Its a great to give our audience the opportunity to get to know the bestselling author wes moore. You wrote the book with the awardwinning reporter the Baltimore Sun reporter final to the 2016 Pulitzer Prize with the death the freddie gray. This book is a beautiful way to understand what happened to freddie gray, baltimore with black and White America and the half broken truth and the incomplete stories that stop us from being one community. So thats a way to think about uprising and reckonings in america. Im just really pleased to have this conversation with you. Lets start by talking about the young man whose life was taken from us, freddie gray. But then leaving the funeral all the different parts Baltimore Society and knit the thread to paint a story to reflect what was going on and baltimore and by extension, the country but talk about freddie gray and why his death rocked the city and the nation. Freddie gray was a 25 yearold young man who committed the crime of making eye contac
President . Arthur called me on the phone and said youre in tennessee and james k. Polk is a tennesseen. And he said i want you to do one thing. He said allen evans has done a paper back that excerpts his diary, his president ial diary. Just take a weekend and read it and tell me no. And i read the excerpts from the diary and i could say no. I was fascinated about the man. Did you know much about him before this . I knew his grave was behind the capitol. There is no marker in nashville except a plaque on the side of a dirty motel wall. His old home place in columbia is preserved and ive been there many times and ive been there since. But i knew virtually nothing about him and almost nothing that was good. Result of what was done to him during his presidency over the mexicanamerican war left him a bad reputation. A reputation as a warmonger, and the attacks on him in congress in the latter days of his administration reminded me a great deal of the attacks on Linden Johnson at the end of
Historians. Mr. Poke ranked 14th in cspans story of president ial leadership. John seeingigenthaler, autho james k. Polk. How did they talk you into doing a biography of this president . He called me and said youre a tennessean, james polk was a tennessean. Why dont you write a biography for the series on the president s. I said, arthur, i dont have time. Im retired. He said i want you to do one thing. He said allen evans has done a paper back that excerpts his diary, his president ial diary. Just take the weekend to read it and tell me no. I read the excerpts from the diary and i couldnt say no. I was fascinated by the man. Did you know much about him before you started this . I knew he was a tennessean, im a tennessean. I knew that his grave is behind the capitol. There is no marker in nashville except a plaque on the side of a dirty motel wall. His old home place in columbia is preserved, and ive been there many times and have been there since. But i knew virtually nothing about him
It is a story leading up to the civil war when the nation was very clearly divided into two political camps. We live in a politically divided time, although i dont want to imply we are headed for civil war. I dont know what we are headed toward, but there is resonance in the way we have red and blue states today. There were northern and Southern States then that were fundamentally divided over this giant issue of slavery. There are other things. The 1840s and 1850s was a time of enormous technological and economic change. The development of the temoak inof the telegraph came 1834. Within a few years of the invention of the telegraph, cities east of the mississippi were connected and there was National Conversation which becomes part of the story i tell. It turns out these communication devices that were designed to bring people closer together drove them farther apart. They were horrified by what people on the others were saying. There is that. There is also just the fact that it is a
The first is a little disturbing. It is a story leading up to the civil war when the nation was very clearly divided into two political camps. We live in a politically divided time, although i dont want to imply we are headed for civil war. I dont know what we are headed toward, but there is resonance in the way we have red and blue states today. There were northern and Southern States then that were fundamentally divided over this giant issue of slavery. There are other things. The 1840s and 1850s was a time of enormous technological and economic change. The development of the temoak of the telegraph came in 1834. Within a few years of the invention of the telegraph, cities east of the mississippi were connected and there was National Conversation which becomes part of the story i tell. It turns out these communication devices that were designed to bring people closer together drove them farther apart. They were horrified by what people on the others were saying. There is that. There