battles and the things that he did, making the kinds of decisions could not have been, so how you put all this together. the one end is the idea of this great guy going through the woods and this great frontiers men. and then roberts the pioneering guy. these are things that are so deep in the american myths of how we were created in what the frontier, how did the frontier really make us americans who we were? that is what i really wanted to get back, painting and more complex story of the nature of the frontier. there were a bunch of people out there trying to survive in the all learn from each other. indians, the hunters, the french trappers and british colonies. they were all hungry out there and learned to survive. there's this incredible morphing and learning of different cultures. robert rogers was the epitome of that i think.

.. [inaudible] what area of a twin dealing with

primary sources and secondary sources and dealing with the living history community, what area of his life was the most perplexing to wrestle with in this sense if you had an additional primary source for additional viewpoint that would have made your research ah-ha moment, what do you wrestle with and if you had that additional piece what would it have done for you in his life? >> very good question. one of the most interesting kind of problems i worked with in this book was banned after the war, rogers was sent to the mitchell and mackinaw and in the most kind of western significant post out on the great lakes and was in charge of that for a brief time. and a letter, a passel of letters came into the east coast

and came through hansen. there was a letter that was a very perplexing interesting letter but it was a letter to rogers that made its way up that said, and you know, we've been talking a lot, you know, we've been buddies for a long time and if you come to the other side as we've been talking about,, over to the french, take the indians and start an insurrection out there. the french crown will take great care of you and all this. it was a great letter that posing great treasonous actions on to rogers. it ultimately would result in his being court-martialed, thrown into the galley of the ship and then taken and should be exonerated because there was just no evidence. but i'd really wanted a little

bit more to know who wrote that letter. it was signed by maryland, and it may be a kind of for this guy hopkins who did go over to the french site but this particular letter i was dying for a little bit more a rounded to figure out because it was such a pivotal thing. there are three or four of their letters and i would love to see those. general gage will only let one through and that is roberts he sent to william johnson who read it. is it did back up and sent it back out and this was the one they were looking to hang robert rogers and this letter was part of that so we would have loved to have known more about that but that was part of the intrigue. you should have realized these officers and how much ambition and everybody was doing a lot of backbiting and all sorts of it. it's interesting we don't think

what life was like back there. >> one last question, anybody? right here in the front. just a second. >> did the st. francis experience enhance his reputation or was he diminished because of it? >> he was devastated of course because he lost so many for so long. it ultimately did enhance his reputation, yeah. >> thank you, john, thanks for coming. >> thank you for having me. >> john ross is the editor of heritage magazine. formerly a member of the board of editors at smithsonian

magazine and is writings have appeared in several publications including "the new york times," newsweek and the washington post. john is the author of living dangerously navigating the risks of everyday life. for more information visit american heritage.com. here is a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months.

we are life at the 11th annual harlem book fair from the schomburg center for research in black culture langston hughes auditorium. book tv will be bringing six hours of coverage from this year's harlem book fair. the schedule starts in just a couple of minutes with catherine archolonu will discuss her book of ancient civilizations of nigeria, they lived before adam followed by "new york times" senior editor danna canedy who

reflects on her husband's writings from the iraq war. later gregory walker presents his book on the trojan war in shades of memnon with a panel followed by a african-american slang windage and culture. we end with a panel on writer emma from the harlem book fair. in just a couple of minutes catherine archolonu. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> thank you. welcome to the 11th annual harlem book fair. thank you to all of our attendees and viewing audience. thank you to c-span, for once again in partnering with cost to tell our stories. today we will bring very interesting panel discussions. we will have authors, book signings, storytelling, analysis, the whole of the black world in print, in writing. our lives, our words, our stories, and this is that public platform from which we do that. again, i would like to thank you all, the founder of the harlem book fair. thank you. we will begin our program.

[inaudible conversations] >> good morning, everyone. i would like to welcome you to the langston hughes auditorium at the schomburg center for research and black culture. my name is troy johnson, the founder of the african-american literature book club better known as aalbc.com, the largest and oldest web site dedicated to the works of books by and about

black people. today it is indeed my honor to introduce all of the author talks that will be taking place here. there are three that are scheduled. we have another scheduled at 12:than with dana canedy discussing a journal for jordan, a story of love and honor. the third author that will take place will be this afternoon with gregory bulker, the ethiopias rediscovered the african expedition into the trojan war that begins at 12:45. but now, we have author catherine archolonu who ase the author of the book "they lived before adam." in 2001 after more than 11 years of research, catherine discovered a library of stone inscription made by the ancestors of what she refers to as the family of the nigerian

