Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20140727

Which is some of the things ive been talking about this week on the news and how the parallels are with iraq and whats going on there. It amazes me that people dont see some of the patterns that keep repeating themselves. But thats what the book is about. Its not just straight history. Its again read like this one is periodically from the cockpit from the f. 100 from the f1 05 and a f4 at the very end. So its going to be a good book, i hope. What else . Do you have a call sign . I will tell you but im not going to explain it. They call me to dogs. Dont ask. My mom is here. [laughter] read viper pilot. Actually its the Readers Digest of how i got the call sign. I flew with guys for years and maybe knew their first name and very rarely knew their last name because we always went by nicknames and call signs. Its just a pilot thing. Do you have one . Do you want one . Yeah. You have to earn it the hard way by usually doing something stupid. [laughter] what else . [inaudible] at the end, yeah. I always read that i was a superior plane and i wondered why you had raf. Interesting you should say that because i didnt know this until it started researching it. The germans copied the allied version of the triplane. The germans got hold of it and do what germans do best and figured out a way to make a little bit better much more, just better. It was actually an ally design. What were the major bandages to that plane versus the biplane . Without giving too much into the aerodynamics because i dont want to put everyone to sleep you have to overcome drag for the plane to lift and the engines at the time they left a lot to be desired. A little airplane at the beginning of the book had an 80horsepower engine. My f16 if you wanted to do a worse power to press comparison had about 60, 65,000horsepower. Compared to 80. The big limitation in world war i among other things because remember they were figuring this out as they went. They didnt really understand aerodynamics and they couldnt make an engine any bigger than 12 cylinders because it got too heavy and they hadnt figured out yet how to make it efficient enough to overcome its own weight. So it could taxi on the runway looking good but it couldnt take off. The triplane with its three wings, short stubby wings, very wide wings. You didnt think i know nothing about aerodynamics. It generated a lot of lift for the engine that it had to make up for the smaller engine and with more left and lightweight. It was lighter than most of the airplane so could climb fast until 2000 feet and i could turn really good. Its a tradeoff. It always is between a bigger engine and more powerful engine and how much stuff you can carry. You know the point of a fighter airplane is to fight. Otherwise you just have a goodlooking airplane. You have to put weapons on that or whats the point . They were also figuring out how to compensate for the weapons and Everything Else in all of this was being done while they were fighting. They dont get enough credit for the advances they have made. I like the triplane because i just think it looks cool. It looks the way you think a world one world war i fighter should look besides snoopy and the red baron. To me and somebody asked me last week on an interview what my favorite aviation movie wasnt i told him blue max because not only did they get most of the Technical Details right that they have really portrayed the pilots i thought the way they talked and acted and their attitudes towards things. And they had had triplane to matt aaron too. On the different replays did anyone ever shoot themselves . He asked if the deflector plates, did anybody shoot themselves down . The answer is no, because it didnt get spread. It didnt get developed that way because he went down pretty quickly after he do that and it wasnt an air force monster thing. It was just a pilot in a hangar trying to find out a better way to do things. Also when the germans looked at this he tried to burn the plane when he got shot down but it was wet. It should tell you something about the airplanes that if you cant light a bonfire with a flair pencil because its wet and the germans got ahold of it and they turned it over to a guy named anthony faulconer. He looked at it and he said well its a good idea but very french. I could do better than this and hes the one who figured out the interrupter gear so as the propeller blade approaches where the axis of the gun is a would interrupt the firing pin and he did it in one night. He did it in one eye. He came up with a simple cam arrangement inside that just basically kept the pen for making contact as the propeller rotated. Its like a clock, pretty simple. So anyway, it never really happened and the french used copper jacketed bullets which would deflect. The germans use steel jacketed bullets which would have gone to the would have gone to the way to ensure that the propeller so it wouldnt have worked for them anyhow. Another piece of trivia i didnt know. That makes sense. I think thats a footnote to maximize pretty interesting. What else . Well, i think i have about worn out my welcome. Appreciate you guys coming up especially on a especially on fridays when there is lots of things to do in the local area so i hope you enjoy the book and if any of you want to undo what make a sign that i will be happy to. I have got the standard web site and harpercollins