Married someone she shouldnt have, but in her mind she felt this man she would never be cheated on. She struck in her mind a devils bargain. She was deeply in love with george, but scraired to cross the line and marry him. The way she did it was she said, well, at least, this means i will never be cheated on. She married one of the most famous ladys men of harlem, and he was cheating on her within months, if not week, and that continued throughout her life. Her daughter was killed in vietnam, and two years later, josephine hung herself in their apartment while george was reading in the living room, and many of the women in this book did come to sad ends. Do you have a piece to read to us about josephine . Yes, i do. With peoples permission. Okay, one microphone is enough. I think the selection displays how in so many ways her marriage was based on an idea, not a reality. Their ideas and fantasies about each other consumed realities of who they were, and that built their faulty relationship in so many ways. So just a couple of paragraphs as background, and then just a little touch from her diary. Today, surrounded by interracial images, hard to grasp how brave they were in their time. The lines they crossed did not begin to break down until recently. The first kiss did not take place on television in the late 1960s. In the 1920s and 30s, those were tbhot lines that most people were willing to cross in the open. Josephine and george founded their marriage on their shared willingness to brave center, violence, and isolation for what they thought was right. As they often put it, they spent their lives trying to break down race prejudice so that the schamgs they faced would fade into future generations. Particularly, for the generation of their daughter. To that pass, they brought their own myriad contradictions about race. Throughout their lives, the two principles of harlems interracial celebrity marriage oscillated among all available positions on the race debates of the day. Is race line a goal or another form of racism . Can one attack racial essentialism and celebrate race difference . What, if anything, do we owe our own race . Can we switch races . Opt for an identity based on asilluation and allegiance rather than on blood . Sometimes oscillation between all of these conflicting ideas brought them closer together. Often, it drove a wedge between them. In that, too, they mirrored the texture of political and emotional ties in harlem. This was a woman who braved extraordinary senture to do what she did, but she carried into her experiment, into her journey, into her bold race crossing all of the ideas with which she had been raised. She didnt drop them or lose them the second she married george, and part of the texture of their marriage, as was true of the techture of the interracial lives of harlem, was this bold attempt at deep interracialism, integration, which was ribboned through with racist ideas, skepticism, mistrust, and doubt. The night before her wedding, josephine poured her doubts about marrying george into the journal to dispel them, and heres a little piece of what was written in the journal. I know up north here the negro women will all hate me, and feel i have taken unfair advantage of them and used my peal color to turn skylar. Now it all recurs to me how i felt him alone of all the men ive known to be my mental, spiritual, and sexual equal. Now i remember why im marrying him. I want him to browbeat me. It gets worse. I want him to destroy my superiority complex. I want him to laugh at my white aspectations and rationalize my fears. To my mind, the white race, is spiritually depleted. America must mate with the negro to save herself. Our obnoxious selfesteem will destroy us if we do. We need shaking down, humanizing as was often said. I need skylar. Without him, i will quit growing and solidify. If i am to be saved, s will save me. My last pure white knight i shall take calmly, serenely as being the future wife of sur realist of uncompromising courage and color. Lets skip to the juicy question because that one brings up so many characters, and theres a line where you write unconventional lines are the most difficult ones to live and judge, and so this was something that i struggledded with too in writing near black full of the characters who are in various ways passing as blacks whose relationship to blackness and awe then authenticity varies quite, and i absolutely confess to having favorites and less favorites in the book, characters i felt sort of i cross identified in a way that struck me as authentic and not based on a primitive caricature of what they thought blackness was versus those who, you know, seemed less appealing and more incline towards those primitive identifications, and it was a struggle writing about characters, having favorites and less favorite characters, and at the end of the book, i try to evaluate standards by which we can judge one who cross identifies or crosses over or passing in this way . Can we evaluate them. Talk about the characters in your book along those lines. One of the things that was important to me when i finally decided that i was going to write this book, and it was a book i wrote because i wanted to read it, and it was not out there. This was a completely missing piece of the history we have had up in 1920 and, indeed, of the renaissance, and i had gone looking for the piece, couldnt find it, and realized if i was going to read it, i was going to have to write it, but for me, one of the conditions i set for myself, if i was going to do this, was that i was going to withhold judgment. I was going to withhold it at a couple of key moments. That as i went looking for miss anne in