tory, is a tv host, a podcaster,

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 co-host of msnbc's 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 that's a that's a big mouthful you're 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 mother's refrigerator, he wrote that isn't 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. america's 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 you'll have the chance to ask questions after that. so please join me in welcoming the stage. michael harriet.

how's everybody doing tonight. yeah, i think that's right. yeah. yeah. so i'm going to be like, skip around, but it's 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 kid's 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 there's a heaven for jackets it's 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. y'all 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 army-navy 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 mother's 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 you're walking home the rest of your body fight the whole. of course i kept it a secret. i wasn't embarrassed about the mugging as much as i was afraid of my mother's 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 wouldn't 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 they're 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 i'm going to skip ahead the next day. i'm 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 d's 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 don't come along the sleeves for days until he finally was fed up and called into prison. but like freaky d america don't steal this is the black of history of american this book is the sleeves. the give me always the talk that i do it i'm good it wasn't brooklyn. thanks for having was the other. from down south so this part where are you from. i'm from hartsville south

carolina that's a little town called. knoxville. it's an interesting time. it should be. it's. it's 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 don't think history is being attacked. one of my premises is that i think they're to erase white history. like they don't care about us learning. what black people did, right? they want us to know what white people did like. they don't. they loved the black. we shall overcome. as long as we don't talk about what we overcame. and so i think that's what the pushback is against, not the black history, but the white

history. and so that's 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. let's 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 that's 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 it's a really beautiful addition. and we meet your your grandmother, your mom, your uncle your cousins. and it's 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. they're fooling you, they're lying. so there's less dispense of that from the beginning, right? so i start with the story about wicked and so you won't 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 you're talking about black people, you have to talk the south, like when you talk about read about american history, you know, it's 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 family's 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 doesn't make sense if talking about how black people saw america. so that's what i wanted to do there's 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 isn't a character in that story. so i would probably have to say that's what i said earlier. total force. joe yeah. and so for joe is the person who inspired what what we call america's 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 wasn't a black myth. it was a white like why people say he could disappear here and

he must've 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 governor's plantation and shot the slave overseer in broad daylight because it was like y'all know forest or don't play and so that i love that story of course so because it's 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 it's like, yeah, we all stay here and like they say, there's 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 that's i love that story, too. i think the way tell the story is really interesting and indicative of. the book, because you're giving us history and knowledge research, but you and it's harrowing stories. black history is quite often traumatizing, right? but then you because you're 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 that's 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, i'm torn up about this, but don't make me laugh. it is beautiful because that's just way we relate to each other, right and that's one of the things that i wanted to make sure book was worth were laughable. like i didn't 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 it's not to me, it's 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 that's 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 we're the survival is like we're 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 there's 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 we're going

to slow it down or we're going to we're 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, you've seen people die just because they are black and how you navigate that. i don't i can't condemn you why you navigate some people are be like, you know i'm a sad white folks because they and i don't 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 can't 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 don't 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 wouldn't 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, it's 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 wasn't 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 self-preservation. 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 didn't 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 you're telling the story of the first white people to come here and you're like, they were dying. they did not know what to do, right? until the natives and the blacks started to show them like, yo, you can make rice. yeah. and then they started to figure out how to live. right. but they were about to die right. and then the same is true with blacksmith thing and like you know that florida that slaves learned stuff that they could benefit when. the truth is that we bought skills that america benefited from the cowboys like there was no planes in europe where they learned how to ride horses. now we brought that from the plains of africa. they went to the rice of africa to gain people who were horticulturalists and agricultural experts to grow rice right? like it was like we have this

narrative that they got some people with strong backs and brought over here and taught them how to do things when the opposite of is true. people over here did not know how to do things, which is why they literally had to go across the world to get to do things for them. i love that. you know, one of the things i think that comes through in this book is your love for black people specific black people and us as a people. right? and i feel you are speaking to from a place of love and i think all your work does that. but i feel that constantly throughout this. yeah i think even with all the traumas because i think you can't talk about history without talking about trauma but i think try to impart is that at the end of the day when you look at black people when you imagine to a continent you didn't know existed halfway across the globe with language and no family, no belongings, and that nothing and you were considered nothing

human, not even human, but property and in a relatively short period of time, like the blink of an eye in a long arc of history, like think the consternation we see in society is because in relatively short period of time, the people who had had every advantage that a society, a political kind of political event, the social advantage, economic event, every advantage possible they had given themselves and they like the space us and them right now, is so close that they got to do something right and when you think about how amazing that is in a relatively short period of time where it like, okay, we're going to stop doing --, we did this all now and then we'll how fast we'll catch it. still it yeah and they can like

the most the funniest and the most thing to me about american history is that how incompetent the people who want to erase black people from the earth have been at doing it. it is impossible like like you think about it, they but one of the things it i discovered when was writing this book is that i wanted to not just say, here's what happened, here's my perspective on what's happened. so i would go to what black people thought at the time it happened, which meant going to lot of archives, of newspapers, black media. and i discovered to citizens. and it stopped because i'd never really knew about this, burned by a white mob. no surviving copies exist. it's incredible how many just black newspapers black. if you go to an hbcu, you'll see there's an old building on every campus that was built in 1936