has a Facebook Page for me if you want to get ahold of me directly. I do get back to everybody who contacts me. It may take a while but i do and they put videos on their interviews and other things and i will answer any questions you may think of later. Anyway thanks very much for coming and enjoyed it. [applause] thank you for coming. I would invite you to line up on that side and come around in front of the desk if you would like to have your book signed. Thanks again for coming out on a friday night. [inaudible conversations] up back some booktv, after words with guest host lavar tomlinson. This week. This weeks Chris Tomlinson in his first book Tomlinson Hill. The former Associated Press correspondent set out to explore his families slaveowning history and the part of texas that carries the family name. He found the impact of slavery on American Society continues. The Houston Chronicle columnists also found what what hes the descendent of the hills former slave owners Ladainian Tomlinson the former running back is a descendent to the hills former slaves. This program is about an hour. Host so, chris tell us, what made you want to to write a book . Guest well, i grew up knowing about Tomlinson Hill. I had never been to Tomlinson Hill but my grandfather would always say you know, we had a slave plantation down on the river called Tomlinson Hill and when the slaves were freed they loved us so much they took tomlinson as their last name. And as a seven or 8yearold kid in dallas going through desegregation because in 1973 dallas schools were still segregated and there was a court order for busing and so race was very much an important topic at that time in dallas. So i was aware of that as a child in the idea that there were black tomlinson spent my family once held as slaves just boggles my imagination. And that became an important part of my identity growing up and in white southern culture you know having a family that fought in the civil war and that had held slaves and were part of that antebellum plantation life, that was a big deal. So i unknowingly bragged about it because that was something that you were supposed to be proud of. It wasnt until later in life once i became a journalist and i became educated and i went to africa that i began to realize that you know, that myth that it shaped my life so much, no one was examining it. No one was questioning it and i witnessed lynchings and i witnessed things in africa that really reminded me of what i knew about the south from learning about it as an adult so i decided well you know, i think its time to examine this myth that my grandfather sold me on and so thats when i set out and decided to look for you. Host so, how surprising was it to learn the truth about your ancestors . I think by the time i started on the book, i knew that there was no truth to my grandfathers story. I was educated enough to know that what i was going to find was not necessarily going to be pretty. But thats all i have to go on. I mean it was just that one statement from my grandfather. And some Old Newspaper clippings of obituaries, so, what i didnt know where the details. I didnt know to the extent they were involved and in lynchings and in the klan and these are all things i would later discover, so it was kind of expected. I really kind of expected it. I didnt expect to find the oral history that my great aunt greatgrandfather gave in 1936 as part of the Works Progress administration. Where he bragged about his first lynching, where he bragged about how the whites in 1872 prevented the blacks from voting and helped usher the end of reconstruction and the beginning of jim crow. That kind of boldfaced pride in ethnic violence, that was really surprising. I also didnt understand the power of the ku klux klan in texas politics in the 1920s. Or that my greatgrandfather was involved in that political movement. So, you know i wasnt really surprised to find out that they were in bold boldin these things, but the details are what were shocking. Host so, we have known each other for a little bit now and i have known you not to be a racist person at all. How uncomfortable were you learning all this about your ancestors . I mean it had to make you uncomfortable. It did. I remember i didnt make my trip to Tomlinson Hill until 2007 so this is a place you grew up in. This is a place you spent your childhood and i had never seen it by the time i was 42 years old, im sorry 47 years old and so im standing on the hill which my family donated 17 acres to the Confederate Veterans Association and they constructed a reunion ground and its Still Standing today and now your family still holds reunions on the hill. There was a big sign that said welcome to Tomlinson Hill. In saying that for the first time as an adult, it was this sense of pride and a sense of place. Its like this is where my ancestors are from and i was excited by that. At the same time though i was born because this was also where my ancestors committed unimaginable crimes. This is where they beat people. This is where they tortured people. This is where they quite likely raped people. And so that was really hard to get my head around. I think this gets to the challenge for southerners today, all of us, is that how can we be proud of our heritage and at the same time recognize the crimes that are ancestors committed. Thats one of the things i was trying to get out with the book. And through this