the people in here and i think she liked it here because they respected her and they gave her promise. She could go to the Grocery Store and they wouldnt bother her, they really liked her and she was quite you go into a restaurant and the the heads turn as she walked to her table. Everybody would be punching everybody. I had one which and call me and he said i want you to know that i talked to my National Office today and they want me to tell you that we dont need to make their business. These are stores that helped the White Citizens Council that is dedicated to keeping you and i secondclass citizens. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we will be demonstrating until freedom comes to negros here in jackson, mississippi. As a child i remember vividly my mother talking about amelia evers, important to know about this, she was always dismayed that nobody had really written about him or gotten account of respect that she thought he deserved, unlike Martin Luther king jr. And others, didnt feel he got that recognition. We begin with a history of Prospect Hill plantation and the slaves who lived there. We are at Prospect Hill plantation which is sort of the nexus of the story of mississippi. It is a very odd story few people know about. It encompasses the u. S. And africa and freed slave colony, the Largest Group that came from this plantation and emigrated to liberia in the 1840s. Prospect hill was found by isaac ross, a revolutionary war veteran from South Carolina who came to the mississippi territory in 1808 with a group of slaves and freed blacks. Some of them had fought alongside him in the revolution and the slaves themselves were mostly of mixed race and come from several plantations in South Carolina and he came here and established this plantation, arranged for the freed blacks who fought with him to buy land in the airy and he set up slave based standards, an egalitarian arrangement. The slaves had a certain autonomy. He was very close to them and he never bought or sold any one, and so the slaves became a tightknit community and when he realized he was going to die and the slaves would end up being sold 0 would become common slaves he wrote in his wills that at the time of his daughters that the plantation would be sold and the money used to pave the way for those slaves to emigrate to liberia where a free slave colony had been established by the American Colonization Society. The American Colonization Society was comprised of two conflicting organizations or groups, one was abolition, it would make emancipation q the slaveholders so there will this was a way to remove a Large Population of freed blacks, wasnt totally egalitarian in its approach. Isaac ross it was the law to free the Largest Group without legislative approval which would not have been forthcoming and he felt this was the best chance they had to sort of control their quest to knee and his daughter agreed, he wanted to keep and in play until her death at which time they would be allowed to emigrate but his grandson contested the will and that is when the drama started. Isaac weighed contested the bill. The young guy in his early 20s at the time and didnt like the idea of selling the familys plantation and giving the money to the slaves and freeing them and so he contested the will, it went back and forth through all the local courts and eventually made its way to the Mississippi Supreme Court and for a decade it was tied up. During that time, as does the we went, a group of slaves became dissatisfied, felt he was going to prevent them from migrating to liberia and they were not going to be freed so has the story went up there was an uprising and they set fire to the house one night hoping to kill him, and the house burned, a little girl died in the fire. He was not injured but the group of 12 slaves who were lynched afterwards from a tree as i was told behind the house by one of the last descendants, so that was the highest drama of the story and after is that, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the slaves essentially, that although it was the property issue the court ruled anyone has a right to do what they want with their property at the time of their deaths so no one could interfere with the freeing of the slaves, so as a rough way to regain control of the property after the state was settled and build the existing house on the site of the original that burned and he lived here and not all the slaves immigrated. There were 300 and about 250 went to liberia, 50 states for various reasons and their descendants still live in the area. In all the documents and even today when people describe it, they call it the repatriation and talk about him going back to africa but you have to understand these people most of them were americans, they had been here four, five decorations so was not like they were just going home, they were going back to the continent their ancestors originally inhabited but it was quite a risk on their part. There were representatives of the Colonization Society there who said the mop and they made their way to mississippi and africana and started from scratch basically and started farming and trading and building the houses but that first year, and i am sure, was really challenging for them and in the letters they wrote back to Prospect Hill, the only way they could communicate with the slaves who stayed was to write Isaac Ross Wade and always asking for we need this or that, we have a lot of shortages, they were accustomed to being provided for and couldnt get everything they needed. Q cant overestimate the challenges that they faced when they went. There were a lot of basically greek revival houses the freed slaves built in mississippi and africa and across the river was louisiana. And liberia which was settled by freed slaves from louisiana. There was georgia, virginia, kentucky, maryland counties and all of those people came from those states in the u. S. So they took their culture, what is a new year, there. They built houses like this one because after all they are the ones who built this house so they knew how to do it. There were a few free slaves to emigrated to liberia who made bad decisions, who enslave local people, the slave trade was still going on and some of the indigenous groups were involved in the slave trade. There was hostility immediately between them and the freed slaves who arrived. So it is sort of like the colonists in the u. S. Under native americans, their approach toward the Indigenous People and they werent allowed to vote, some of them were enslaved. My first effort was aimed at documentation. I went through all the Court Records and started to track down people and had no idea i was going to end up in a civil war in west africa. Was between descendants have the Indigenous People and freed slaves who had been sort of upperclass and had ruled over them and it was like here, old times not forgotten. The story was still playing out in the 1990s when i first started this in liberia. So i thought i will wait till the war is over and then go and see if i confined these people. I found they had settled in a place they called mississippi in africa but it was a parallel universe out there. How can we not know what happened to these people, i have got to find out and eventually it became apparent that war was going