after a mob it down there like 1910. like everything that black people have ever done has been that someone has attempted to set it on fire and. the remarkable thing is that we keep building it right and that it is like out of those ashes we built other things. and to me that is the positive hope that. i think this book has not just the trauma, but the fact that of all of things that they've done, they still were ineffective at stopping black people, you know? yeah i hell, i say i want to ask one more question and then take questions from you also, you know, get your courage up, get get your question ready, your hands ready to come up. i want to order off the menu for a second because one of my favorite pieces that you ever

did was the the wealthiest black characters of all time. i love that piece. i'm like, why don't i think about it? so i can really can you talk about like where you think like say let's say the top three fiction or wealthiest black people are so. oh of course he's talking about i write it's almost like my life a writing problem if i think about it, i'll try to expand on it. so you have to have some caveats. why so? we asked when i wrote that, the caveat was is got to be who got the money through legal means, right. so it can't be like avon barksdale or why do you leave it at the underground? this. so i still feel like i'm adjusted for inflation dominique deveraux has to be still number one. she was number one. dominique because she had what,

four or 500 million? yeah. four or 500 million in the eighties. now, like so i wasn't like this wasn't like speculation it was like real economic research. so dominique deveraux, when we first talked about this, you're like, you're never going to guess number one. and i'm bragging by braid. what couldn't we did not guess. dominique now this is this is going to be hard because it was girls frame his chicken empire was separate from the breaking bad on breaking bad was separate from the drug empire. so you give it to him for the chicken shop. but then you have to also have a conversation about. like. like, does he count as an african american? for sure. for sure. well, he's in spike lee movie. he's good. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. so you got think about him. there's some the symbols are not top five not the husk huxtables are not top five but you know who who surprise them the jeffersons the jeffersons adjusted for inflation.

oh yeah. because first of all the locations you and the other thing is that people don't generally know that one of the most profitable businesses small businesses in all of business thing is the dry cleaners it's like almost entirely profit right right. it's like you chemicals and that's it. like people don't bring that stuff to you and say well sometimes i do know. do you think that those dry always clean your clothes like sometimes they just spray some water on or whatever you know? what about the family for empire? are they up there or not really? i don't know. make a streaming. probably is devastated. the music you talking about cookie and cookie like yeah yeah yeah and then split up remember so they had to stay yeah so so who's got a question for michael. -- i'm i call on people if you oh yes my sister in the back. yes.

hi. yes. first of all i want to thank you for coming like, i don't know how that magic happens. day that i found out about this tonight and able to show up but thank you i'm just curious who in your family who owns your comics which or uncle made you realize that you are a -- as a comedian and a writer. i don't love that question. i don't know if my family thinks of me as in the top 520 people in the family for real like i know. i'm not in the top three, but i think one of the things about being in my family was that they allowed me they allowed me to be a nerd. everybody in my family is eclectic and, weird, and they just allow each other to in

that. so they weren't like, i would say, weird jokes. i was growing up and they wouldn't say, hey, be quiet with that. right. so i think that's part of it. i don't know if they would even write me in the top three funniest areas. are you best bass player in your family? yeah, because my family was really religious, so kind of cards was being a heathen. so i snuck my best friend down, taught how to play spades, and i snuck played space. but probably like i'm probably the one of the few good played spades players in my family. you think you're like top five in the country? i mean, like, i don't know. i don't talk about. no, my record is top five, but i, like i went to boston's in a day one time, so i don't know if that's in the guinness book of world records or not. but like, i don't even know what you like, that's not even speculation, right?

like you can look at my face. yeah. what are you about that we go. hello. name is jason wallace, and i just want to applaud you just for making historical attempt, because one of the things that i noticed that like a lot of american don't even know american history, like when any besides the generation that they're living with so just want to applaud you on that. and if there part of research just like a little known fact that even you like having like oh my god i can't even believe this like you know what i'm saying in terms of that you discovered in your recent life. yeah. so there were a bunch of things like that. one of the interesting parts of research about especially about the period right after slavery, reconstruction is that the like

all of the stuff that black people would like, like we done in right. like in south carolina, mississippi, we took over those legacy features like, it's amazing of the themes. interesting fact to me is that you, the american education system did not exist until people invaded it. the 1968 majority black constitutional delegation of south carolina created, the first constitutionally mandated public education system in america. it did not exist before then, right? there were, like some counties had public schools, but there was guaranteed public. and they stayed until black people of south carolina did it. universal suffrage, the same thing. right. and so a lot of like the idea