harlem, who the women were, who put harlem at the true sent of their lives and resurrect them, i was not going into the archives sure of what i knew about them. These are women about whom weve known either nothing or very little or on whom we have already passed judgment, and i think, particularly, of nancy whose been dismissed, a great deal written, but these been dismissed as a sexual predator. I want to go back in the archive with an open mind, not my usual way, by the way, but i wanted to go back into the archives with an open mind and see what i could hear from these women. I med a commitment if i was going to do this, i wanted them as much as a biography can do, answer the questions in their own voices, and occasionally in the harlem renaissance, white women were asked that. Mary white reflected, white founder of the naacp, interesting fact, she reflected on being asked that frequently by black friends, why give your life to black civil whites . She was asked this in the 1940s, and i wanted not to prejudge the answer to the question, but to try to let the women explain why they did this thing because what they did was at great cost. What they did was filled with cringeworthy moments. What they did was very complicated, a range of motives, a range of outcomes, but for all of them, it was at great cost. Many could never go home again, many of the women in the book came to fairly sad, even tragic endings. As a direct consequence of their choice to violate race lines, and i didnt want to jig that. As i did the research, one of the things that was most shocking to me, and that i had not expected was to find how unjudgmental in the main harlem intellectuals were about crossing race lines and trying racial identities. From the inclusion of white voices and poets page of the naacp, journal of the crisis, to become welcoming women into an interracial benefit. Libby was famous for what we all call an insulting performance of a black prostitute in brown space to a genuine love on the part of her proteges, even for charlotte mason, to a kind of heroic status for nancys work in putting blacks culture expression in the largest anthology that i think to date has still ever been created. Harlem held back on its judgments. Saying we are not sure what race is. We dont know, we want to celebrate it, and we dont know if we want to be free of it, and we didnt know if race is ethics or owe the people we were born to allegiance. We dont know where to stand. Lets get it on the table. It was a remarkable openness to cringe worthiness. It was invited many in, and that convinced me to hold back my own judgments because i think we might find that the more we all put on the table, president er off we are. Very good of you. Again, generous of you. Ill push you, and then we can open it up to the floor for questions, but you cite joplin. I do. Being black for a while will make me a better white. That could apply to characters in the book, and thats beyond cringe worthy, the idea you can dabble a little bit, and, again, this is something i found quite a bit in near black as well. You could dabble, enter the world, and you can dip in, dip out, and, ultimately, retain your whiteness and your privilege and benefits, and that was one of the criteria used to distinguish between those who did that, you know, the Elvis Presley started take a little and get whiter and whiter as career progresses and money rolls in, ect. , ect. , versus a long standing commitment, so, surely, theres a place even if history did not judge them, for us to potentially apply judgment, or no . Yes. I mean, im not saying we can never judge, and, certainly, these women are here for their rairds and for people to sort of make judgments about it, and i do. There is a woman in the book who i judge harshly. Hurst, as far as im concerned, went into harlem to take and take and take, did not give back, and paid no price for everything she got from an appropriated sum of black culture, but the reason to hold back judgment questions until the veryings very, very bitter end is i think we are still string ling with the question of when does empathy and understanding lead into appropriation and theft and vice versa. As a literary scholar, what excites me is seeing my students genuinely learn to identify across cultural genders with characters unlike themselves. This is the great moment for any future. This is, like, yes, you know, more important than theory, a moment of identification. At the same time, we cringe at a appropriation. We, and we have been cringing so carefully at appropriation, that we have not been enconcerning a great deal of cross lines allegiance and identification. For me, trying to judge women, trying to think about what they did at cost pushes questions back on the table. You use an authenticity as part of what you bring to bear, and for me, this was a moment where racial and gender, ideology, was so all over the place, and miss anne, let me put it bluntly, was such a mess, okay, because miss anne is a mess. Thats the first thing, absolutely a mess, that i could not do Something Like authenticity, and what i ended up using was was there a cost . Did it cost them . Did they give back . Did they contribute in a way that was meaningful, but the people at the time saw as meaningful . I think thats still relevant that trying to step outside ourselves at cost, not conveniently, not for fun, and certainly not for profit which is what fannie hurst did, but trying to step outside our identities in which were comfortable and born with, at cost, is still a bit i still think this is worth doing, and and i hear you on that. I think the struggle is that in a contemporary lens it is so difficult in light of our