Welcome, everybody live at the l. A. Times book festival. We hope youre having an extraordinary day. Welcome also are friends coming in via this recording for cspans book tv. We are thrilled to be with you. My name is martha jones and i have the distinct pleasure of moderating the panel today. The legacy of slavery through the generations. My first task is to introduce the extraordinary authors. I begin to my left. Carry greenwich is the author of the grimkes the legacy of slavery in an american family. Congratulations on being a finalist this year before the l. A. Times book prize. Rachel jamison webster, author of Benjamin Banneker and us 11 generations of an american family. Welcome, rachel. Williams, author of, i saw death coming, a history of terror and survival in the war against reconstruction. And, the author of master slave husband wife and epic journey from slavery to freedom. You can already hear where this conversation will go and i am thrilled to help facilitate it. To start, i want to ask a question for each of you. It will help us introduce these books. I want to start with the journey. How did you arrive to write the book and when did you know that it was the book you would write . Where did you land . Carry greenwich, can you get us started . Marshall jones work on black women was a transformational piece of my journey of as a historian. So, think you so much. I first encountered the grimke name throughout my childhood and adolescence. I was told the story most of us are told about the grimke in terms of their relationship with enslavement and antislavery. As i was doing research for my first book, black radicals i came across the grimke name all over the black press. Details told in the black press were often about the black side of the family. And they exceptionalism. There were two things. One side, the white family that i was told is this exceptional family. And, the black side that has gone to these heights of accomplishment at the end of the civil war. I wanted to explore if that could be true. These two extremes. Number two, was the legacy of the Abolitionist Movement and the ways in which white women in particular interacted with black women in that movement . And what does that say about the legacy of enslavement generally in families and in communities . Not just in what happens and happened under slavery, but what happened generations afterwards. I think i knew where i was going with the bug when i decided to spend as much time as i did on the roots of the white grimke family in South Carolina that was so entrenched in slaveholding and the atlantic slave trade. I realized this book had the potential to be much bigger than the questions i initially asked. I admire the people on this panel so deeply and i am thrilled to be here. I found out about this ancestry and story in 2016 during the height and season when the narrative of what america means and where we are headed was really up for revision. As soon as i found out about this ancestry i wanted to write these stories because they were amazing. They went all the way back to a dairy made in england that was indentured for stealing milk and a kidnapped and enslaved man from gambia. They went back to the late 1600s. Then the sister of Benjamin Banneker. Of course, any writer coming up on these stories would be thrilled and want to tell them. But i was from the side of the family that several generations ago had lost contact with our black relatives and black ancestors. And with generations of activists and people that thrived and survived. I had to grapple with the ethics of the project. I did a lot of research. I wrote an essay called white lies and fiction that posited my families denial of black presence and black genius in our origin stories that we have written out of ourselves as americans was mirrored in a larger cultural denial of black presence and black genius. I continued to do research and grapple with how i could write more about this and it years later my cousin ed lee harris saw the essay and got in touch and said, we need to talk about our family. That was an amazing moment in my life. It was a very healing moment. Edie had done years of Genealogical Research on her own and was connected to black Family Members. Then i understood the form it could take. Each chapter is a chapter about the ancestors and then there is a presentday chapter about a conversation between me and my cousins about what we learned about history and how we were grappling with our ancestry and the moment we signed ourselves in today. Kidada . I am thrilled to be here. I have been interested in reconstruction since i learned my teachers lied to me in school and when i realized they misrepresented reconstruction i started Digging Deeper and i cannot get enough of it. The story i tell is a story that uses records which have been available for have been available for a long time, for more than 150 years. Historians looked at them, but in a very particular way, focusing on election violence and elected officials targeted by the ku klux klan during reconstruction. When i looked at the records, i realized how much historians and missed. Had missed. The extent to which survivors including men centered their kin in their accounts. They were attacked as family. They testified before congress they told family stories. So i wanted to write a history of reconstruction from the perspective of those families. What i wanted to do, and i knew as the story came together, when i was able to follow families on their journey out of slavery. From the frying pan of slavery into the fires of freedom. And all the things they made and did with freedom and how successful they were and the price that white extremists made them pay. I wanted to center them in the story of reconstruction and that was what i was able to do. When i knew that is what i was doing the story came together easily. Ilyon, please. It is an honor to be here with all of you today. I first encountered the crafts in their own writing, their own published narratives. For me, that was an indelible reading experience. I was in graduate school. I just remember the feeling of that voice in my ear. And, the story just, i mean william and ellen craft were motivated by love. They were actually husband and wife. They go on an incredible journey