Employee owned bookstore. Before we begin tonight, later this week we have romance writer Christina Lauren with Meredith Goldstein on thursday, next week, we are hosting Robert Pinsky along with the mind and we are hosting nancys atlas of boston industry and more events coming up and we are demonstrating the registers when you pick up your copy of the books today. How night Stuart Russell present human compatible Artificial Intelligence and the problem of control american radicals how nineteenthcentury protest shaped the nation. This wellwritten overview of americans who protested wrongs in their society deserve a wide readership. Many fine Academic Studies have studied this but this account for a general audience is authoritative and portrays a crucial period. Publishers weekly in a stark review wrote electric. This is a central reading for anyone interested in how the us became what it is today. Holly jackson is associate professor at the university of massachusetts, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, washington post, boston globe and a number of other scholarly venues, shes the author of one previous book, scholarly study of family values, politics and 18thcentury American Literature published by Oxford University press. She lives in cambridge, massachusetts and we are glad to have you here tonight. Thank you for joining us. Hi, thanks so much for coming out tonight. It is a blustery wet night and so good to see you all. An absolute thrill to be here at cornerstone books, my neighborhood bookstore. Those who live here it is such an Important Institution in our community. I encourage you to make some purchases tonight. You should start by buying out their stock of american radicals how nineteenthcentury protest shaped the nation. And just support them. The holidays are right around the corner. This book, my book is a history of social justice, activism in the United States from 18171877 and if you are not regularly immersed in 19thcentury history that can sound really remote. If you think of it as the civil war era or period of western expansion, the social issues that mattered at that time ago so clearly still in our own moment that i think they will likely sound very familiar to you. The people who drive this story were americans who were outraged by family separation, the idea of federal agents who were hunting refugees, sexual assaults on women, the devaluation of black lives, and economic 1 that had outside control of the government. They were in a moment of real political crisis and were deeply concerned that the country was on the wrong track and they decided to do something about it so they went for specific legal reforms and i think the literal forms of the 19th century activism we are most familiar with but more important i wanted to write about people who want to the deeper cultural transformation. They wanted to reeducate the conscience of the American Public so they would see inequality as a moral failure and a National Disgrace so they had a range of tactics, protested a lot of things in this book, individual lifestyle choices, consumer choices, they figured out ways of exerting pressure on the economy and Public Opinion and on elected officials and the tactics went all the way to attempt armed coups against the government so theres a kind of paradoxical relationship with the nation at the heart of this. Many of them were interested in overthrowing the government but they did this in the name of american political values. They saw themselves as the era of the founders. I tried to capture that in the title and it informs the whole book. They saw themselves engaged in a second american revolution. They called it a more glorious american revolution. They thought of the First American revolution that was fought by their fathers and grandfathers, the book starts the moment the founding generation was dying. A question of the meaning and direction of the nation would be going forward. They saw the First American revolution is merely political, important but political. The goal was to break away from england to establish a new political system of the people in my book thought a social revolution was absolutely necessary as a followup in order to make good on the ideas the initial revolution had articulated but never made real in American Life and i think they succeeded is the argument i make, to a surprising degree though incomplete and imperfect. I tried to show that they werent just responding to the singularly turbulent conditions of the period but protest movements actually shaped this period and we should understand that. The first half of the book, the big story is the rise of radical Antislavery Movement which was really the First Political project that brought together americans across lines of race, class and gender on a National Scale and inspired a much broader and more textured culture of critique in antebellum america. Slavery was a centuriesold institution in the United States, the basis of the economy, it was supported at every level. Once that was called into question nothing was off the table for interrogation. So we moved from the beginning of antislavery into a broader interrogation of religious observances, sex, marriage and family, private property and capitalism so in this first part of the book i establish the network of activists that i will follow through the remainder of the century that includes leaders of free black communities in philadelphia and boston, a scottish air is named francis right, a charismatic character that ends up being a cautionary tale. Includes local hero William Garrison conventionally known as the leader of the Antislavery Movement that was headquartered in boston, he did a much better job with the intersectional and coalition that im interested in this book. Also youll find transcendentalists and socialists on utopian communes, pollyannas vegans and another thing i wanted to emphasize is the growing culture of dissent was met in this moment by a really reactionary mainstream oppositions that as people started to circulate a real resistance to the way things were we see huge backlash and it is in that conflict that i start i see them as drivers