And the author of eight books, including Ivy League Counterfeiter and, the prince oral history. Nothing compares you. He is a host and creative director at the grio. He is also host of the podcast the today show, which has had over 4 million downloads. He was the cohost of msnbcs the and a host of mtv and betty and a correspondent at cnn and a writer for rolling the new york times, the new yorker, and many other publications. And thats a thats a big mouthful youre a very impressive. He will be speaking with our featured author michael harriott. Michael, a columnist at the grio, where he covers the intersection of race, politics, culture. His work has appeared in the washington post, the atlantic and bbc b t and on his mothers refrigerator, he wrote that isnt that precious . I did not write that. He is a political commentator on msnbc and a cnn and has been honored by the nationalist of black journalists for commentary digital commentary, tv news writing his, college course, race and eagerness. The construct was adapted by University Economics departments across the country as a model for teaching. The combination of history, economics, politics and class structures. Americas back story is a whitewashed mythology in our collective memory, but in black af history. Michael harriot presents a more accurate version of American History, combining an unapologetic, provocative storytelling with Research Based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering black historian scholars and journalist harriet removes the white sugarcoating from the american placing black people black people squarely at the w kamau bell. If i ever won an election for political office, i would have them swear me in on a copy of black history. Michael will be reading from the book. Tory will join in the conversation and then youll have the chance to ask questions after that. So please join me in welcoming the stage. Michael harriet. Hows everybody doing tonight. Yeah, i think thats right. Yeah. Yeah. So im going to be like, skip around, but its going to be from the same, like kind of the opening of the book colts or, the bane of my childhood existence. I always lost them. I left them in church. On church pews in cause and a at school. And because colts are most expensive part of a kids wardrobe, i received more dressing downs them from my mom about coats than anything except my to forget to pull the garbage can to the curb on trash day if theres a heaven for jackets its almost certainly filled with the misplaced dinnerware purchased by dorothy. I always always lost my coat. So in the fifth grade, when i began, when i begged my mother to buy me a goose down a feather filled jacket with removable sleeves that had become the latest fashion. Yall from brooklyn its way back. Of course. She gave me a lecture about how i have to suffer frostbite and hypothermia for the next two winners of one last puffy coat. The next day, my mother bought that. The day that my mother bought that down from the armynavy store was the second happiest day of my my sartorial life exceeded only by the parachute and ghostbusters. T that i received for my birthday a few years later. So one day i was home from elementary school, which require me to walk past the hangout spot where thugs cut school to smoke and look at naked magazines i was in. What am i trademark daisies when the scent of menthol smoke alerted me to the fact that i was being followed. By the time i tried to run was too late. The crew surrounded me and demanded i give up the goose down. I of my mothers with wrath. I thought of all the long lost jackets from the past, from the bootleg members, only to the sea is tough skin with corduroy sleeves. I thought of my mothers frostbite warning and the days in middle school. Solitary in my future, and i refused. They beat it. Me, i so hard that while they got the body part of the jacket, they get the sleeves. I mean i good a warm arms when youre walking home the rest of your body fight the whole. Of course i kept it a secret. I wasnt embarrassed about the mugging as much as i was afraid of my mothers wrath when she realized that i was no longer dead, i no longer had the item on which she had spent an entire 56. I knew she wouldnt buy the mugging story and. I had to get it back the former before found out. So instead of telling her that i had been robbed, i told two other cousins, fred and squeak along with my best friend james bond, yet less like really his name james. But they were already in junior high and they probably knew the culprits a few days later, as i shiver home from school, avoiding the newports sweat cuts, they yelled at me to come over they had found theyre wearing sleeveless goose down with my next door neighbor, ricky freddie what big he just fearless. At 13 he was already smoking and drinking colt 45. Apparently he been casing my goose down for months, surrounded by my investigative freaky d swore that he had owned a coke for over a year. His friend, who i recognized from the mugging, backed him up. They corroborated his story with what my friends. They took their jacket back so im going to skip ahead the next day. Im at school. The principal calls me into the office and in their seats. Freaky d with like fake tears in his eyes, accusing me of, robbing in. I vehemently objected district ds lie explaining that there was no evidence for this wholly untrue. He was the real jacket thief unbeknownst to me. Freaky d had proof, which was why my mother was summoned to the school staring a hole into my soul. She reached into my bag and pulled out the evidence that had confirmed the true history of the goose down jacket, the sleeves of which match perfectly what you about to read is a true story. The names have not been changed. Protect the guilty see. In most history books, america is colonized. European settlers and quite a lot in chronicling this past. Historians recognize english, the dutch, the spanish, the french as human beings with different cultures, backstories, motivations. We know the political incentives. They are economic concerns. But all the black people are just black. Well, this book does that that timeless tradition. And while book is not the complete history of black people in america, it acknowledges that too much has been stolen for that