knowledge of the context of appropriation of black culture and specifically for profit with capitalism entering the picture. I think it becomes about trying to negotiate of balance of what ownerrous ownership idea of identity which is i own this, i own this, i cant take from you, you cant take from me, and theres another model, like, yeah, i take from here, here, and were one big happy hybrid because we know its more complicated than that, and the dynamic is more complicated. I think one of the things that you take to is how much we try to answer miss annes question. She was an enormous problem for harlem because she said, oh, i want to be a voluntary negro. Count me in. Im signing up. Im here too, and she was not just saying i want to participate. She was saying i so identify that im partly black, and Even Charlotte mason actually said and meant im a black god. Shes a complicated figure, but she did mean that, and, you know, i speak as if i was a negro myself, and she meant it. The problems they were posing, because what is it that we can say that says to her, no, you are not allowed to do this. Are we falling back on essence, blood, and biology . Surely we no longer believe that, do we . Race is a social construction. We dont believe race is blood or biology or essence, and miss anne says, all right, if race is a social construction, because this is the 1920s when the idea is developed, she pushed if to the limits saying if race is a social construction, im black. Harlem said, oh. Youre a mess. With respect ready for that. We with respect ready for that, and i think we are still struggling with that question today which is not to say shes not a mess and not to say shes not cringe worthy, but it is to say whats our answer back . What do we say to someone woo says that . Thats a good place to bring the audience into discussion. Questions . People are asked to use the microphone. Im martha from new york university. My question goes to the last point, carla, thank you, and thank you both. [inaudible conversations] turn it on. Im from new york university, and my question goes contactually to the point that carla was just making, and its a question you can both answer from both of the books which is this idea of a white perp saying im a voluntary negro depends upon the american racial system of a one drop rule. In other words, that anybody with any african ancestry whatsoever by the 1920s is legally considered black, labeled that way, you know, which was a process, it was not always that way. My question is did miss anne, did these women ever acknowledge that their privilege came from this one drop rule system where they have the choice to say does it matter what i look like . I can be white or black and may the same with your folks in near black, did they get that . That people of african dissent couldnt necessarily pass for whites . Yes and no. Some of the women in the book, and it is important for me to reiterate that miss anne was never a monolithic. They came with with different motives, different understandings, different experiences, and somewhat different outcomes, and some absolutely understood that, and the reason they wanted to be voluntary negroes was effort on their part based on fundamental misunderstanding of the phrase, was to dispel the one drop myth, was as ad race radical way of saying that any reliance on blood or biology to determine race is ridiculous. Race is a social construction that works politically. Some of them were very canny in using it that way. What they didnt understand is that at the time, the phrase voluntary negro with a lot of currency in the day, it felt to the one preferable. Those who were volunteering negroes were blacks who looked so white they could have passed for white, but chose not to, and the most famous and celebrated voluntary negro was walter white behooves so white he was almost translucent. You cant get whiter. Blond hair, blue eyes. He refused to be identified as white. He encysted on his black identity, which he could claim because he had the drop. Even harlem was all over the place about this status of the one drop rule. Some of these women were simply exercising prief leming. Were saying that i can be anything i want. There was one script laid out for them, the post victorian lights as matrons playing with, doing charity work, and so for them saying, no, im over here k im this other thing, im Something Else was a way to claim freedom in other sphere. Its complicated, i guess, is what i say. Im sure you have an answer too. Similar. I mean, its the same mixed bag in my book in terms of the characters. Its a source of evaluation for me, again, how attuned they are to the kind of white privilege. You have a character like johnny otis, for instance, pioneer, greek born who passed as africanamerican in various con tensions, wrote a book using the we liberally to refer to himself as an activist and so on and so forth whos very attuned to the issues, and the ultimate privilege of saying, hey, i can choose to pass for blacks because its benefiting me in certain contexts, but not necessarily in others. Passing for blacks; right . Im elsa. I finished your book yesterday. Well done. Thank you. If you dont mind a plug, i find it faze enating and very well written and i certainly recommend it, and i epsz appreciate your treatment of nap sigh. I just changed my whole opinion of her. You didnt judge her. It was a very beautiful treatment. My question is what is the response of whats been the response of black scholars . For both of your works. Oh. Let me repeat the question. I thank you very much. Well written, especially appreciated. The question was what has been the response of black scholars, not just