of history rather than just responders. The second half of the book is all about the civil war and reconstruction which was a real watershed moment in National History but i also talk about how it transformed these activists im writing about as well. For instance people who had been principled pacifists for example came to condone violence or even participate in violence. There was a major riot of 50,000 people in boston where deputy federal agent was killed and the community in boston had previously been defined by either working through political channels or through the use channels that were devoutly pacifist and that was a real changing of the guard moment that kicked off a very violent decade leading up to the civil war. Another example of a figure from the book who is transformed in this period, Martin Delaney who had been ready to abandon the United States and take africanamericans to make a new nation in north africa. Started to rally around the flag, served in the military, served in the reconstruction government, backed john brown before that, so this period in this period of reconstruction, and unprecedented opportunity for social reengineering but it ended tragically and violently especially for African Americans in the south and for workers in the north and out west. The figures that i follow had accomplished so much that seemed impossible. Most people in america thought was impossible and crazy. At the same time by the end of this period we see a breakdown of their values or a rethinking of their fundamental strategies and the splintering of a lot of the coalition all relationships, the coalitions that defined their work in the previous period so i end with conclusions evaluates what they succeeded with and their failures and reviewed some of their Ambitious Goals that remain hours to pursue. So i am going to read a short passage, 3 pages long and i can read more after words if that is what you want to do but this particular passage takes place in the late 1850s, essentially on the brink of the civil war at a big meeting of reformers in vermont. There are a lot of interesting settings in this book like freelove dance parties and communes and various things and conventions where people try to hammer out strategy and are you in the scene is fun because it captures a kind of wacky multiissue counterculture i really wanted to emphasize about how we see ideas and personnel overlapping in movements we generally study in isolation or think of as separate but i like this moment because it shines a light on how those overlaps and collaborations sometimes just could not work in practice because in one there are interpersonal dramas and that is fine but on the other hand there are real and necessary and significant disagreement about strategy and priorities and you will see that here. In the course of this short passage there are four terms that might be unfamiliar because there is a lot in 19 century activists culture that has been forgotten. I want to define those so you know what i am saying when i get there. Spiritualism. Spiritualism was not a radical political movement. They were like fellow travelers and they dont figure in this book significantly outside you may have heard in the 19th century that people were communicating with the dead, spirits wrapping on tables, ouija boards, the spirit medium, those are the spiritualists. Free love is a big subject in this book, goes all the way from the 1820s through the 1870s and it looked like a lot of things, there were a lot of varieties of it but it was a movement to reform or abolish the institution of marriage and it overlaps a surprising degree with other movements like socialism and antislavery that i try to highlight. A very important controversial strain of Antislavery Movement they were radical pacifists but more than that they completely rejected the American Government, didnt want anything to do with the legal system, they wouldnt vote, wouldnt serve in the military, wouldnt sue in a court of law, didnt recognize the American Government at all. It was very controversial within antislavery and the come outers were abolitionists. Their target of critique was religion and specifically the northern churches was they found it outrageous and appalling the northern churches were not the vanguard of abolition and so they withdrew from their own churches but that wasnt enough. This one guy, Stephen Foster was particularly famous for direction been protests he would do on sunday mornings in which he would go into a church and sit with the congregation quietly and when the minister got up to Start Talking he would rise and just deliver a barn burning until people in the congregation grabbed him, he was tall and lanky and he would go limp and they would have to carry him out. He was beat up every time, kicked, they tore his clothes off, he went to jail, they made it a crime to interrupt his Church Service in New Hampshire where he was doing this but he did it anyway. He is one of my favorite in the book. In the last week of june, 1858, they stepped off the train into dazzling sunshine in the small but bustling town of rutland, vermont, shorthaired women and longhaired men sporting bloomers and byron college, conspicuous hats and checkered suits the smirking New York Times reporter would write in his evening dispatch, people of all sorts of notions, white, black, partially black, badly sunburned, who convened to discuss abolitionism, specialism, freelove, freetrade and other things. Finding the vacant lot on the east side of grove street they bought root beer and gingerbread from locals who set up food around the perimeter and gathered under a tent 100 feet across decorated, sagging hairless we in the heat. They talks into the evening barely breaking from meals and musical interludes. Colorful countercultural types came out of the woodwork, the time supported claims to have walked into one gathering in hotel parlor is a woman was restyling poetry and accompanying herself on antique accordion was interrupted by an atlas and had a tramp began flailing around the room is mumbling messages from the departed spirit. The Convention Resolution from their belief in spirit