tribes. these inscriptions are located in cross river state nigeria. they discovered -- that discovery buoyed her research and creative access into the lost civilizations of ancient nigeria. as ground-breaking as this research -- as ground-breaking as the research at johns hopes frankland that came before columbus they lived before adam extends the conversation and controversy surrounding africa as the birthplace of human civilization. again, it is indeed my honor to introduce catherine archolonu, as she discusses and depth her work "they lived before adam." thank you. [applause] >> would you like to come to the podium? >> i would like to first of all

address the significance of the work we have done, the research we have done. we believe that our findings have expanded the perils of knowledge, the belief that our findings call for another look at the history of mankind. we believe that is an important that history be written so that africa was place, black africa's please would be assured. the contributions of black africans towards the making of civilizations are what our findings are about. before i begin my talk let me

first of all acknowledge the following. how excelencia -- the first lady of the federal republic of nigeria. for the support should give to the research in today's nigeria. the residencies -- governor of state whom we the cities since the call the boy king. for his contributions and support and his wife for their support for this project and creating in my home state where intellectuals like me can function and where academics and new ideas can thrive. the new relationship, the epics of the organization -- war presentation of and putting

their stamp of support on our new publication, "they lived before adam." i stand here not today just as myself alone, but as the head of the research team set up in 2004 under the auspices of the united nations culture nigeria. the united nations for of culture is a program of the global secretary of the u.s. on which happen to be the representative and a goodwill ambassador. this team has personalities such as an indian software technology engineer. specialist of the united nations for the arts and culture. a senior culture officer. and applied arts specialist and distinguished alumnus of the

college, the culture of united nations culture. those are a few i will name among the team. i myself am a professor of linguistics and african cultural studies former scholar for international studies professor at manhattan college, college -- all in new york state. they lived before adam is my extent published book and second in the series which are the result of this research project which originally began in 1990, 19 years ago in the states of new york and precisely on manhattan college. therefore on behalf of my co-authors and researchers and myself with gratitude to the u.s. department to the fulbright organization and the national studies for the support i received 1989 when i discovered and published their roots of

african slaves author and americans leave of iraq. 1991 they granted me the honor of enjoying the hospitality and support as international visitor and scholar in residence here in new york. -- reconstructing 450,000 years of africans lost civilizations published in 2005. together, these books make up a total of about 1,150 pages. to understand its importance, [inaudible] presented to the world in december, 2005. by the then president of nigeria represented by the minister of culture and tourism, ambassador

frank. i am here on invitation of the harlem book fair, the largest book fair in the world to present the new book, quote cody lived before adam." the findings and the prehistoric origins of the igbo, never-been-ruled. the alternative for title. two things for ground-breaking addition to the scholarship the first is discovery and transcription of lost stone writings of prehistoric africans. they look at it in nigeria and the world place in cross river state have been charted to researchers since the colonial days but we were not the first to see the inscriptions as a form of writing and to actually isolate some of these letters. another series of inscriptions found in ireland which many

linguists have been struggling with for decades. we also transcribed into an african language spoken today in nigeria. in fact some were found in west virginia in the usa. what we have found in the case of the inscribed of southeastern nigeria the monolith is that they contain two letters that were the foundation of a writing system used in mesopotamia before 4,000. the letters in question are the letter he and the letter she. the first and last of photography. we also found some basic letters of hieroglyphics such as letters are and end. the majority of the letters on the stones are from an indian language called [inaudible]

as well as symbols now recognized as universal due to the facts they formed the root of most cultures, religions and seances in the world. these include the cross, spiro, a triangle, circle, and every other known in geometric shape. the antiquity of the stones and fact they were discovered in the forests where many were buried underground shows they were indigenous and they belong to human history. prehistoric indeed. the tradition of the natives see that the inscriptions were instituted by the stone age people, the first humans to inhabit the area. and that they were invented by the first of humankind. they call this mother [inaudible] and say that she was the first woman to have borne a child by pregnancy and that her first child was a boy through came to

the world. the monolith was -- [inaudible] just like the oral tradition. britain and an of tucker fee that includes uniform [inaudible] same hebrew name adam called eve in the biblical story of creation. the eyes and mouth from the hebrew letter which is the first and highest in the hebrew cibula? it represents the north internet. there are over 300 stones in nigeria. another thing that is a team of archaeologists.