to go along. The civil war went on 19902003 so it became apparent the 5 was going to find out how this story played out in west africa i just had to go. Fortunately in the capital of fighting had moved 100 miles out from the capitol when i went and so even though it was a war zone on wasnt really in the middle of the fighting. It just made it more complicated to do my research and lot of the people had been displaced but i found them and ultimately it paid off. I found the local people totally embraced what i was there to do. People in liberia recognized the u. S. Is the old country to them. People in developing regions of the world all over, it is a possibility for advancement to have a contact in the u. S. Everybody wants to talk to you. As soon as they found out i was interested in mississippi and africa it opened doors everywhere. I remember i was in a walled compound, all of these strange people like gun dealers and drug dealers and missionaries. It was the very weird mix of people. The first night i was there i talked to the bartender and he asked why i was here and i said i am planning to sign people who immigrated to mississippi and africana and he said where are you from . I am from mississippi. He said i am from mississippi too. That was a real eye opener to me. Are you talking mississippi in africa or mississippi in the u. S. . He said both. So he felt their story, the story of Prospect Hill was still being told, that was their identity, that they had come and been educated, they had a little bit of money and they have a very complex history too, but everybody that i met embraced me warmly and they were very interested, if anyone cared they know what is going on in the u. S. And they dont understand why no one in the u. S. Understands who they are. They feel such a strong connection with america and most americans who couldnt tell you the difference between liberia and libya. There are people here today who are white and they see the story one way. They are fascinated by may be related by blood to it. We had groups out here that were black, related to the story in a completely different way. My whole goal was to try to include all of those versions of the story because it is a story about access to power. But you can learn about that who was denied access for so long and see what happens when they gained access, since late voters committed atrocities against people because they could, they had the power. When you freed slaves who immigrated to liberia some did the same thing. It is human nature. Some people are going to go too far but it doesnt i know when i would talk about this a lot of times to white groups they would look kind of smug, as they did the same thing. It is not as simple as that. It is just a story about some people going too far and some people trying to do the right thing. You have plenty of both insist we. Race took on a whole new meaning through this story. I dont profess to understand it fully by any means but it made me understand there are a lot of different ways history is told. All you should do is to ensure that everybody has the opportunity which has not been the case in mississippi history until recently. This weekend booktv is in jackson with the help of our local cable partner, comcast. Next we sit down with the director of the eudora welty house, mary alice weltry white. We talk about the optimists daughter please i take what i know for granted. The new is new in the old is old and i feel i am a judge because my eyes and been trained by experience align know where i am as a base to see people moving in their true light. In jackson, mississippi at the home of eudora welty. It is a National Historic landmark. Eudora welty was a writer born in 1909 and died in 2001. She was a writer who won just about every literary prize there was, she studied throughout the world, really, published in many languages of law she wrote some short novels, best known for her short stories. That was the form she most valued, the short story form. She had four collections of short squeeze some of which are not that short, totaling just under 50 stories in the collection. Then there is a short actually to start Eudora Weltys life, she her publication is very entertaining. I personally love that one but also the novel the optimists daughter won the pulitzer prize. Most of her writing she did here. This home was designated a landmark in 2004 and house open to the public for tool is in 2006. I cant tell you how many times people have said to me in the tool or how they would come down here just to hear her typing away and they did. They often did. It was an old manual typewriter. She did quite a bit of work here. This is much like her room when she was here writing. Her typewriter she would make not done anything available, the back of a checkbook or scraps of paper. The address book, she would jot down things she heard, she could be in a beauty parlor or the Grocery Store or she would see something and think of something or hear a name and shot these names down and then she would know not to use the old name in the story because it was a real person. She loved jackson. She knew the people here and i think she liked it here because they respected her and gave her her privacy. She could go to the Grocery Store and they wouldnt bother her. They really liked her. She was quite a she would walk into a restaurant and you to the heads turn and everybody would be staring. She knew the people, if you read the stories you see how well she worked, the way they said things she never wrote about anyone in jackson but she knew the people of mississippi. She was invited to go to a ryders colony in new york. She didnt like it. There were a lot of writers there but as she said they expect you to go to your room and right. That is not how she wrote to. For example she happened to walk into a Country Post Office and she saw an ironing board in a post office and she thought what if someone lived here so story developed. A story about people burning everything they own, going out in the middle of the night, she hears the whistle and asks what is that and theres going to be a breeze tonight. Letting farmers to note to cover their crops. Everyday happenings, the story would develop. When she wrote, she would fight it out and then read it and she would decide to edits. She would read it and she would change a few words and then it in. It was easy to move around this by penning. She saved everything she ever wrote. It is wonderful for researchers, and she changed this. Throughout this process. But throughout history and all of these things, but unlike today when writers do it all on computer and do the next version and the first version is gone. And decent copies i cant say what her legacy is that to me her mastery of the short story form, particularly as it relates to dealings with the internal life people often dont talk about but is there. Her powers of description are amazing, not only the physical description of nature but also the interior dramas going on within the individuals but also between close individuals. It is extraordinary. Also the southerner is the talk about nature but we are used to an audience, we are used to a listener and that does something to our narrative style i think. Up next, author Michael Vinson williams talks about medgar evers mississi