communication, rejected war, the death penalty, they stated the American Union was a crime in its formation improve the curse ever since. The influence of radical abolitionists was evident in his declarations and the first to speak with henry c wright, a founder, but the most impassioned remarks pertained to sham marriages, abortion and the gender politics of sexual consent. It turns out right chose to be a champion of the antislavery cause because he he could not stand to be at home with his wife. He confided in his journal no marriage love is between us. It is many years since we slept in the same bed. Staying in other people at times as he traveled he was tortured by the site of happy couples, newborns nursing and other blissful domestic scenes that he was denied. He felt trapped in his marriage in a living death. His travels prevented other opportunities as well. Passionate affairs and multiple women in europe led him to question the traditional standards that sex in marriage was the only legitimate form of intimacy. By the time of the rebels convention and the Antislavery Movement he published a book called marriage and parentage that called for sex to be taken up as an object for soul reform in movements like abolition intemperance. Extending his no Government Principles to private life, right declares the no human law or license or authority or social custom can make a true marriage. His call for the immediate abolition of all external authority was a wide net cast to encompass not only the slave power, the government and churches but the institution of marriage as well. All participants in the convention had their own causes dad to this list of external authority to be abolished and they were practically climbing over one another for the floor. Spiritualists butting in after freethinkers, one uping abolitionists and patient advocate for native americans tried valiantly to call attention to a recent massacre but contain no traction with the crowd as a jump from one topic to the next. Julia branch, i vivacious resident of the manhattan commune was a star the convention. The New York Times reporter, it produced an odd sensation to be a goodlooking woman rise and about herself a free lover. She said women were bought and paid for is the negro slave is. The stamina stock of marriage lately was matched by others decrying mental slavery, spiritual slavery, manned enslavement by religious consent. They seems to computer for which of these could be proved worse, than the slavery body practiced in the south. Stephen foster, cantankerous come out or was there as well listening for two days to such speeches. He had engaged in freelove discussions with an open mind insisting the real problem was gender inequality but granting a cruelly a gala terry marriage did not work for others the way it worked for him and he would support them in trying an experiment of a different kind. By saturday afternoon foster was tired of listening to all this talk, not just tired, furious. He rose and addressed the convention in the same come out her spirit with which he harangued unsuspecting churchgoers at the sunday services he crashed. He would not allow the selfstyled reformers to feel comfortable while in the south the last continue to fall. Frankly discussed by so much talk foster demanded action. My heart has been pained and sunk within me as i have listened to the discussions which have been going on, he said. I call upon you in the name of 4 million slaves to go to work. He charged when his listeners sit and chat about communication from beyond the grave they called after the cries of millions of living people bound and chained. How could they speak abstractly of womens rights, he wonders in the very moment that enslaved women were being raped in newborn babies torn away from mothers, sold at auction with cattle and swine. The Free Convention threatened in fosters view to splinter activist energy into offshoots that seem to distressingly apolitical, doing nothing to save lives in end and just suffering. In response he made his commitment clear. Let me say here and now that i never intend to lay aside the question of slavery come what may return my eye from the slaves into the last shekel falls. Ending with a sanguinary note that was becoming inescapable in the late 1850s even in the rhetoric of devoted nonresistance he warned, i leave responsibly with you, god is my witness, if you go to the grave with this crime upon your soul my goal is fosters foreboding remarks lobbed into what had been a boisterous information to suggest something of the precipice on which they and the entire country teetered. In a few short years allamericans would be living in the shadow of mass death and the long crime of slavery would meet it end in apocalyptic bloodshed. They would soon be little time to debate who should be emancipated next when the National Crisis the abolitionists had long desired finally arrived. [applause] okay. Let me hear from you. What questions you have, what are you hearing with your own moment . Yes . I was wondering is there anything you learned from the Coalition Building of that time but can apply to Coalition Building efforts now . Yes. There are examples that are incredibly inspiring of people working across movements and across different and a lot of just cringe worthy moments of failure, cautionary tales. The first example of this in the first part of the book you have these black communities in the north who have been for years doing this work of civil rights and antislavery agitation in their communities and when white activists come on the scene the first example i have is francis right and he had every opportunity, was aware of the works the Philadelphia Community was doing and had every opportunity to collaborate and learn from them and understand what they thought the solutions were but her own granted venture, had her own ideas how things should be and she ended up it ended really badly and she found a socialist commune, ended up purchasing slaves and enslaving them on that property and shipping them to haiti even though by that time the African American community had largely abandoned the haitian Immigration Movement so