where she passes as a rich white disabled man and he pretends to be her slave. They journey over 1000 miles to freedom. And thats just the beginning. So, this is a story that was really a page turner. A 60 page page turner. I did not think there stop thinking about it in the moment that i could not stop thinking about it for decades. Something about it, especially the family story. The stories of loss. The feelings of longing they expressed. The dangers. These all caps coming back. For a long time, i wanted to read more because there was a lot the crafts said and there was also a lot they could not or would not say. I wanted to know more. I honestly hoped somebody else would write the book i wanted to read. And i was honestly not sure if i was the one to write the story. But, curiosity got the better of me. I started doing a little digging and scratching at the surface. And i know that my fellow panelists know what it is like to fall into that incredible rabbit hole when you connect to my material this material. This happened for me at a moment of incredible doubt. When i was heading to macon for the first time and it was raining i was thinking what am i doing here . Am i going to do this . I thought, if i see william and ellen craft in the archives i will move. If i do not, isaac i will rest. That day when i was in the macon county courthouse in this strange upstairs area where they improbably let me go to put my paws all over everything, i opened these great tomes that i do not think had been touched for a very long time. But, the pages i held that day, one was a document by which ellen crafts biological father, a document by which he gave his own daughter away as a wedding gift to his other legitimate legal biological daughter Eliza Collins. The way he writes it is he says, out of the love i have for my daughter Eliza Collins i give her this property, the property being his own biological child. When i saw her name on that page and what i saw later that same day a paper by which william kraft, a boy, 60 16 years old and trained as a cabinetmaker. When i saw that page where william craft was listed next to a bunch of a pianoforte and numbered church pews and other objects i thought, i have to know more about the story. Thank you for that. We do not talk often enough about the signs that come to us and tell us, even if that we are if we are at the very beginning of a story, that we are exactly where we are supposed to be in the work. Thank you for that, so much. I have shared with some of you that i am teaching a graduate seminar this semester called the black world. Our focus has been on the history of family, on Family History. Each and every one of these books will be until the next time because you have all really grappled with that. Here i want to ask you about where you think the focus on family. Which is different. As dr. Williams has begun to suggest, it is different than a focus on political history or social history, and uncle monica an economic history, the history of capitalism. All these important threads historians follow in their work. You have each elected to stay connected to and rooted in this very intimate perspective. Maybe dr. Williams you can get us started. You have already begun. Can you say a little more about what it means both as a storyteller and a historian analyzing the past, explaining the past, what happens when we think through the family . When we center families, for me, when we follow their direction, and what i mean by that is, what if they believe was important, who they believe was important to them, then we have a better understanding of how they experience the world. The families i look at during reconstruction, when i realized i needed to trust them and not necessarily the investigators asking questions, not necessarily the historians that have whistled past a certain aspects of their account, when i paid attention to what they wanted known it became clear that they wanted people, meadowbrook members of congress in particular to understand how devastating the violence was to their families. And, what families were losing in the war against reconstruction. I think when we only look at the political aspects of the violence, when we only look at the economic aspects of the violence we lose the personal. Survivors who testified before congress did not have the luxury of looking past that. Many of them say, yes, i lost the vote. But that is the least of what happened to me in my family during the attack. So, when we do follow families, when we do understand what mattered to them we have a completely different his grandmothers, his sisters often that allowed him to be the genius. I want to begin by saying that all of your stories have transformed the way i continue to learn the story of william and ellen craft. I was just thinking, dr. Williams, reading your book, i mean, the crafts, there are many layers to the story. But, they eventually leave the story then come back and start a farming and Educational Cooperative in South Carolina. Then they are attacked by knight riders. Its an event we dont know much about. But, reading your book opened it up. You were bearing such witness that i felt like i could revisit that space in a new way. But, i wanted to invite you all to join me back again in macon, that moment in the courthouse when i was looking at to that deed talking about family. We have already talked about i mentioned how james smith his idea of family definitely was warped. Where he is giving one Family Member to another Family Member. The other thing really troubling about the document for me is that it is a document that not only condemned ellen craft to bondage by her sister, but, it was in perpetuity. So, the language for this is not only would ellen belong to her halfsister, but, her increase would belong to the increase, or, the generations to follow after Eliza Collins in perpetuity. That is a line of bondage that extends then, potentially all the way to the present moment. But it did not. Because ellen craft disrupted that when she embarked on this incredible journey with her husband william. The thing that really moves me now can sit to consider is that line, the crafts were running for their children. One day, they had the children they dreamed of having in freedom. So, they had a child. They