examination is how do i reconcile these two things . What made you want to do that . Guest well, i think there are two things and ive heard this argument mostly from the white families in falls county and the Community Around Tomlinson Hill. Thats the past. Those people had nothing to do with me. I dont act like them so why should i care about what they did . To me, that is how families like mine deny the history of families like yours. Its how we deny the reality of what it means to be white and black in america. The only way you can understand the true meaning of that is to understand the history and that is why i thought it would be compelling to tell the story of a white family and a black family with the same name who come from the same place and follow them from slavery through the civil war, reconstruction, jim crow, the Civil Rights Movement up until today and compare and contrast. This is something that your uncle charles really helped me with is that he described going to a sharecroppers Elementary School in the 1940s where its 1gram, two teachers with 30 kids grades one through eight all in one room. And no bathrooms, no running water. It was all outhouses. Well, at the same time he was going to that school, my father was in dallas texas going to a brandnew beautifully built Elementary School where he was learning german and violin lessons and was the best of the best. Its like you cant understand where our families are today until you understand that kind of history. So yeah thats why think its important. Host so, in the book he reveal some pretty embarrassing stuff about both families. Guest yes. Host why did you she feel that was important . Guest why think as a journalist i have revealed embarrassing things about probably thousands of people. I have described the worst moments of peoples lives that they would just as soon forget that i have put them in the newspaper and made them part of history for anyone and everyone to read for as long as we have the archives so for me to not take this hard journalistic look at our families i think would have been dishonest. I think it was also important to make the story real. I mean no one has a perfect family. So with our families were perfect in the book, then it wouldnt be real. It wouldnt be accurate. It wouldnt give the reader a chance to feel a connection to us. So, you know i mean lets be honest there were a lot of embarrassing things i discovered that arent in the book. I tried to make sure that again we maintained that parallel. So at the same time that your family was going through the tumultuous lives of the 60s in the 70s and the cultural changes my family was going through the same thing and so i think that was a way to show how these greater outside forces shaped our families just the same even though our experiences are also very different. Host yeah, very different. So, what about the book is applicable today in society . Guest i think theyre a couple couple of things. One is that the Younger Generation who grew up with the segregated schools, who grew up postCivil Rights Movement and frankly the ones who are comingofage with a black president , there is a gap. They are not aware of what our families have been through. So i think its an opportune time to revisit that. The other thing i learned as a course pond and, as a Foreign Correspondent with the Associated Press was that working in south africa at the end of apartheid, working in rwanda after the genocide, working in somalia today, that whenever you have this history of ethnic violence, of communal violence, that the only way you can move forward is to have a shared understanding of the past and so you know we talk about truth and Reconciliation Commission in south africa. We have to have a common truth before we can step forward for reconciliation. I dont think we have really had that in the united states. Where there is an accepted truth that both sides can agree upon and taking that, building a sense of reconciliation. I mean, do you feel i mean, do you feel like American History or Texas History in particular which we all have to take growing up in texas. We take more Texas History than we do American History. Host we do. Guest do you think its been balanced wax. Host not at all, no. Racism isnt a balance in america. We might have elected our first black president but we are still a long way from where we need to be as a society. And that brings me to my next question for you. Growing up in dallas texas and going to the school you went to. I remember reading used to sing the dixie song. How were you able to do that growing up but still turn out to be the man you are today . Guest well i think, i mean one of the things that i think particularly during desegregation that we the teachers had to struggle with was that you have this old curriculum so we had white schools and we have black schools. We have the sole curriculum where you know it was the war, northern aggression. It wasnt about slavery. It was about states rights. We should be proud of the chivalric history of the south and how noble the cause was. You cant teach those things when everyone in the classroom is white and as i said in the book, we learned the words to the battle hymn of the republic but we sing dixie more often, you know. So there was this awkward time in which suddenly you have this mixed classroom. Suddenly he couldnt teach history the way you did before so how, so the teachers