that is a lesson about being willing to follow the leadership of the people who had some skin in the game as it were. The bestknown moment of the coalition fell apart graphically when these movement that had been the Womens Movement and the Antislavery Movement turned into a landgrab and the postcivil war movement for who will get the right to vote first and white women had a bad moments, like Elizabeth Stanton and susan b anthony. I read this book, love this book, had a great time reading this book and there were tons of things i learned, when reparations happened people got 40 acres and a mule, then we messed it up and i want you to talk about how that happened. You are absolutely right. You are absolutely right, in the wake of the civil war, when it was still going on, there were programs in the south for land distribution, many African American leaders put this out as the number one priority, generational lasting economic sustainability, to have some land to farm and pass down, whether there was suffrage, this had started that there were parcels of land, many thousands of acres were redistributed by the Freedmens Bureau and president johnson stopped it and put a end to it and the radical republicans had a supermajority in congress and pass a lot of legislation, he put a stop to that part of it and even as people, there was still massive support, africanamericans were calling for this, there were petitions before Congress Even in 1870 with thousands of signatures, people who want land grants and farming equipment etc. But suffrage became a kind of easier concession because it is easy to take away a practice, tragically easy to take away and practice, these communities should look after themselves and protect themselves, arms themselves but it was not possible in this context that followed. What have you learned about leadership in writing this book . Wow. Thats a really good question. I think that for these movements, inspirational leadership was important but these leaders were not, there are a few of these cults mentioned in the novel with charismatic leaders of the kind you would imagine with multiple wives and the whole thing but in terms of actual political movements many of the most inspirational leaders, William Garrison for instance exceeded where fanny wright failed in that he was able to position himself as a megaphone for the black community in boston, he picked up the work they were already doing and when he started his newspaper the liberator, the most groundbreaking radical newspaper of the century, most early subscribers were africanamericans, many of the contributors were africanamericans and he really brought people in, he championed Women Joining the movement in leadership positions and was willing, he had a farreaching system on human rights, not just on the single issue of slavery but human rights and was willing to do things like sit in silence in protest of any Antislavery Convention that didnt allow women to speak as delegates. He was considered the most important abolitionists leader in the world but he would just sit there and not speak and people would try to applaud him into saying something that he would not. He would sit in protest and so he really was there for the people in the coalition that he cared about and he is one example of leadership that stand out to me is really successful and Abraham Lincoln credited garrison with his decision to write the emancipation proclamation. Yes . You mentioned one of the connections, people speaking out about Sexual Violence and i was wondering in what context people were doing that, who was speaking out about it and how that went, what happened . A great question. I love to talk about this because we are in a moment where we are celebrating the passage of the 19th amendment, the womens suffrage amendment and it is such an important time to think about the role in the american electorate but in another way i think we think of the 19th century Womens Movement as a Suffrage Movement and that was a latebreaking in my mind, in the moment where the book ends for me in the 1870s the Womens Movement was turning its focus to constitutional reform in a singleminded way just at that moment in the Womens Movement before that is that is the entirety of it but i cover in the book and Sexual Violence was very important to them, economic power, social power, authority in public and all these things were very important to them. They were a womens liberation movement, they wanted change and they were talking about Sexual Violence in marriage and this was something people who were the respectable wing of what became the womens Rights Movement and the free lovers had in common, that women had to be empowered to have command of their own bodies in the institution of marriage and this was for the free lovers a backdoor into critiquing the whole institution and calling for the abolition of the whole institution es, marital rape this was a controversial thing to talk about. These conversations about womens sexual rights in marriage opened the door for this kind of voluntary motherhood. That meant a lot of things but it meant since women bore dangerous consequences at the time, they had the responsibility for caring for these children they ought to be the ones to decide when conception can take place, when they are having sex in their marriages, voluntary motherhood was a nice term that could be used by Birth Control advocates to talk about more active ways of caring for ones family and we can see in the Womens Movement and free love and overlap thinking about reform in the private sphere that dropped out of the conversation. We talk about womens rights but may be now in the me too movement we are thinking psychological dynamics that concern women in the 1840s. At some point in your research that you thought i have to tell this, people need to know this, something new to you that people need to know. I have been studying this period for a long time. I went to graduate school to study 19th century American Culture and i have been a teacher, a College Professor working in this area since 2008 so that has been a long time and i felt like i was all the way through this research