with this project but to all of our work . What are the things i want to say about that . Im not going to attempt in any way to answer for others who experienced differently. What are the things i want to say is this book, which is a missing piece of the history of the harlem renaissance, could not have been written too much earlier than it was because it was very important to me, and i think its important to other scholars who have supported this book that the white women did not come first. They do not come first. We worked for decades now to resurrect the lost, neglected, and derided history of black culture expressions from this period, and one of the things that made my comfortable enough to do this book is that i have been part of the archaeological effort. My own work on hurst was very much rooted in what i call a scholarly archaeology, an attempt to bring back the missing pieces of literary and culture history of women and africanamericans, particularly. Had that book been written before the ark longer call work, which is not over, but ongoing, there would be a different feeling about the book. I dont think anyone wants a harlem renaissance history thats missing a big hole in it, and this hole was missing. I will admit, and the question points to a salient fact that my own experience, as a white scholar in black studies, informs this project. Please do not go away with the misimpression this is a book in any way about me. It is not. I promise you. You would not have to suffer through any stories about me, but having been here for 25 years, i have an understanding of what the joy and challenges are to be part of the community to remain an outsider, and that is brought to bear on women, and maybe thats why you use the word generous, i dont know, i noticed that kept coming up, so that is part of that experience that informed the larger study. I have the same reaction that people see this hole of passing, but not reverse racial passing, and there was appreciation of the fact i distinguished between those passing. That they do not work the same way, theres prof ledge involved in one and not the other and cant conflate the two. My book came out at a time when there was a lot of talk around the issue of whiteness studies and scrutiny, never a good thing in a classroom in any context so its not this is not this invisibility factor or a blank page that does not need analysis and has not been construed in history and culture in the same way that blackness has, and so its fitting into that niche, i think, fairly well. I teach at the community college. A little louder. Im carol. I teach english at the Manhattan Community college, and i heard you speak first at bernard. Thats why i got interested in your work. My mother, born in mississippi, she did use a term miss anne so i think you need to broaden it because the way i hear you using it, youre saying that the black women are sarcastic, but for no reason. Oh, no, for good reason. This is what im hearing. I just want to bring that to your attention. Before you sell out because most of the black women did domestic work, raised the white chirp, took care of the white families, especially in the south. Yeah. All right . Im going to give a quote. This is not from my mother, but she used miss anne. This is other women i heard use the term, and they said, its too hard to work for a white woman. She has to sleep with her husband, raise her children, keep her house clean, cook, and shes never satisfied with what she did. That is how they use miss anne, and i think you should put that out there to give a context ever why. I first heard it like that as a little girl. Thank you for letting me clarify that in case someone misheard. I did not say for no reason. I said for good reason. This was every reason for the black community to try to not just not just use the term, but its a dismissive term. So many black women in particular, as you say, had to work for white women who they could not dismiss, that finding a way behind employers backs to put them in a category where they could be dismissed is very important. [inaudible] they are not dismissing them, but describing them as tyrants, all right . Thats really important. Secondly, my father physically looked white with green eyes, so he didnt pass, but people thought he was white. That was a part of his Life Experience so i hear my mother say miss anne, and listening and watching my father, people think hes white with me a brown child, all right . I think im happy you did the book. Well, good. I read some of it, not all of it, because i really have negro i have, you know, the anthology. I have it. You own the original . Yeah, i got one. When i came to new york, michelles bookstore was open, and he was still alive, and you could talk to him who knew all these things. You know what the copy is worth; right . Negotiations will take place after. If you dont know, can we meet outside for a moment . A lot of stories short, i do think this is important. I always admire lillian woodian smith. Uhhuh. Her writings, and what she did, always admired her. People like nancy have real question marks about because i spoke to dorothy west who was hursts roommate. Thats right. Dorothy west said wherever it was, a political party, wherever, whenever a white woman walked into the room, it was trouble. All right . Absolutely. If you were in the southern states, it couldnt mean a thing. If they spent the night in a home, when the people went back up north, the house was burnedded down. I think its did you i have not finished the book, but do you have the trouble in there . Not only the trouble, but one of the reasons so glad you said that in particular, this is a hard book to