held, named, and loved the child. The child held, named, and loved another child. That child held, named, and loved another child and that child held and named and loved children who are sitting will hear sitting here with us today, in the front row, the descendants of william and ellen craft. [applause] thank you for that. What i was hearing in part as i was listening are the ways in which what your family stories do is not only invite us, but, insisted that we pull those threads into the present and that easy notion of the past and present becomes, i think, very blurred, very complicated, but very powerful. We rethought in all of your stories. I hear another threat. That is thinking the liberty about family in black and in white and in all the compact cities we know is the product of violence, of exploitation and more. Early america. You all forthrightly confronting that. I think something about the familys we are born into and the families we make. All of these books do such important work on helping us reflect about what we think family is, even in our own time. One thing that distinguishes our storytelling as historians are these approaches to research. I want to take some time for you to share some of that. You not only center voices and perspectives and past experiences by black americans, we know that is not as straightforward an undertaking as it might be. In your stories, there is something about how much possibility there is in asking those questions. I think some readers might be surprised by how rich the archival record is. I want to start, if i could, with you because i know you began very deliberately, very early in your thinking about the crafts with their words but you did not end there. That was just a start. Tell us about your archival journey. Thank you. I knew if i was going to tell this story, i had to do something more with the crafts then they had already done with her own words. There are areas where there story did not go. One thing was there was a reason they would not tell is because ellen crafts mother was still enslaved by her biological fathers widow. He had passed away but she was still living. Ironically, this womans story is what ended up yielding a lot of the research. A sad reality of the archives is there is this richness but there is an archival deficit. An imbalance between what we know of the enslavers and the enslaved, who were denied literacy in part because of this reason. I wanted to know more about this woman. This is a woman, she is the reason why ellen was separated from her mother because she could not stand the sight of alan baer ellen bearing such a strong physical resemblance. She is the one who has ellen given away when she is 11 years old. It is easy to demonize her and make her a bad guy. We can say she is not like us, this is a past era, but she is not the only person who made the decisions she did. I wanted to try to evoke the fullness of her reality. There are tons of records. She comes from an illustrious line that connects to a presidency, the cleveland family. I know what her favorite hymn that she wanted to have sang at her funeral. There is so much information. I know of for losses, too. We do not have the same information about maria but we can find her information. Age, dollar value assigned to her and the challenge that i found in writing about this, on the one hand, i wanted to evoke the fullness of what her experience was like. I did not want to recreate the same in balance we are seeing in the archive by giving so much to this woman and not being able to give the equivalent amount to maria. What transformed for me was almost a changing at the molecular level of storytelling. Mr. Smith has many more records and much more stuff. We can change the access by which we tell the story. I went back into my writing and looked at the sentence and the paragraph in the section to see who is a subject, a direct object, who gets the thesis, who gets the story because that is something we can change. In all of your reframings, we can shift the access upon which the story is told. Who wants to come in . I will go. For me, i had access to survivors testimony before congress. What is really interesting about those sources is they are full of all this information that lawmakers and some historians have deemed irrelevant. They tell us a lot about the familys transitioning from slavery to freedom. Who is selling hogs. They have a listing of their earnings. A number of them detail how much property they have acquired. How much they paid for it. When they were driven off their property. How much they lost in earnings for that year. You have a lot of rich information about those families. What i wanted to do was sit with that material and help readers understand what familys achieved when they left slavery in a very short period of time. When i talked about following the direction, it is not to say you do not use a critical analysis of the sources because you do, but there are other things that make sense to follow. A lot of the people who testified before congress, they referenced people coming through. Even though the senses is a complicated even though the census is a complicated source, it help me find the potential names of Family Members who were referenced indirectly in the account. When they focused only on the men, because they were elected officials or voters, what we miss is how many people were in their families during the attack. A story of reconstruction that focuses on the men alone would say one person was attacked by the klan without acknowledging or knowing there were three generations of the family in the house that night. You had 10 people, right . They were held hostage, as opposed to that one. There is a lot of rich material in there. I look for additional evidence to try to thicken the data if you have a better understanding to reveal as much about who they were and how much the achieved in this moment and what they were losing to violence. The last point i will focus on is in their firsthand accounts, what is really interesting, and revealing, is how much they theorize on the future. There is a refrain in the testimonies, i will never get over it. She will never get over it. We will never be over this. I think that challenges the way people have thought about reconstruc