were talking about the evils of slavery but no one was held responsible. It was like there were no slaveholders. There were but somehow it just existed and no one is responsible. And thats the kind of thing that frustrated me. Even as a little kid i would be singing the class song, singing dixie just thinking to myself, the Confederate Flag is a symbol of slavery. This song is a symbol of slavery but you are teaching me that slavery is wrong. There something wrong here. And this is where i give my father so much credit. Hes the one that broke the shaman my family. His grandfather was klan, his father was a klan and he decided now, im not going to be this way and im definitely not going to raise my kids this way. When i came from School Singing dixie you would sit me down and say do you know what, that song represents a lot of bad things and singing it will make black people feel bad. And hes explaining to a 9yearold, to a young childs level and that is how he explained it. Just dont do that. Host so you had a pretty good start. He told me about your dad and how he changed, how his mind was changed by going to a record store. Guest yeah. As i. As i said he played violin in school and so he would play broadway songs and write Classical Music and he knew enough about music that in the late 50s midto late 50s rock n roll kind of bored him. Hes like yeah maybe the records two or three time. So he goes into the record store and he says dont get give me any albums. Show me something thats interesting. I want to hear music. The record shop owner and back then you got to listen to the record before you bought it and took it home. The Record Store Owner handed him an album instead go try this. He goes in and puts it on and the first in is around midnight with miles davis playing it. In my fathers words, he had found his home. He sat there and listened to that music and it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard. He instantly fell in love with it and was engaged with it and he sat there staring at the cover. It was a black band. It was miles davis on the cover. He thought to himself, there is no way something this beautiful and this amazing could come from someone who is inferior. Host right. Guest that is when he realized he was being lied to and thats when he dedicated himself to not being a racist. Host miles davis did that. Guest miles davis did that for him. Host good man miles davis. How did the research change the way you look at your family . Guest well my grandfather died when i was very young, so i didnt have the opportunity to confront him. Not that i would have. He was a very angry, a very angry man and he didnt have a lot of patience. And because of my fathers view he was very supportive. One of the things that he had done when i was growing up as he didnt emphasize the comments and family. He had emphasized his mothers family which worsen west german and much more progressive and so he was trying to instill their values and may rather than that, the values. I kind of went in a circle. I started out thinking you know as a child my family is this noble aristocratic institution and then as i dove into the research i began to realize that they were actually pretty awful and had done a lot of really bad things and most importantly in my research i discovered that they knew better. This is something, when i first met your mom and uncle charles and add and, they all said to me its okay, its okay. Your ancestors were your ancestors. They didnt know any better. When i did the research i realized the i actually they did know better. They were being told every day in the newspaper. There were ways for them to know better and so i couldnt give them that excuse. And then i began to realize th that, i began to accept that they were people and they are part of my history and part of what put me in a position im in today. And for all of those reasons i have come to peace with it. And i accept it. I actually feel much more secure knowing the truth. I feel better knowing the truth than believing a lie. Host so, how did your experience as a Foreign Correspondent affect your approach to doing the book . Guest well, i learned as a journalist the importance of being as thorough as possible and making sure i got my facts straight which was very important that this book and i didnt need that theres no need for hyperbole. Theres no need to amp the story up. This was a compelling story about real people going through real things and so as a journalist i kind of kept all those principles in mind. And so i tried to be unsparing but i also try not to be, to go over the top of the language. You have read the book. I try to maintain this very neutral voice and let the facts speak for themselves. Host yeah you did that very well. Guest one of the other things i also tried to do which is different from a journalist because you dont have this opportunity and writing a book it gave me the opportunity to let people speak for themselves. One of the things i am aware of is that as a white man filtering this information i needed to let peoples voices stand on their own including your voice. You are in the book. Your interview, i let you speak for yourself or large portions of it to tell your story. Host right. Guest so is a mix of using that rigor of being a Foreign Correspondent of approaching it as an outsider, to try to make sure i get the facts straight but then as a book i get personally involved