that we don't know that is crazy me like the idea that like there were no public and then the narrative of well you know they had to pass laws to keep from reading and then they had to threaten us, to kill us. this can keep us going. and then we create a public education system. then we send our children school and they they let them spat on on our kids so we could get equal education. is crazy to think the narrative that black people, when people say black people need to focus on educate them like is crazy. like when, do we stop? like, look, when you look at history, that narrative is insane. me because the only reason someone would see is one if they didn't know or two of them were like just making something else out of thin air. they also think about the way we use taxation in this country, or

at least in our cities, right? i mean, the taxes that i pay also help maintain central park, you know, or roads that i will never ride on. right. but you know, schools are hyperlocal. right. so if you live in a poor neighborhood which is constructed if you live in a rich neighborhood, which is a social constructed right, that's to matter for the level of schooling you get, which creates a sort of educational segregation. well, if we had a broader vision of how used for schooling, we wouldn't have. well, there's a chapter in the book on reparations, which says rich throws away the idea of reparations for slavery and there's a better case this after slavery. so think about this. states like carolina, mississippi, that were majority black, all those people who were black were citizens. now who are paying taxes, who were working but couldn't attend to schools that their tax

dollars paid for their money was being used to fund the generational that was that's just outright theft right? the colleges they couldn't attend. right. and so that system of taxation is a system of theft. if you don't the access to the stuff that the pay for, if you can't go to the schools and the colleges and you can't figure out what and go to the libraries, then isn't that theft right. and so went and then it's not my argument. the supreme court eventually said it's wrong, but they never fixed the remedy right they did that. they said, hey, y'all can go to school with them. but that wasn't the remedy for all of the wrong that was already done. right. right. and so when you think about that of taxation, economic theft is not just limited to slavery right. there's a great cause. slavery ultimately is bad as it

was was perfectly legal and constitution right. but after that they specifically eventually said, hey, y'all, we're doing it wrong. all the desegregation all of that, all of that. the case for reparations in my if y'all have a question, just let me know. i'll get back to you one second. jason's a great photographer. so he's good. he wants to document this. i think about the 20th century, right? and can take this as sort of a two part question. i feel like there are certain individuals who made more a difference in the direction of the history of the 20th century? and for us and then than others? right. and i wonder who you think is the perhaps the most the figure who made the most difference. i think about mamie till, right. i mean, it happened to emmett. but mamie makes the critical decision that has this massive impact. rosita excuse me of rosa parks hears about that and she's like,

i cannot move the civil rights movement goes into another level. even muhammad is like my life was changed. lots of people's lives were changed by the story of emmett till, which we know because of mamie. so i feel like the two of them and really her are crucial figures in the of what happens to in the 20th century. so the names i'll i'll say would probably be little recognized. i think i play this game with myself called the six degrees of triumph our so tim howard was a surgeon at mount view hospital in mumbai in mississippi which was built a group called the knights table who had actually planned a nationwide slave revolt in 1860. and just to that civil war started right. so they would take a penny week and four years, collect it. and so they built the hospital. so most of a lot of people in the civil rights movement. you'll find out that they were

in the mount bayou hospital, which was an all black town, was started by one of the enslaved people on, general lee's plantation. but he, graham howard, if mamie till was is is your choice to mamie till knows what happened to emmett till because tr howard housed black journalists who came down there to investigate with his own personal army. he hired all of these young to be here, own insurance companies, to be insurance salesmen, a little young insurance salesman named medgar evers. he since mamie till up to chicago to talk to one of his old insurance brokers. his name was reverend franklin revenge for aretha franklin's

father. so it's almost like all the black people in the civil rights history in history are connected somehow. the tree. howard so as he has a real house sized impact, a when you consider we don't really know. mm we don't really bring up his name lot jason go one more. so i like to know your perspective on the 13th amendment because our to fight is really to our freedom and. it's like that's like the dirty little amendment that keeps getting passed along as a way of being able to have law to control people or propagate slavery. so the except this punishment for a crime is what you're talking, but you to the thing about the 13th amendment, as it relates also to the civil rights

act of 1960. well, so it relates to the civil rights act of 19. so the thing about the 13th amendment was like the black people who proposed the end of slavery had proposed a. 13th amendment right, like involuntary servitude is like there shall be no involuntary servitude was once in its way. it was going to be shorter than the second amendment. and the crime, in part, we think it is like a way to a loophole to keep slavery. but you also have to realize that it was the manifestation of white people's that what was to happen when these enslaved like, which is another insane idea that they gone for, did fight the civil war and left their enslaved people with their wives and their daughters. but somehow if you said of a free they were going to just go on raping killing rampages and

so that 13th amendment was a way not just to just the loophole was a look now if y'all act up, we can still make y'all a slave right. and it wasn't just like like to think of it in terms of mass incarceration, but i think it was also meant as warning to the people who were emancipated. michael, this book is black on multiple levels. the way that you write your sentences, the way you talk about black people, information that you're giving us. it's a fantastic book. i loved it. i laughed. i cried. i learned a lot. thank so much for the book for coming to brooklyn, kicking it off here in. bk nice to see you. thanks a lot for.