and learning about things that were not familiar to me that i did not know even as a supposed expert on the subject so i really thought these stories are so resonant right now that i thought they should be brought to a broad readership but specific things that were particularly, some of you have already read the book, you can help me out if theres anything you found surprising. I knew about john brown, he is in there and gives me goosebumps to think about that. The labor stuff i didnt know. One of the things the book ends with his 1877 was this incredibly violent terrible year in American Life and there was a workers strike that started as a strike of Railway Workers in pennsylvania but it flashed across the country and almost turned into a workers revolution and it was one of two instances in the book where the president of the United States deployed the military to put down civilian protests, the military came out and killed 100 protesters and restored order, the first time the government was put to use to protect corporate interests, to protect the interests of the railroad corporations that elected the president who deployed them. That set the tone for kind of relationship between corporate money and the government that was really different than you saw in the previous century so i was less familiar with the Labor Movement and i learned a lot by weaving that into the story that i was more familiar with. A little related to that story, where in terms of the squabbles society has about what freespeech means and covers now versus then, what remains consistent that you have seen and what has changed . Thinking about like zuckerbergs facebook speech recently. Incredibly relevant, thank you for asking. Shes asking about free speech, activist be and in public what could be said. One of the main ways, one of the main forms of opposition activists faced in the 19th century was on a real crackdown around speech. All the figures in my book really believes in the power of the written word and speaking in public to make change and they were right. It worked to a surprising degree, it worked and the government responded in a number of ways that were relatively consistent across the century but as soon as the radical Antislavery Movement developed and started to have, to make pamphlets and the liberator and other newspapers the south outlawed distribution, clamp down on activist speech and it wasnt just the south, the federal government and Congress Passed gag orders on abolitionist speech which meant any proposal having to do with abolition could not be heard by elected representatives of the american people. It would be tabled and not discussed. This incredibly Important Movement that was growing and growing and had hundreds of thousands of people in congress was just saying outright we will not consider it. There was that, the criminalization of the distribution of those materials and later on you see this again around of sanity laws. It becomes illegal for the free lovers and womens rights magazines talking about Birth Control or sex, a lot of them are locked up in jail, one of my guys was locked up several times, cut tuberculosis and died right after that because of these obscenity laws that were called the comstock laws and that was one form. I talk about a lot of forms of opposition, some of it was like a mob comes to your house and build gallows in your yard, tars and feathers you or beat you up in the streets or murders you or throws your Printing Press into a river etc. Some of it was the federal government passed gag rule and employs the military. I mentioned the protest in boston, that was the other occasion the president sends the military, and part of the summer of 1864, that crackdown on speech was a core way to silence dissent so thanks for asking that. Yeah . I got the impression there was a lot of rowdiness and anger in the events you describe in your book. Were there also some people who said we have to be righteously angry and not settle for anything less than justice but lead also know when to be calm and use strategy and respect our fellow human beings because their human beings, was there any of their mostly rowdiness . In fact kind of acrosstheboard the reformers were much less rowdy than the opposition. The opposition was really rowdy, turning out, throwing bricks a lot of people in the street and as i said, for half of the period this book covers, most of the people involved in this work were nonviolent. I will say it also includes people in the slave system, enslaved people carrying out violent uprisings that constitutes protest in this book so it is a separate issue but no, they were masters of rhetoric and they really believed in the written word and the spoken word and this should be familiar to you now, for people who want to make social change whether it is climate strike or whatever movement you want to think of there are certain narratives that end up being effective, they get in peoples feelings and you remember them and the abolitionists were masters of this and all of them were out here to bind or construct and circulate and penalties narratives as part of a project every educating the american conscience and making people think this thing that has been part of my life forever and has been for hundreds of years and is supported by the bible, may be something in me is saying thats not right . Narratives like family child separation has been a really effective, has been really effective in 19th century history, that was a big narrative and we are seeing that now, the outrage people feel around the border and family separation at the border and i was thinking about the video, the terrible, the baby whale that it wouldnt let go and that is the same narrative, that certain currency for the same reason. There were many rhetorical and text based ways of going about this and consumer boycotts were huge. People exerted pressure by walking off their job and also making micro decisions like i will not let my kid have candy that is very hard because sugar comes from slave plantations. Lots of people were defiantly refusing to be part of exploitation and whatever the way they could even if it was just