because it is about my family. And i also because its about my family i need to give your family as much voice as possible. Host right. So you experienced at the ap and Everything Else and the things you have seen in your life, how did that compare to what you found out about your ancestors . You have seen some horrible stuff in your life. Yeah. As i said i covered nine wars over 14 year period mostly in africa and the middle east to include to include iraq and include afghanistan. I think having witnessed lynchings, having witnessed war, having witnessed violence, Domestic Violence as well as you know the traditional idea of fighting, when i retrieve the stories of the lynchings, theres an entire chapter based on nothing but this whole series of lynchings that happen and false county in the eight the 1890s. I could see it. I could feel it in these detailed descriptions of what happened. And so in that way it was very kind of emotional because having lived through those things i was able to imagine them i think much more vividly. One of the heroes in the book in my mind is a newspaper man named j. M. Kennedy. He was the publisher and editor of the modern democrat from when it started in about 1890 until his death in 1942. This is where the family knew better because he was in antilynching crusader. Every time there was a lynching and false county he would go out and write the most detailed accounts of it and half the time he would go out and prove why the person who was lynched really was innocent. Every week he wrote an editorial about why lynching was on american and how it went against the constitution and it went against our values and his fellow editors from smalltown newspapers around marlin they condemned him. They wrote editorials about how awful he was and he stood up and said no, this is wrong. Not only is it wrong you are getting the wrong people. And he can veined convey the gruesome nature and it was not an abstraction. That can kind of give you nightmares doing that but it also got me excited about journalism again because in the same way when the klan began to rise again around 1910, 1914 in texas to eventually the klan in texas at its highpoint half of all white men in texas were members of the klan in 1924. Throughout this j. M. Kennedy is out there condemning the klan, condemning the politics just laying it out why they are unconstitutional and unlawful. Letting everyone know that it is wrong. They did have an opportunity to know better. So yeah that was one of the most exciting parts actually was seeing how a brave voice would stand up and change things. Its interesting to note that the klan began to sink away in false county in 1928 and by 1932 the city of marlin elected jm kennedy mayor, you know. So he went from receiving Death Threats to being the mayor of the town by being a strong, moral voice. That was one of the most fun parts of the research was reading kennedy. Presto we have got to take a quick break. We will be right back. Guest s solo bar, let me ask you because one of the most awkward things for me when i set out to write this book was i have not met you. I knew you were out there and my goal was to come up and approach you and i met your mom first. But it was a really difficult moment for me because it was like well what am i going to say you no . Oh hi my name is chris, and th then. Lets talk about why we have the same last name or yes, my great great grandfather owned your great great grandfather. Lets it. I mean, its got to be awkward for you to have someone like me come into your life so we have never talked about this so tell me what your experience was. Host i have got to admit man, when you first came around and my mom approached me and she was like there is a guy who was doing a book about the Family History and he wants to talk to you. I was like, who is he . She said his name is Chris Tomlinson. I said okay. She said hes a white guy. I said okay and she was like yeah his family owned your family back in the slave days. I was like no, mom. No, no im not going to talk to the guy. But after she explained to me that she had met you and you were a good guy and i believe you had interviewed my sister and she had given me the thumbs up, i went on and tried to get to know you. Im glad i did. You are pretty solid guy. Guest well, thank you. Host its always good to meet someone in your position that lets say not a racist because you run into a lot of types of those people especial especially guest especially of my line. You grew up in marlin right outside. You were born in marlin. The family, your family still owned land on the hill, on the plantation not far from where the slave quarters had been. So in that way your family had a much longer continuity living on the hill on the hill than mine did because my grandfather left in 1920. But you didnt know the history that much, right . Tell me about what you knew about the hill before i came along. Guest . Host i didnt know anything to be honest with you. I knew that it was a slave plantation but we always used to say to ourselves you know, youve got a piece of land outside of marlin named after us in texas. So that was good for us. I never thought about slavery or what went on back then with the lynchings or any of that bad stuff that happened on the hill. I never thought about it. Reading your book though, i was kind of proud of who my grandparents were and what they did as far as helping