Washington and i just got in about an hour ago. We were on the tarmac. And then thats when i realized one of the things i dont miss about in congress is sitting on the tarmac at Reagan National airport waiting to get here or sitting on the tarmac at laguardia to go there. Welcome to theodores books. Its wonderful to have you all. Many of you know that i did leave the United States house of representatives after six years and very rare form i left undefeated and unindicted, which is a triumph these days and when i left my my desire was to just get some kind antidote to six years of sound bites 16 years of trying to things in 60 seconds or less. Theres actually something that is technically called a one minute speech on the floor of the house, one minute speech. Explain your position on the Affordable Care act in one minute. I wanted to avoid fighting in the screaming, in the yelling, in the partizanship jabs. And what better place to do that than to open up a bookstore where you cannot really explore a curious city or a passion in anything less than 300 pages where you can actually feel book and rifle through it, thumb through and what place to open up a bookstore than the hometown of president theodore roosevelt, who lived here, who died here, who worked here, who here . Who wrote here . 7000 books on his shelves and sagamore hill on the night he died. And so theodore books is dedicated to being a place in the neighborhood. You can come and read and enjoy the fulfillment of all of your curiosities and were so glad that that we are here for those you who are interested, you love that you are here. But you can buy any book you want, almost any book you want on theodore books. So visit our website, theodore books dot com. Today we are honoring black History Month with Mark Whitaker and. Tracey edwards. Mark has written a brilliant book saying it out, saying it loud. I wanted to share with you before i turn it over to tracy, some of the critical praise it has received. The boston says that it offers fresh, interpretive patience of key moments of activism during 1966, based on interviews and memoirs published over the past four decades without sacrificing historical rigor. He writes with the eye of a journalist, an ear of a poet. Thats pretty good. Thats pretty good. Henry louis gates, jr said it is an enthralling and, riveting reminder of the tumult, inspiration and potent possibilities of the black movement. And as i said, i just flew up from washington, d. C. I grabbed this book because i wanted to read word for myself. And i also found absolutely riveting. I highly commended. It is just fascinating and insightful. And i learn things that i never knew a little bit of housekeeping. Tracey edwards. Mark and i will converse until about 435. Will then it up to you for audience questions and. And mark will sign it about until about 530 or six. So were going to at about 430 will. Well have a signing and our store manager, manager, becky will give you instructions on how to get the book signed. Also want to acknowledge hannah and dan who are with us, our amazing booksellers. Thank you, guys for being with us as well. So lets get to business Mark Whitaker, author of the critically acclaimed memoir my long trip home and smoke town the untold story of the other great black renaissance, former managing editor of cnn worldwide, previously the Washington Bureau chief, nbc news reporter, editor at newsweek, where he rose to become first africanamerican leader of a national. And my friend and colleague from so many years Tracey Edwards now tracys mom, many of you know thompson. Mark, i could tell the president of the United States know whenever i wanted to and it didnt bother me. I could never tell your mother. No as a member of the Huntington Town Council, i didnt have the courage to tell her that i couldnt do what she wanted to do. Tracy is a long regional director of the acp. She supports ten branches in nassau and suffolk, focused on education, Voting Rights and civic engagement, public safety, criminal justice, economic empowerment, health and environmental. In 2015, after 37 years at Verizon Communications as a corporate executive, she started her own consulting company, focused and focused on branding organizational, workforce and economic development. She was elected to the Huntington Town Council in 2012. She is the proud mom of, three and grandmother of three. And she and her husband reside in dix hills, new york. Please welcome Mark Whitaker and Tracey Edwards. Thank you. Thank you very much, steve. And it is one depaul to be back at theodore books. Before we get started, just want to acknowledge some of elected officials that i see, the audience. I see assemblyman chuck levine. Thank you very much for joining us. Huntington town tax receiver jillian gutman. Former town councilwoman jackie gordon, representing our suffolk District Attorney ray tierney kimberly garrido and representing town of huntington supervisor ed smith. Michelle conroy. Thank you all for coming today. So i am very excited and i just absolutely loved your. But what i want to do is ask the first question, you know, really a couple of the pages in the beginning about your parents sylvester and jean whittaker. Can you just share a memory of them and why you thought was important to dedicate the book to them . Well, first of all, thanks so much, steve and tracy and, becky and everybody at the bookstore for having me. Well, know my my didnt necessarily have a happy marriage. I wrote about that in my first book. They were interracial couple that met in the 1950s and their marriage didnt last that long. And after they divorced, i was six and my dad was on. We were in l. A. At the time and. My mother, my brother and i moved east with with my mom and he sort of dropped out of our lives for for a while. But then he resurfaced. He was a black academic. His specialty was