And white, and the butler which is made into 2013 film directed by lee daniels. He has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and the boston globe where he was a pulitzer finalist and he is currently a visiting scholar at Miami University in oxford, ohio. Joining on her digital stage is a cream clinic peter guralnick, author of numerous books including last kind of memphis and careless love. Theyre here discussing the new book colorization one hundred years of black films in a white world. Publishers weekly calls it an engrossing account of a a vitl but often slide cinematic tradition full of fascinating lore. And Dwight Garner writes from the New York Times this is sweeping history but it feels crisp, urgent and pared down. Like a good movie, it talks from the start. Were so please be hosting this event tonight. The digital putting is yours, will and peter. Thank you. Thank you. Its great to be hit with you. I wish we are in person. And congratulations on the book. Weve known each other a long time. Weve known each other over 30 years. In all that time i feel like weve been not so secret. At last year, and clergy so that i wonder if you always had a book like this in the back of your mind . A big book resting on the twin pillars of social history and story storytelling, too. Or maybe more to the point, how did you come to write the book . Yes. Well, lovely of you, peter, to be here with me. T when i was a kid growing up. In columbus, ohio my first journeys outside the home solo journeys were to the garden theater on north high street. I was nine ten years old nine and ten years nine and 10 years old when my mother first started letting me go to movies. The ritual would be go to church, come home and then change your clothes and then you can go to the movies because she would give me 50 cents, a quarter to get in and the other quarter was for my snacks and i sat there like we all do in awe of the magic of cinema and so theres this little kid looking up at the 60foot wide screen and on that screen there were stars like lee marvin, liz taylor, henry fonda, robert mitchum, robert vaughn, paul newman. These were all people who i just grew very fond of. They were movie stars. But they all had one thing in common, they were all white. As a kid at the garden theater in the 60s, i never saw a black face on that screen, never. And so i went away to college in the 70s and came home. There was a new theater downtown, the southern theater, they were showing cool, hip black movies like super fly and lady sings the blues. And shaft, movies with great urban musical scores. And then years after that, here i am on a movie set in new orleans, i hate to name drop, but there was soiree at a house, it was sandra bullocks house, the actress, lee daniels, who direct the butler, based on the story that id written, he had a soiree one evening and im in the kitchen and im looking out over this over this crowd, multiracial cast within that movie, jane fonda, forest whitaker, oprah winfrey, lenny kravitz, mariah carey, jane fonda, great cast, and i said to myself, my goodness, somebody needs to write a book about this moment and then Terrence Howard who was also in the movie walked over to me, youre the writer, you ought to write the book. That was the evening back in 2012 that idea for this book was born. Thats pretty cool. I didnt realize that it went back to that specific kind of a moment. But now, its a very different kind of a book in some ways than your other books and your biography of sammy davis, jr. And then your great biography of Sugar Ray Robinson or other, and columbus for that matter. But it seems to me what it has in common is its its the story telling. I mean, its like a master class in story telling, colorization with all of these unexpected connections, folded within the story of your talent. So you get the obvious one like Sidney Poitier, and then Harry Belafonte backed up by Charlie Parkers combo. Or fanny hearst when youre doing the life, like the passage and the movie thats out now. Just a fascinating evolution of porgy bess, across all of these cultural barriers, from gulla to gerschwin, and sammy davis, jr. , and edition of samuel golden, and one and the other one in a restaurant or a club. But in any case. Yes. These are full of vivid anecdotes and such telling detail. So, but i wonder did you what did you take from the say the discipline or the lessons that you learned from writing these biographies, from writing the extended profiles that you did over so many years on different figures such as marion barry or eugene allen. White house butler. Did find lessons there or sense the differences in writing this . Did you have to find new ways of telling the story . One of the things that has driven me as a writer is that i love to find a side door or an attic door to go into and run down a story. I mean, so many people go in the front door and they just get the story that is right in front of them. But if i go through a side door or if i jump down through the chimney, you know, if i go at a story in an odd angle, and then i come up with these, it seems to me riches, riches like, you know, cinema was still new in 1915 and yet, it was the president of the united states, Woodrow Wilson showing that very racist movie the birth of a nation in the white house because Woodrow Wilson had a friend who wrote the novel that the movie was based on. But one of the fascinating things for me in that chapter was to find the maid of the director. Dw griffiths had a black maid and she was brave enough to stand up to him after she had watched some scenes of that movie and she walked up to him one day in his study and she said you have hurt me, mr. Griffiths, by what you have done to my people, period. You have hurt me, mr. Griffiths, by what you have done to my people. And just saw, wow, imagine