the black community there get along but it was also kind of sad to learn this stuff too. Guest to me, one of my shopping things, and maybe i was naive, but when i started, when i got to false county i started doing the research. I realized the only history that was in book form in the library the false county library was written by white people for white people about white people. And even one of the histories that was done in 1976 made it sound like the klan was benign, that they really werent that bad, which i found shocking greatest late as 1976, and you know thats about the time you were born in that town reads so. Your father was so proud of living on the hill and it meant so much to him. Why do you think he didnt want to tell you the history . Host may be being embarrassed a little bit. My father always had a great sense of pride in his heritage where he came from you now, so to disclose to his children the atrocities that went on on his homeland, you know it probably made him uncomfortable and he didnt want to teach us about that. Dad was always a fun guy. You know, he was always the one to get out and run with us when he could. That just gives me a story. I thought my dad was crippled. I remember one time you werent going to do anything and he got up out of that chair so fast. I have never seen an old man moves so fast, man. Thats just the type of guy that he was. He was a fun funloving person, never the one who brings bad news you know. He never was that type of person. It was a sense of pride for him to be able to speak highly of you and not about the things that went wrong out there. Guest well i think, the book, i built my book around the geographical location and to be clear its not much of a hill is that . Is a slight rise overlooking the brazos river. The nearest town, the town is waco. Thats 20 miles away up upriver along the grasses and i begin the book with the first tomlinson to arrive and that was a woman named Susan Tomlinson jones was married to Churchill Jones the big slaveholder who bought the land and susan convinced her brother jim to move from alabama and that was my greatgrandfather. The book ends with your father who was the last tomlinson living on the hill when he died in a car accident in 2007. Unfortunately i never got to meet him. He sounds like a wonderful man and a very loving man. He cared so much about that community as did your grandparents and your grandfather died before you were born. So so was my research about your family, does it help . Does it make a difference in your life to know this stuff . Guest definitely, man. Reading the book i got to learn who my grandfather was. Like you said he died before i was born, years before i was born. My dad never talked about him. I did get to meet my grandmother for a few years but i dont remember her talking about them either. Being able to read your book and to learn my grandfather was a pillar of the minute he was. He did this and that. That infuse me with a sense of great pride. You have to be proud of who you are and where you come from and to be a black tomlinson and learning that my grandfather was the type of person and his dad was another great comments and, i mean i have no choice but to stand proud. It infuses into the last great tomlinson to come through and we just have that sense of pride. It continues from your book. It didnt die off when my grandfather died. The greatness didnt die with him so it was great running learning cap. Guest well, i know obviously when i set off on the journey to write this book, i kind of knew, and knew the five generations of white tomlinsons. I had grown up with that and i knew their names, i knew where they lived in and where they were buried and where they were born. Your side of the family was completely new to me. They required the most Research Grade and then to find that there was so little documented historian processed there werent a lot of books. I had to go to the primary sources. I had to go to the birth records and the emancipation records and Land Ownership records. That is probably what i am most excited about with this book is that it was a chance to really get to the history of the black families that has never been recorded. And frankly how remarkable it was. So i trace your family back to africa to a slave named george. He took tomlinson as his name at emancipation and then his son was milo. He was your greatgreatgrandfather followed by peter and then vincent ray at milo is remarkable because hes the one that helped build the first church, the black church on Tomlinson Hill. It was called the grapple hill church. And then his son peter and grandson bins at your grandfather were so key to building something i had never heard of before when i started the book which was a freedom colony. This was how africanamericans developed their own independent communities outside of jim crow. They usually found some friendly landowners like the tomlinson sent the jones who said okay we are never going to grill anything here. If you want to build your house, build your church and work so hard to be selfsufficient. They grew their own crops in addition to the crops they grew as sharecroppers. They sent their children to school. Your family has always valued education so highly. They were some of the first black families to educate their children. That helped them build these communities that were so selfsufficient. And unrecognized until research and