other stone implements belonging to the time whose stone to 5,000 b.c.. they walk with others with some british faculty members of the department of archaeology in the university in the 70's discovered several non-polished as well as polish picks and other implements in a place in the town in the zone in southeastern nigeria. their completion published a number of the journals of the time -- will homo erectus was the one-stop shop, the warehouse that supplied survival tools to

all pockets worldwide. for this, for us this means it was from prehistoric nigeria that are out of africa migration took off to populate the globe. also because, practice employment discovered all over the world all look like they were made in the same factory. this was also the composition of the archaeologists. our analysis of some from a number of languages spoken in all continents of the globe today confirm put several other linguists have suspected and completed that mankind as the hebrew bible said spoke language at the beginning. our linguistic analysis of the words from languages across the globe show that hebrew, the

language group that includes the home of the nigerian heller erectus was spoken by the inhabitants of countries as far-flung as nigeria, egypt, mesopotamia, turkey, india, china, greece, united kingdom, north america, south america, including the greenly and eskimos. in fact the vernacular wiltz that survived in plato's description of atlantis were found to be in sound and meaning, were found as sound and meaning to be directly derived from the language environment. so too were 90% used by adam and the household especially. our research includes origin and meaning symbols used in every religion and literature all over the world.

in these we found that hebrew bible, the call of the hebrew and the chinese, the hindu and walleye yanna and recently discovered egyptian christian bible called -- of importers in for the lost knowledge wherever we look we found evidence confirming the claims to have been conducting mitochondrion do any research here in the usa that all mankind can durham sub-saharan africa that even adam or black africans. however, it had been previously believed adam and eve were descended from east african. our findings reveal it wasn't an east african loosely but more like igbo. this is the name of the first lady of my state who is actually from the home of the hallmark

this. what i'm saying is it wasn't losing but [inaudible] who was the ancestor of, where activists out of africa migrations. research conducted by french pathologist's lead by -- wingfield the direct ancestors of homo erectus and homo sapiens or adam lived at nigeria 7 million years predating and even without ancestors by forming new years. this confirms that we didn't come from anywhere. that we are -- we are the never been ruled, the kings and

queens. by 2008 to 280,000 b.c., 2008 bc, himeno evolution was interrupted and adam, a hybrid was created through the process of genetic engineering. however our findings reveal the creation of adam was a downward climb on evolutionary because he lost. he became divided. no longer whole or wholesome. all over africa and an ancient egyptian records the traditions maintain oral and written traditions maintain, iraq is people were human beings and possess mystical powers such as telepathic, levitation. that their words could move rocks and mountains and change the course of rivers. adam lost all that when his right plane was shot down by those who made him, created him.

the direct ascenders of homo erectus were the key roles of the folk tales in every part of the world. it was the who founded and sustained where they continue to function until they were driven out by colonialists recently. it was then who transported language and culture to all continent on the globe. therefore what we say the things falling apart which we read about to whom this publication before refers to the falling apart not only of the colonial period but the pre-historic, the ancestors of mankind. adam, taken from his nigerian

ancestry and moved and changed and altered and made it to become less than his ancestry. the significance of the research work confirms both theories of evolution. evolution as am i as well as creationism. that these two theories played some part in the development of the human species. that indeed mankind and black africans are the oldest ancestors of human kind. and the first to be called homo. that in the last paradise of eden was african. in fact it was a west african nigerian location and the solutions to problems created by modality to the fall of adam are to be sought in black africa. thank you so much, god bless you. [applause]

>> okay we are going to open the floor for questions and if anyone has questions there's a microphone on this side. please feel free to step up to the microphone and oppose any questions you have for the author this afternoon. don't be shy. >> [inaudible] excuse me for the benefit of the season of against it would be much better if he stepped to the microphone so everyone can hear the question.

>> my name is dominique. i'm an architect also a professor at the, the university technology and i find information to be very interesting in essence and the reason why is because there are stories we've all been listening to and hearing for past sentries and most of the stories we've been listening to were certainly more of what we call full details and at that time we were not educated in terms of the process of reading certain documentation in regards to whether it is attack or is about the existence of mankind or extension of the end of my question to you is how does that

book, pertaining to they lived before adam define the stories of the bible itself with the deadly -- bibliotech? >> well, we've spoken about the beginnings of humankind. we've spoken about evolution and a thin and creationism. it is clear wear adam falls into that story. there is science and there is religion. religion deals with issues of faith. and mostly we don't deal with issues of faith when we do research.