what courage it took for this black maid to tell this famous white movie director who paid her weekly how she told him that he had hurt her through this magical thing called cinema. In movies you sit in the theater and yet, the real world is just 70 feet away out the front door and i thought that, if i could find an off screen story to tell, along with the on screen story, then it would be pretty fascinaing because hollywood lags behind the reality of this country. The reality is that there were people fighting racism on the streets and they were dying for it. But we didnt see civil rights movies in the 50s, even in the 60s, it was very rarely that a movie and that a movie talked about race or racism and when it did, it was in a very happy manner, almost. Sidney poitier, he played a lot of figures who didnt really have an edge to him in many of those movies. Some did, he did his best, but hollywood was really very slow to translate what was happening in the country to what was going on on screen. And the western director, john ford said something to the effect if theres the truth in the legend, all print the legend and the legend in hollywood is hurray for hollywood, but if you tell that story up against africanAmerican History, then you really come out with a completely different story. And one that is that epic as the life blood of hollywood itself. Well, yeah, and going back to the first black filmmaker, the dominant black filmmaker of the day and you attach onto a movie with nothing like a man with dixon and lincoln and its almost the 90s movie in the circumstance in 1970 or so, maybe . Yes, yes, exactly, nothing, but a man. A beautiful movie. No, i mean, really ahead of its time and there it is in the book. But also, you know, when you talk about looking for the different angle, everything is about the angle of perception, i think, and i always think about my friend, the great photographer david gar, if every photographer went to the right of the stage, i went to the left of the stage because it gave them a different angle. And with gone with the wind, two angles that you had on it were hattie mcdonnell, was the first black woman to win an oscar. Yeah. But your back story of her life and her brothers life in black minstrel shows. Yes. And it just gives it so much more of an edge an and when you go into that the whole thing of minstrel and you could say more about that. You talk about Margaret Mitchell, a young woman who goes off to college and then goes back home again and writes a novel which is a huge success, it was a movie based on it. Martin luther King Martin Luther king, who was then but anyway singing in the choir in the opening of the show and youve got the conversion of Margaret Mitchell when her maid, again, bringing in the maid, and cant get medical help and she donates money to who is it . Morehouse medical school, yes, morehouse. Thats a very beautiful story in its own way and for its time. Margaret mitchell had had a black maid who got very sick and Margaret Mitchell was astonished that she couldnt find a hospital to admit and care for her black maid and even though Margaret Mitchell was willing to pay the bill. No white hospital would take and care for her maid and so, Margaret Mitchell had to bring this lady home and she died because she couldnt get medical care in georgia. It affected Margaret Mitchell so much that she wrote a letter to Benjamin Mays at morehouse and told him, i would like to contribute some money to train or to help train help fund the training of young black medical students, but she was so afraid that word might seep out in high society that she, a white woman, had helped black students that she asked she asked Benjamin Mays, the head of morehouse to keep it quiet, which he did, but she continued to send money, which was very nice of her, but it also showed that she had lived in a completely different world than her black maid who lived in a, you know, jim crow world in georgia and was not treated as other human beings who were white were treated. And of course, that novel has been praised by many, many, many whites through the years and still is and blacks have a completely different perception of that novel, as they should have. I mean, its racist, stereotypes in the novel, and yet, it was a very successful novel and so with the movie, and the movie directly led to the casting of Hattie Mcdaniel and her character had one name, mamie, and she wasnt considered human to have a first and last name, mamie. And that really, too, was what cinema thought of the black female, that they were only suited best suited to play maids. Well, its like you tell the story i was going to say its not a redemptive story with regard to Margaret Mitchell, but gives shadings that didnt otherwise exist and prior to that turned down Benjamin Mays in his request for contribution. Yes, yes, yes. And so, i mean, its but no, it seems to me that that is in so many ways shows the slow degree of evolution that takes place over a long period of time. I mean, this is your book is almost like a very slow reveal. Yes, yeah. Because what was so obvious, not just to the black population, but to large elements of the population, but not to the mainstream, lets say. And with racism with gone with the wind, there it was, and it took a long time, and wakeup calls and in none of this do you get up on the soap box and say, this is the way it should be. Oh, look, look, here is a complete turn around, because it generally isnt a complete turn around and at least some evolutionly steps. Right. I had a question for you. Did you always wan did you want to become a writer . Did you envision yourself as a writer . If you were going to be a writer, what sort of writer did you think you might become . Yeah, no. I did not always want to become a writer. I when i was in college, i