the freedom colonies began in texas in the 1970s. So i thought that was a part of Texas History i was unfamiliar with. And it was one of the most exciting topics. But now, im pleased to hear that you got something from it. Guest oh yeah, it was great. What would you like readers to take away from Tomlinson Hill, your book . Guest well i think its a larger issue than just their families. I mean our families are a metaphor for black and white america. And the details of their lives are only interesting to an outsider, someone who is not a relative, right . To as metaphors for a larger issue about race. So one of the things that really shocks people is when i say you know, lavars father was a cotton picking sharecropper, it was not that long ago. Its one generation removed. Host right. Guest so first of all, 160 years or 150 years, right . Emancipation proclamation is 151 years old. We just celebrated juneteenth in texas. Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in texas, the last slaves in america to be freed. So 150 years is not that long. Its not that long. So first of all, okay, 150 years is not a long time and second the next time you think that these issues are over and done with and they are in the distant past, when you see, when you read my book you will see how the carpetbaggers who came from the north were really americas first civil rights activists. Who fought so hard only to have congress pull the rug out from underneath them in 1874 and abandon the former slaves to what would become the jim crow laws. My family was part of that driving out the carpetbaggers. Then my family was part. I had an ancestor who was in the Texas Legislature in 1882 passing those jim crow laws. So they were part of a Systematic Campaign if he willed to make sure that your ancestors did not have access to education, to capital, to business and Job Opportunities and that continued up until the 60s. And your worked for one of my cousins until his death in 197 1970 and by all accounts the two old men love each other but they werent equal. Host right. Guest so thats kind of what i want. If we want reconciliation and we want an end to our racial problems the first thing we have to do as americans is happened on this conversation about what really happened over the last 150 years. Host do you think thats possible . Do you think americans can move past the color of ones skin . Its been 150 years since the end of slavery but its only been just over 50 years since the Civil Rights Movement . Guest yeah. Host so do you think we can . Guest i think we can. I think we can. The inspiration for the 8yearold chris to write this book someday was sitting in a classroom at lake collins Elementary School and hearing Martin Luther kings i have a dream speech for the first ti time. He says i have a dream one day on the red hills of georgia the sons of slaves and the sons of slaveholders come together and brotherhood. Host we talked about that last night. Guest yesterday you and i stood at the Lincoln Memorial at that same spot that he gave that speech. You know, and to be frank i dont want to put words in your mouth and maybe youll disagree with me but could we have done that if i had not written this book and been honest about our history . Host we could have but it would not have happened so soon. I believe we would have maybe a year or so from now because like i said, there is not a racist bone in your body. Guest and not in yours either for that matter. Host so its easy to talk. We could sit down have a beer and talk about just about anything and not be offended by what the other is saying. So yeah man, we could have stayed up there a year from now or two years from now. I think we could have without the help of the book. But does it make a differen difference . If i came to you and said i want to write a book about how great my ancestors were you know, so sit down and tell me your story about how great my ancestors were. Because when i was interviewing black people, africanamericans involve county, they always started out with i am very happy. Yes, i knew your cousin and its all very polite you know. And it really took a while to convince them that no, i really do want to know the truth. I am really ready to talk about the truth about what happened. I dont want the sanitized version. Host right. Guest but that has a big difference when someone says im ready to talk about the truth rather than say or if i cannot do instead of oh yeah we have this common history but lets forget about all that. Thats not important. That is important, isnt that . Was good it is. You are right, its important. And with the help of the book, its like if i tell you like you said if you were to tell me that you want to write a book about how great your ancestors were i would have laughed at you right in your face and probably walked away or something worse. But coming from marlin and i know what kind of people are out there and for you to walk up and be able to interview them and going into the story because of what they went through. I am sure they were a lot older than you. Guest i was talking to people in their 80s. Host oh yeah. So they knew. They knew. They knew a lot more than i knew. So chris, you in the book said we should begin a conversation about race. We as americans talk about that for generations. Why did you say that . Guest well, i think its a conversation about the history of race in america and i think