we believe some of the stories in the bible as well as the scriptures are what you call for full details and oral traditions. they are convinced information in such a way that the essentials are there but that details are not often there. in the case of the creation of adam and how it relates to the 2,280,000 -- 2,285 year ago event when adam brought up different from his ancestor, homo erectus and without a proper evolutionary growth that would have permitted that. genesis tells us that something happened.

someone put a hand in the evolutionary process and interrupted it. and so, the story we have in the bible is actually, the story in the bible is the process whereby a man and a woman who used to be naked and didn't know how -- they suddenly changed and they realized they were naked and what not. so it is -- that's the point where evolution, where creationism crosses the path of evolution. so that's all i can say at this point. [applause] >> dr. archolonu, my name is steven thompson. my question is the region where you found the stone inscriptions

, would that have been the reason where the noch culture was located? nicoe noch i'm selling it with a capital of n-o-k. what they have somehow been related? >> yes, the answer is yes. because an -- between 9,000 b.c., and 5,000 b.c. we've gathered, we discovered there was a thriving civilization called [inaudible] and area and that civilization was a mighty civilization and it enveloped much of nigeria and the camerons' and some environments. its center is what you now call nok. it appears to be its library

where information was taught in the remote forests for self keeping so to say to weeks connecticut. thank you. that's about all the time that we have four questions right now. we will be taking a short ten minute break. the author is ready to go at 12:10 with author dana canedy. so relax and we will be back in about ten minutes. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] with you've been watching the

catherine archolonu, author of "they lived before adam." booktv coverage of the harlem book fair will continue in just a couple of minutes with dana canedy who will discuss her book a journal for jordan. [inaudible conversations] this summer booktv is asking what are you reading. >> i just finished recently a big book called liberal fascism and i had to read a lot of stuff for that and so the stuff i confess i've been reading most have been graphic novels the centrally comic book store grown-ups but right now i'm reading a book called rebirth of a nation by jackson, i hope

that's the title or i will sound silly if it's not what i'm going to be reviewing for the "national review." but so far. it's ideological to have problems with it but it's a good read about the sort of intellectual currents that lead to the progressive era in effect. i've been reading some stuff by the social scientist sherry berman about democracy which is pretty good. and i picked up a copy of the book called meth land, which is an interesting phenomenon but not a good recreational drug to get a few books i would recommend to people, my friend, vin cannato has a book i'm hoping to get to. there is one of my favorite books is an older history book that's written by lbj little called -- named eric goldman and the book is called rendezvous

with destiny and it's a history of american politics. fantastic easily accessible book. a book by a guy named arthur ekirch, the decline of american liberalism -- i hope i'm getting these titles right. this is my own book, liberal fascism. a great read. meet friends, influence people. and the angel graphic novel series which takes place after the tv series ends if you ever followed it. i just reread the watchman pretty recently which was the famous graphic novel from the 1980's. it's a pretty interesting cultural historical document. less -- i think it's a good comic book but it's more interesting in the reflex at the time. and i guess that's about it for now. and very much looking forward to christopher caldwell's new book about europe and immigration,

which people on the right in particular and fans off chris caldwell have been waiting for a very, very long time and he is a fantastic writer, so it should be pretty good. >> to see more summer reading lists and other pergamon formation visit our web site at booktv.org. bookexpo american new york city, 20 online at the yale university press and the director of yale university press. what do you have come out this fall? >> an hour of great books for the fall starting with the making of americans by e.d. hirsch, i think you remember he wrote a best-selling book called cultural literacy and he cares very much about what role of education has and actually defining what it is to be

american and in this book is sort of i think a capstone of his career which is many best sellers and decades of fact some of a education to talk about the centrality of the information and knowledge and what it means to have a shared corpus of knowledge and how important it is to the national identity and how it's being threatened by the way education seems to be splintered across the country so it's a book that has a lot of argument, a lot of advocacy. a lot of ways to look forward to what the administration can do about education. >> the other book you have elephants on the edge, what animals teach about humanity? >> yeah fuss is a really marvelous book. it's very moving, very touching. what she does, and she has quite a platform. she's been on 20 slash 20 and 60 minutes and what she tries to do here is understand how human behavior affects the wild and the captivity and it's touching