to ever exist in this book. There is no america in this book the country we know as the united is just a parcel of land that was stolen and repurposed as settler state using european logic and the laws of white supremacy. This book is a story about a strong going robbery. It a testimony. It is about a family and friends trying to recover what was stolen. It is the testimony and the verdict that a jury of our peers has never heard. And i can do that in my history free. It taught me years later i asked righetti about that he acknowledged that he knew it was stolen when he bought it from the thieves. According to freaky d, the guys dont come along the sleeves for days until he finally was fed up and called into prison. But like freaky d america dont steal this is the black of history of american this book is the sleeves. The give me always the talk that i do it im good it wasnt brooklyn. Thanks for having was the other. From down south so this part where are you from. Im from hartsville South Carolina thats a little town called. Knoxville. Its an interesting time. It should be. Its. Its got you. Interesting time to with a book about black history. With black history is under attack and being purposely erased by part of this country. And this an interesting entry into that. Yeah i think so because well one i dont think history is being attacked. One of my premises is that i think theyre to erase white history. Like they dont care about us learning. What black people did, right . They want us to know what white people did like. They dont. They loved the black. We shall overcome. As long as we dont talk about what we overcame. And so i think thats what the pushback is against, not the black history, but the white history. And so thats part of it. And the other thing is i think that a lot black history about black history, focus on black people. Yeah. Or either you have in a book about American History that focuses that gives a white perspective. Lets be white. Yeah, but rarely do you have black people not talking about black people or giving the perspective on black people. But about america. Like we rarely america through. The eyes of black people. And thats what i wanted this book to do. You do a lot of things in this book. Your family is a part of this book and its a really beautiful addition. And we meet your your grandmother, your mom, your uncle your cousins. And its inspiring or courageous or how smart and like studious they were as the importance of education. I them as like a sub character and all this. Yeah i think i think one when you give one of the things i wanted to do with that is i start from the beginning saying like no history you read is objective like the people who write history books under the pretense it being objective. Theyre fooling you, theyre lying. So theres less dispense of that from the beginning, right . So i start with the story about wicked and so you wont have any preacher of like this novel objectivity that way. We believe forced us to believe in. And then the other thing that i wanted to do with that is this is a i want it to reset the story of america one in the south because. If youre talking about black people, you have to talk the south, like when you talk about read about American History, you know, its always from boston new, the northeast, but the majority of black people lived the south. And our history is in the south, right. And so my familys roots are perfect, strictly aligned with South Carolina. And one of the premises of the book is if there is such a thing as black america, then South Carolina is this is its capital. I firmly get that impression from the book that South Carolina is the center of black america history. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every every thing like 40 of the enslaved people who were brought to america came South Carolina. Now, if you add a scholar, say, if you add up like just people who stopped there it might be up to 90 . Well, right so that history like telling it from the perspective of like new york is something that happened in boston doesnt make sense if talking about how black people saw america. So thats what i wanted to do theres a lot of really great characters in this book. And as far as historical figures, i know who mine is. I want and i want to get you to talk about him, but i want hear who is your favorite historical character, who you are talking about in this . Oh, i think my favorite. So i would say the favorite is the story of jimmy and the stonewall rebellion. But he really isnt a character in that story. So i would probably have to say thats what i said earlier. Total force. Joe yeah. And so for joe is the person who inspired what what we call americas first police force. Now right. So they people say, well, police started in boston, so in 1821, from 1821 to 1823, a man, an enslaved and just terrorized the state of georgia in South Carolina and the interesting thing about force joe was like he was kind of like a myth, but it wasnt a black myth. It was a white like why people say he could disappear here and he mustve had extra long legs because he get away. But really what it was, was he was smart. He quit, he camouflaged his clothes, he created bulletproof vest in 1821, right. And so he terrorized the state of South Carolina for three years. And at eventually it came to a head when he walked onto the governors plantation and shot the slave overseer in broad daylight because it was like yall know forest or dont play and so that i love that story of course so because its the story of not just like we talk about, you know, slavery and in terms of the underground railroad. But we this was telling the story of maroon communities where people would escape and its like, yeah, we all stay here and like they say, theres a part of the Great Dismal Swamp between virginia and North Carolina that they think maybe hundreds of thousands or maybe even a million enslaved people lived in. And so thats i love that story, too. I think the way tell the story is really interesting and indicative of. The book, because youre giving us history and knowledge research, but you and its harrowing stories. Black history is quite often traumatizing, right . But then you because youre who you are mixing in comedy, right . And just leavening and