political science. And in 1969, we he he contacted us to say that he had taken job as the first head of africanamerican at princeton university. So all of a sudden is back in our lives. I was 12 years old at the time, and we were living massachusetts. We go down to, visit him, and all of a sudden my dad, who i hadnt seen in five years, has afro. Hes wearing a dashiki. He teaches me the black power handshake. So, you know, and look, i was 12 years old. I had no idea that i would write a book someday about black power. But i think that, you know, probably on some level i always sort of had a fast nation about kind of how father had changed and why and what was behind all of that. My mom, you know, first of all, you know im thankful to her because she really raised us, you know, after that, after the divorce, but also, you know, she went out of her way to keep my brother and me in contact with my dads. He came from pittsburgh. His parents were undertakers and, you know, they lived in basically all black, pretty segregated world of pittsburgh in those days. And my mother, we were living in massachusetts, but she would drive us, you know, every over the Christmas Holidays and sometimes during the summer just to spend time with my my grandmother and my aunts and my cousins. And, you know, it was really thanks to my mom, really as much as my dad, you know, that we kept in contact our black heritage. And, you know, my book. Im not going to hear youve plug my previous books, but i wrote a whole book about the legacy of black pittsburgh in the middle of the 20th century, motown and. That was all basically inspired by my childhood memories of going to pittsburgh to visit my black family with my my white mother. Wow. So i, you know, i think even though they didnt necessarily have the happiest of marriages, i definitely they were both with as i was writing this book. I find that pretty touching. You know, you rose to be the first africanamerican to occupy the top editorial position, the National News. I think, you know, we want to make sure that we thank you for that, especially in our black History Month. But what i want to ask you is when you think about what are some of the Lessons Learned and what would you share, if we have any aspire ing journalists that are out here today . Whats your message to them . Well, first of all, you know, you know, its a little bit of a troubled profession right now in terms of the Business Model and so forth but its a very noble profession. I think its very necessary and think that it is only enriched by having people of different backgrounds, different perspectives. That was not always the case. I mean, even in this book, you see the effects. Having a press corps that as recently as the 1960s was still predominantly when black power came along, didnt really understand it. Actually, they actually badly misinterpreted it at a times in a way that really of affected, you know, its effectiveness that eventually changed. It changed partly because of the black Power Movement that that white news organizations realized that they had to start hiring more more black reporters and eventually more black editors, which is what i became. And, you know, its very important that reporters be out there to bear witness to it, to to whats going on then and now. And so i would still very much encourage who loves to to write and to observe and to meet people and to search for the truth. Its still a great profession. Well, you know whats i find very telling in your prolog the road to black power when it comes to the media and telling the story the similarities between the death viola liuzzo in selma and how that became National News and the connection to heather hire the parallel who died in charlottesville. And it just seemed that it was a connection between what was going on in selma and whats going on today. So what are your thoughts about . How these events just keep coming . Its like groundhog day. Yeah, well you know, there are so many echoes from from throughout the sixties, but specifically 1966, you know, and you know, it took me a while. I started out wanting to write a book about, you know, the the broad arc of the story of black power. And i was a year into all my research and reporting, and i was still in 1966. Thats how much happened in that one year. Stokely carmichael takes over the Student Nonviolent Committee from john lewis and turns it into a more militant position direction in the of the meredith march in mississippi in june he first publicly chants black power and all of a sudden it becomes focus of all of this Media Attention. Later in the the black Panther Party is. The one we know of in in oakland, california. Dr. King tries to take the Civil Rights Movement from the south to chicago with, you know, somewhat disastrous results. There was just like so much that happened and so much of it has echoes terms of the role of of, you know, for example, confrontation ins with the police. There are so many points in that one year that start just with that. You know, and were still living with that. It was also the year that there were the first calls for black studies on a white campus at San Francisco state. It was then college. You know, when you think like the debates were having to this day about the role of black of black studies. So you know there just the echoes are fascinating and then there are lessons to be learned. We can we can about that. But you know, theres no question that you cant read this book without thinking like history itself. Absolutely. Mark, i like to dig on that. Dig into john lewis a little bit. You know, one of the i had so many extraordinary serving in congress, but what could be more extraordinary than calling john lewis colleague . You know, he actually came to long island, campaigned me and then came back years after i was elected and visited glen cove. And so i had these opportunities