majored in urban planning. Then when i got out of college, i got a job as a social worker and then another job and had a job on a weekly newspaper. And the pay was so low that i quit. I moved to new york city in the 80s. It went through the executive Training Program at Macys Department store. I became a low level floor manager at macys. My mother was telling people. My son is running macys. [laughter]. And worked that job for two years. Then i got fired. I just wasnt very good. One of the store managers said, retailing is not in your soul. And i wanted to say no kidding. You arent kidding there when you say that. And so, you know, i moved back home in the columbus, ohio and looked in the mirror and said, okay, its time to get serious, find a career and i did like writing in college and i did like writing for that little weekly newspaper that i had that job for about five months. So i started writing newspapers around the country and thats how i got in the newspapers. I went to charleston, West Virginia and then i went to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and then i went to the boston globe for many years and then, and then i went to the Washington Post, but i always knew, too, that i wanted write long form stories. I wanted to be able to just sit inside of a story and really wanted to write things that were big, you know . Big, wide stories. You know, so i would buy the newspapers that happened to give writers a lot of space in their feature stories, so wherever i was at i would always buy the Los Angeles Times and the chicago tribune, and i would buy the boston globe and the New York Times and the Washington Post, newspapers that had a lot of space because i just liked to be able, you know, to write long form. It seems like it would ask a lot of you to keep a story going for 70 inches and i just liked that challenge and when i started writing these long form stories, people started whispering to me, you ought to write books and, you know, its very easy to say that to someone, but its not easy to find your way into into the book world and i was at the boston globe, actually, and sam roselle, two time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and a dear friend of mine came up with an idea to take a trip down the Mississippi River in honor of mark twain birthday and so i took that trip down the Mississippi River, wrote a whole Magazine Issue that was devoted to his photographs and my words and then i was approached by the Atlantic Monthly press and they asked me to turn that into a book. Me and stan did, so, that was my back, our first book and then i was off and running. Well, of course, you mentioned those newspapers. They all had magazines in those days. Yes. And the long form wasnt conformed to the magazine, but encouraged the outlook. And how we met, i wrote you a letter about one of your early stories and i dont know whether it was that one or the story about James Baldwin and william it was that one, it was about the trip down the Mississippi River because i still have that letter, thank you, yes. Thats how we met. Yes. But, no, what struck me from the very first and you know, people can write long and they can use a lot of words, they can repeat words. They can turn around in circles and stuff, but what struck me, and this is, now, i wonder if you knew you had this, but it seemed to me from the very beginning, there was an emotional impact. There was an emotional core to every story you wrote and thats what really, from my perspective, is what distinguished your writing from the first that i was exposed to it and then in the books. Was that something that you naturally came to or was that just the way that you felt and saw the stories, was in a sense from the inside out . Yeah, the only way that i think i can answer that and because that, peter is a wonderful question. It was my grand mother who raised me and my grandparents. I lived with my mother, but it was my grandmother who seemed to take a real interest in me. My mother had jobs and she was often away working at night. And i think my grandmother was such a sensitive soul that knew when i went out into the world she expected me to be good and to be sincere and to treat people in my stories the way i myself would like to be treated. And so, i do look back onto some of those stories and there is a how can i put it . There is a i dont know, maybe tenderness. Theres a tenderness in a lot of my stories. I even think about this book. My new book about movies and i break off in one chapter and i write about all of the black actresses who had enormous talent, but were forced to play maid roles. You know, some of them had the talent to do shakespeare plays, but they were forced to do maid roles and many of them have never been written about and i said to myself, even though theyre gone, maybe theyve got a nephew, a greatnephew, a great niece, somebody out there who knows about their Family Member who acted in movies back in the 40s and 50s and bam, now that name is written in this book. Its there. Theyve been honored in some way. Theres a great moment in the book and theres a great moment to me. Lena horne, beautiful actress, could sing, could act, hollywood didnt know what to do with her and she kept getting invited to play maids, play maids and so her father finally flew out to hollywood and asked to see one of the studio chiefs and her father said, look, if my daughter needs a maid, ill hire one for her, but shes not going to play a maid on screen. You know, what a beautiful little story. I mean, he gets on a plane and insists on seeing the studio chief and saying ive got money, a lot of money, and if my daughter needs a maid, ill hire one for her, but she sure is heck not going to play one on no movie screen. And she didnt. Now, its funny, i was going to bring up that story because it just but, i