research, is some of the white women who were most important and influential in harlem, like mary white, believed deeply and for good reason, that the only way they could contribute effectively to the harlem renaissance was not to draw attention to themselveses, not to make it about them, and they went to great lengths, sometimes to destroy their own papers or in other cases, like mary white, to write what they wrote so carefully that you can hardly get to the women underneath this really, really constructed prose because they understood that. There were women who understood that white women had so long been troubled, capital t in boldfaced type, 28 inch font; right . , that they had to tread extremely carefully if they were going to do anything that they could feel good about. Its a wonderful point. I think we have time for one more. You used the word complicated that this is a very complicated issue, and yet i never once heard in the discussion whether or not you explored the psychological reasons why these women or these human beings wiewld feel so strongly about wanting to i dont know if we want to use the word pass, but experience blackness or be blacks, and to me, quite frankly, thats more interesting thought. One of the very difficult things, and i know theres a lot of biographers in the room, and any biographer faces this is trying to thread the needle and trying a way between trying to imagine what somebodys motives would be and get inside their heads, and i did consider that to be part of the job, without agenting like an amateur sigh colings and pronouncing or diagnosing them, and ill leave it to readers to determine how effectively or ineffectively i managedded did thread or did not thread the needle. I picked women who left enough of a record, either in diaries, letters, or in unpublished writings, that i heard them talking about their motives, talking about their reasons, talking about how this fit their lives and what it meant for them, and women for whom i could not find that discussion at alling and one of them was mary white. I ended up not making major characters in the book because i thought that question of why anybody steps outside themselves to try to step into a world in which they are not entirely woked is a really important question. And i think in my book theres some common threads, and one of them is music. There were a lot of musicians in my book passing for blacks, and the reasons for doing so was connected to the art and the authenticity question of performing black music as a white musician or white artist. I think art plays a tremendous role here in terms of someone wanting the authenticity that they envision that coming with a different race. I think were out of time, unfortunately, but well be here. Carla will be signing books, and you can chat to us then. Thank you, and thank you, carla. Thank you for coming. [applause] thank you for being with us, we have copies the great book, we invite you to have your books signed. Thank you all, and good evening. What we know, the 32nd version is the guys against the constitution were the religious conservatives, the antifederalists who very much included Patrick Henry at the time, and theres Office Holding and so forth. The founders were the cos monsters pal tins, bible believing christians, but why take the approach they did . Why ultimately come down where madison come down . They believe also no faith like their and was beyond faction. The prescription was multiplicity of section. Its an important develop in the law over the last, you know, couple of decades in terms of government funding and religious institutions. So i would say that there were some real issues to work through, and the rules that govern the area during the clinton years or early club ton years were different, you know, they changed over time, and some people think that was a good thing, some think it was a bad thing. There are some really important issues that people fight about and fight about with legitimate disagreements. Christmas day on cspan, current and former heads of the white house faith based offices on separation of church and state at 12 30 eastern. On cspan 2 s booktv, an an account of the great war july 1 st, 1916. Thats at five. Whats going on today comes down to two words. They are not my two words. Fundmental transformation are obamas words, and i asked a couple questions. You look at the constitution, the power of the president , does the president have the power to fundamentally transform america . Of course not. Why would you want to . That means you dont like america very much, do you . That means you dont like capitalism, private property rights. Now from the 30th annual Miami Book Fair International Campus of Miamidade College a discussion with Nathaniel Philbrick author of bunker hill a city, a siege, a revolution and Brenda Wineapple author of ecstatic nation confidence crisis in compromise, 1848 to 1877. This is about 45 minutes. [applause] thank you. Its an honor to be introduced by a fellow nantucket. Both of our kids were educated by them and its great to see you here in brookline. It is wonderful to be in the Coolidge Center theatre with this great bookstore and the cosponsor with the Historical Society which has been an institution that is an absolutely essential to my life as a historian. I sometimes sort of feel like i have taken up residence in the archives there. Every book i have done there has been essential information that has come from their but none more so than bunker hill. Many of the characters i delve into, their papers or they are and what we call the mhs and its just an organization that is essential to anyone who is looking into not only the history of