making it fun and describing characters in fun, interesting ways and sometimes making allusions to modern day. And so just about mixing the fun and the jokes in with the history, which is really hard to read sometimes. Yeah, i think one, it makes the subject and the material more digestible. Yeah, when you can laugh at it and then the other thing is thats how we talk each other and relate to each other any way, right . So, you know, you could be at a funeral and it could be the saddest funeral and death cousin on the back row crack it up. Right like, you know, im torn up about this, but dont make me laugh. It is beautiful because thats just way we relate to each other, right and thats one of the things that i wanted to make sure book was worth were laughable. Like i didnt want it to be something, you know, high brow people who were interested in dissecting history to read. I wanted to make it something that somebody who would probably never read a history book would read because it was interesting. Yeah, i wanted make it. We want to read like a person who was 13 years old could get a lot out of it. And then i wanted to contextualize it by giving by talk being in the language that. We talk to each other and like a lot times people think of it as slang but its not to me, its not slang. It is the way we relate to each, the way we weave a joke in to something traumatic, the way we say, well, you know, your mama told you not to, you know, so thats what i want to do. And i think comedy allows you to do that. And it it points out the absurdity in some of the things that white believe also. Mhm. One of the bits that i love most you about survival and resistance describes black existence in america and that those two things are like were the survival is like were just trying to weather the storm and then resistance fighting back and moving forward. But talk about that notion. Yeah. So one of the things theres a chapter survival in resistance and it was one of my favorite subjects are slave revolts. But we we think slave revolt as, grabbing machetes and not the other kinds of resistance. Right. Like some a slave revolt was just like going to slow it down, working slowly, like were going to slow it down or were going to were going to steal a little bit of those crops and or burn a little bit or, you know, forget to harvest them and think to not understand your opportunities. And and all of those white all forms of not just resistance, but survival and how the push and pull of that right like sometimes we can do and people like i would have never done that how can these like sometimes we to understand like if you are a black person in america, youve seen people die just because they are black and how you navigate that. I dont i cant condemn you why you navigate some people are be like, you know im a sad white folks because they and i dont it offers you in protection cause at the end of the day still going to be subjected to white supremacy. But none of it makes sense. So i cant fault for using bad logic in a system that have any logic to begin. But one does not truly understand who you are without understanding that, you are a poet, right . And being the poetry world is deeply important to your identity. And the chapter where you go into the meaning of after what poets mean when they say after is really deep and you conclude, america is just a story after black people. But for the folks who dont know what that means, talk about that means so in poetry there is a i guess a phenomenon. If i am going to write a poem that is based on poem or a subject that already exists, i would say like, for instance, like one of my favorite poems is amiri baraka is black write poems , unless they are tea or trees or lemons piled on the step right. Now, if i did a variation of that, i would say like black af art. After baraka is black art, right . And so to me, america, everything that america is like america, was never a democracy first state that had universal suffrage did it because black black people fought for suffrage. Main right like america was never, you know, a democracy country. They never wouldnt have had a economy. Everything this country is after black people right. Like the music is after black people. The poetry, the art, the idea of government, right, is after black people. And so i think that the kind of connotation that i was bringing up in that and by bringing up the phrase we have pushed america be as democratic, as it said it was. And we have made america be america. We and the thing about it is, its not like black people have this idea that we to white people, america was never a meritocracy like we start off in the book talking about the incompetence and the way survived was because it just so happened somebody brought 20 something odd black people here in 1619, right after the starving time. Right. And so it was not like black people giving this to america, say, hey, we want to give you democracy now it was just back to what we talked about before, survival and resistance, right . Like it wasnt like we wanted to participate in america and democracy. So we taught them how to make it universal suffrage, not we just wanted to have control our own destiny. And we demanded it. Right. And so i think that idea of black people not pushing for america is in is, in essence selfpreservation. I think also related to that we are the reason why america, a Global Economic power, that it is the that the slaves created and wealth created by owning people and trading people. That is what allowed us to be able to afford the war for independ ience and become a globe. The Global Economic power. Yeah. And then so there are times in this book where i have to had to refrain from like going putting on hat as an economist because, i do not think that we still understand the impact of having hundred years of free labor in, this country and that and then not when i say labor. We think of strong backs and big muscles. Now we talking about the intellectual power. America didnt have a cash crop, a food crop, until black people brought it here like rice, like on this day, the typical investors, like we have a food crop until well, when youre telling the story of the first white people to come here and youre like, they were dying. They did not know what to do,