to talk with him. And i would say, john, tell me about the pettus bridge. Tell me about selma. And he spoke, of course, eloquently and quietly about his experiences. But i learned something in this book. I never knew that he was deposed as the chairman of snick. And you write, you take us behind the scenes. I mean, as if we were there in such a vivid way. Take us to that moment in may of 1966. The chapters a in kingston springs. What led to that tension . The removal of john lost an election as chair. And what were the ramifications of that you believe . So. So, john lewis, in 1963, just before the march, washington had become the chairman, the student nonviolent coordinating committee, which was, you know, an organization that, grew out of the lunch counter, sit in movements in the south, which he was very involved in. And first, he gives, you know, you know, an amazing speech at the march on washington. And then two years later, during the selma, hes almost beaten to death, trying to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, which we all know about. And at that point, he really sort of became famous. I mean, here is this poor kid who grew up, you know, a sharecropper, alabama. And so he spends the next traveling on behalf of snick, giving speeches, raising and food at a time when the mood within snick there was a faction of of the movement that was becoming more and more militant feeling. They werent particularly, you know, entirely happy with the sort of old Martin Luther king roadmap for for for civil. They were impatient about president johnson, how fast he was moving in terms of some of the legislation that had been passed. But because john lewis had been on the road he wasnt really aware of all this. So every year the snick would have a retreat. A week long they would someplace. And everybody in the organization would convene and to talk about what they were going to do over the following, but also to elect officers. So in the last day of this retreat, they finally assemble to elect officers for the next year. Now, at this point, john lewis thinks hes going to get reelected pretty easily. And indeed, in the first vote, he is. But because there was this feeling some people were sort of dissatisfied with his leadership. A number of people abstained. So after this first vote, somebody said, look, you know, this the vote really, you know, wasnt proper because enough people didnt vote. We need to vote again. Now, at point. All hell breaks loose and and they some people had drifted off gone to bed. They wake everybody up, they come back to this big hall in the middle of this religious camp near nashville and have intense and increasingly heated debate about about john lewis and about king and about president johnson. It gets angrier and angrier through the night until crack of dawn, at which point they have a second vote. And this time, john lewis loses and is to Stokely Carmichael. Now we all remember john lewis for what he became once he was elected to congress, really sort of almost like as close as we have to a sort of a national saint. But this crushed john lewis. He did not see it coming. Snick had been in his identity up until that point and it really took him almost two decades to recover from that. You know, he was sort of in the wilderness for a long, long time before he know finally made his way. You know, to atlanta, to the city council, ran for congress and won the seat that he kept for all those years. And, you know, its you know, its you know, he left the organization snick a couple of months later. He kind of, you know, he wouldnt talk to the press about it. He wouldnt complain. He was, you know, but, you know, clearly he he was still pretty bitter about it. He really wrote a memoir a few decades later where you could see you could just feel in the memoir just how how devastated he was, was that. So but, you know, again, its kind of like a testimony, i think, to his resilience that he, you know, he managed to get through that and figured out what his path for go forward would be. If you could stay in that period. Because during that same meeting, there was the emergence of this powerful woman, ruby smith. Robinson. And she was the second in command, highest woman in the Civil Rights Movement. I find it fascinating that we did not and still dont enough about her. So can you talk . Well, you know, and look, know there are a lot of figures in in my book you probably will have heard of you might have heard of Stokely Carmichael and huey newton and bobby seale, who founded the black panthers, Eldridge Cleaver and julian bond. But there are also some some characters who i think most people would not have heard of. And first, among them was ruby, doris smith. Robinson. She she grew up in atlanta. She went to spelman college. Her older sister had had been a leader, an early leader in the lunch counter in movement. So she was kind of tagging along to various protests with her sister. She ends up going to jail with diane nash, another one of the lunch counters sit in pioneers. And all of a sudden she is part this Founding Group that comes out of that forms snick. And at this point shes you know barely out of her teens she goes to work in the Atlanta Office initially as the sort of assistant to a guy Jim James Jim foreman who was the executive secretary and really kind of the person who ran organization on a day to day basis. But pretty quickly, it was really ruby who was running the organization. You know, she was managing the budgets. She was very, very hires. She was determining would get the cars that wanted was the boss. She was the she was the boss. And everybody. And she was tough. She was as nails. All the men just lived in of her. You didnt want to cross ruby. Doris. So when at this retreat at kingston springs. Jim forman, who was kind of burned out at this point, had announced that he was going