austin but this country. And the genesis for bunker hill really goes back to the summer of 1984. My wife and i had just moved to boston fulltime. We were living on print street on the north end. Add it was at that time a journalist but my primary responsibility was to be at home with our almost 2yearold daughter, jenny so i have a lot of free time on my hands and i would push the stroller through the corrected streets of the north end. It was there, cops phil was a favorite hangout and it was there that i began to think what was it like back then . When i thought back then i thought of the book i had read in middle school along with many people of my generation, johnny tremaine. That just captivated me as well as the movie and what was revolutionary boston like . I began to actually look into the history of boston that year in 1984 on sundays when melissa was at home. I went go to the Boston Public Library and begin to look into the history of the city. Soon after that we would end up on nantucket and quickly my growing interest in history was directed to my new adopted home. I went on that path but it was after writing mayflower which begins with that famous voyage that ends with king philips wae english native peoples of this region and i began to realize i wanted to continue the story so to speak. Mayflower ends in 1676 and even during the midst of this terrible battle it was amazing, the governor of massachusetts insisted to an agent from the king, king charles the second that the king would be wise if anything to give more liberties to those in america. Their own general court, the laws enacted i doubt which superceded anything they were going to get from parliament. It sounded very eerily like what was going to be said 100 years later. It was with that i began to think at some point i would want to continue the story and do something about the revolution. I would then write a book about the battle of little big horn, the last stand. I was working on that look about a very complicated battle that i began to set my sights on the battle of unhcr hill. From the beginning i didnt see this as a battle look. All of my looks one way or another about communities under enormous stress whether they are on a whale ship or a whaleboat or taking a passage into an unknown new world. Those are the kinds of stories i find it interesting and what interested me what happened to the people of boston in the revolution. I knew that bunker hill was going to be the pivot point and it seemed to make sense that i should start after the Boston Tea Party when britain responded with the dumping of three shiploads of tea into the Boston Harbor where the institution of the boston port act, which basically shut down the town commercially, sealed off the port and would begin there with the arrival of the Lieutenant General and royal governor thomas gage military governor and his four regiments of british regulars and it would take the story to the up tick of tension is boston became an a militarily occupy city to the skirmishes at lexington and concord with bunker hill aint the point at which violence turned from skirmishes into allout war and the battle of bunker hill was the turning point when it was realized that this was going to be something more than a dustup that could be dealt with diplomatically. This was going to move into new and truly terrifying directions. And what a lot of people think of outside of boston is when they look to revolutionary austin they think of boston as the center of patriot defiance which it originally was but with the arrival of general gage and his growing army of british regulars that would grow to almost 9000 by the end of the occupation of boston, boston became instead of the center of patriot defiance it was turned inside out as patriots began to flee the city particularly soon after lexington and concord which created a waive of panic and not just bostonians began to leave the city by people who lived around boston began to flow out. Boston became emptied of most of its inhabitants. This was an island, this was truly an Island Community and it was interesting to me being an island or that has a yearround population of 15,000 to think that on nantucket, to think that boston was basically an island connected by a thin neck of land known as the neck that was as narrow as 100 yards at high tide in some places that led to roxbury. Then it was this island dominated by three hills almost of mountainous proportions with a small town of 15,000 people crammed into a group of houses in the north and south ends. This was an island and it was easily, after lexington and concord the patriot inhabitants fled al to. They would be about 3000 nonmilitary people left in the city. Most of them loyalists, refugees and a smattering of patriots who decided to leave, decided to stay so they could look after their houses along with 9000 soldiers. So boston became a city under siege as paid trip militia who had been involved in the skirmishes of lexington and concord and towns well beyond flooded cambridge and roxbury on either side of boston and literally surrounded the city. So boston was now the former center of defiance was a british garrison under it a patriots siege. Now the point of the siege is to cut off the city and starve it to death. This wasnt going to happen in boston because the english had the navy, the british navy with ships or off the harbor and you know today the town of nantucket nantucket excuse me, the town of boston is now the city of boston and its almost unrecognizable to the way it was. Many of those hills that once defined the island that was lost and were shaved down to fill in the back bay, the back bay was a day. It was water