personal and private. Knowing that for today what narrative do you see that could be written to propel people, if it is, whatever the cause is, i would hire you. I think a lot of the same strategies are still effective in a certain way. Writing this book made me a little bit less cynical about protest and the effect it can have but before i wrote this book, give me a break with the straws or are we going to save the planet, the government and the military at all these things need to be addressed but now i do understand that these individual choices and rigorous attempt to lead a life that you yourself dont find distracting and hypocritical is important and when i look at these movements one thing that strikes me is they were incredibly diffuse. It took people who said im going to work for the political system and make a new Political Party and people saying i have nothing to do with the American Government because it is tainting and corrupt and this guy over here nobody saw coming, in various ways that brought the issue of slavery to a head in the civil war. It took a long time for americans to be ready to die in a war. It took a long long time. There was diffuse pressure from all angles and you see that now with some of the movements, you feel kind of like people putting enough pressure on corporations or some governments around the world and so yes, i think there are strategies that can be applied now. I will read one more thing where you can ask more questions, okay. I was interested in the question of failure. They succeeded so much a shaped conditions in this period rather than just responding to them but they failed in a lot of ways, personal failures, movement failures. None of their communes exist today. On brown meant to instate a new government but he was immediately captured and executed. I wanted to reevaluate the ways they were successful in the ways they failed. I want to think about how failure is built into social justice work and is inevitable and we have to face it but it takes a certain kind of radical hope and relentless antagonism to just keep trying things in the face of almost certain failure. I will read the end of the book. A scant handful of many thousands engaged in this period have been elevated to a champion of reformers in National Memory the process requires a degree of simplification, the weirder elements of the counterculture that nourished them. Looking now at their portraits, preserved in other cases, one easily forgets they were hated, mocked and feared as aggravated looking to overturn america. These activists knew their aims were utopian and had every reason to expect defeat but tried them anyway. Ali accomplished with 5 by radical hope and unrelenting antagonism, their willingness to hazard failure rather than accept the world as they found it. The history of radical thought must be a history of a certain kind of failure. We have so metabolized the wild ideas of 19th Century America that succeeded, the telephone, regular bathing that their original implausibility is lost. Success carries a feeling of inevitability as if it is the inexorable march of history, not a hail mary pass miraculously just barely caught. Only the ideas that were dropped as impossible or silly to us now but the stories of these activists, some in a variety of potential americas that have not come to be, at least not yet. What success can we credit the radicals of the social revolution . Not personal virtue, achievement of some crucial goals to be sure but nowhere near the realization of their full ambitions. Following their lead we might look not to the perpetuity of their outcomes but the rightness of their principles, their success in prefiguring at least for a time a different and better world and their motivation to act on those principles in the face of failure, to try something when it was easier and safer to do nothing, devoting their lives to a struggle with no end they dared to begin. [applause] thanks. If you buy a book i will give you a little button and sign it. Thank you so much and thank you all for coming. We have copies of the book at the register and we will do a little reshuffling of the furniture and have the signing line form along this ill, thank you all again. [applause] the new cspan online store now has booktv product. Go to cspanstore. Org to check them out. See what is new for booktv and all the cspan products. Here is a look at some authors who recently appeared will be appearing soon on booktvs after words, our weekly Author Interview program that includes bestselling nonfiction books and guest interviews. Recently university of maryland Baltimore County president chaired his insights on building a high achieving and innovative university. Coming up labor reporter stephen greenhouse will examine challenges American Workers face today. This weekend on afterwords new York Magazine contributor Thomas Chatterton williams looks at race and identity. My father did his best to get involved, Martin Luther king, to really understand a lot of the traditions but also summit in the way you write about always believes my identity didnt begin or end with the social reality of my blackness. He had his life saved by being a fatherless black boy in texas without his family having education but he stumbled upon platos dialogues at some point, picked up and tried his best to read it and it didnt make sense to him at first but he was very early on aware there was something that linked him with a towering greek mind and if he could access it he could potentially access the wider world and he would read books by himself with his flashlight and his family would say you are going to get yourself in trouble, dont read this book but early on esops fables were huge for him. He always had a chance you can see yourself in many different places and figures so identity is not just that. Tv. Org. Hello everyone. My name has brought carol. Im with the school of journalism here. I work with gabriel was sitting here from bb to bring tonight. Im just going very briefly intro to sam he is an associate professor of vigil journalist of the university of miami and he teaches courses in graphic data business and data journ