subject. people who have read on these kind of issues will respond to this book because our actions to have consequences and especially on those creatures i can't argue for themselves in books like elephants for instance pubis she talks about elephants having a nervous breakdown. that's what the title refers to serve the inner emotional life of animals and actively however own empathy towards understanding how a ba to teach us something about it is to be human. so it's a very interesting sort of turnaround there. in our efforts to understand animals we began to understand ourselves. >> to biographies coming out by two artists, charles dickens and andy warhol. t want to tell about andy's leader's book on charles dickens? >> they're actually hasn't been a biography in over 20 years so this is the first cradle to grave biography of dickens and a

couple of decades and we are really excited about this. there's new information, new research -- there will be good bookstore sales for this as well. >> the andy warhol book, who is the author? >> a very distinguished historian and he writes a column for the nation magazine and this is a wonderful biography of the the posthumous legacy of warhol left behind. a lot of people think it's more interesting to think about andy warhol them to look at his paintings and his art but this book actually talks about what warhol date to the meaning of an american icon. how he's become and when he did largely through working with iconic and graphics objects, whether it is the campbell soup can for liz taylor and this is a book that actually takes a look at how he redefined what it is

to be iconic. >> the director of the deal university press. as the director what decisions do you make on a daily basis? >> it may be easier to say i don't but it's in the domain. i have all the departments run up to me operationally, editorial, marketing and financially. so, starting of course with the books we have a staff of about 14 editors and the press is only as good as the book it publishes so that's the most important book decisions we make. we are the largest book based university press in the country and the only one with a significant london base as well. >> university press celebrated its anniversary last year. can you get history on the press? >> it started on the left wall of a lawyer that graduated from yale who worked on lower fifth avenue and over the decades it became more and more famous and

for its lists and humanities and art history and in the 1960's it was appropriate and to the university saw we are a department of the university. we have in the 70's a big london office built in the square and it's still there today and as i said we do about 400 books a year mostly on the humanities and social sciences. >> john donatich is the director of the heels university press. thank you. >> thank you heriot. >> [inaudible conversations] book tv live coverage of the 11th annual harlem book fair continues. starting shortly, dana canedy, author of the journal for jordan [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon everyone.

my name is troy -- aalbc.com. it's my pleasure to introduce the talks this afternoon. we have two more scheduled, one at time:12:945, the ethiopias discovered the african expedition into the trojan war back. but right now we have author dana canedy discussing this incredible story. her book, a journal for jordan, a story of love and honor. dana canedy is a senior editor for the new york times. in 2001 she was part of the team that won a pulitzer prize for national reporting. a journal for jordan is a mother's letter to her son. fears in its honesty about the father he lost before he could even speak. it is also a father's advice and prayers on behalf of the son he

will never know. in 2005, first sergeant charles monroe began to write what would become a 200 page journal for his son in case he didn't make it home from the war in iraq. charles, 48, was killed on october 14th, 2006 when an improvised explosive device detonated under his humvee in an isolated road near baghdad. his son, jordan, was seven months old. please join me as we welcome author dana canedy as she tells this ripping story. [applause] >> ii. thank you for coming today to allow me to tell you this story. i want to tell you how the book came to be and then share some of the journal entries with you. this is a story of a remarkable

man in our life together and this is a book i never wanted to write. i wish this book didn't exist because that would mean charles was still here. charles and id to about eight years on and off and i say on and off because i broke up with him a couple of times. but he was a remarkable man. military man. and was incredibly dedicated to the soldiers who served under him and in the meantime i had my career as a journalist for "the new york times." and as we get the part of our relationship was spent in different places. often the desert training soldiers for battle were going to conflicts around the world, and meet reporting on stories everywhere from the dominican republic to the presidential recount in florida to here in new york. well, in 2005 he got order to go

to iraq and suddenly i thought my gosh, you know, he had just always been there and i thought he can't leave. well, i was turning 40 and he was coming off to the war so we decided to try to have a baby and he left in december of 2005 when i was five months pregnant with ebbers on, jordan. he was on the entire time i was pregnant with jordan and before he left i gave him a journal. i was at a store shopping for a friend and i saw this journal and was a guided journal with questions for men to their children and i thought god forbid he doesn't come back wouldn't it be nice if he jotted down a few thoughts for the baby? we knew we were having a boy. he became consumed with this journal. and he took it to iraq with him, filled up over 200 pages he wrote in the hot desert in iraq

after his missions. he would go on his missions during the day, come back at night. his roommate said his flight would be on under the door and he went right before he went to sleep. he wanted this to be a guide for our son's life in casey didn't come back. he told him everything from the power of prayer to help to a life to what it means to be a black man in america to his love of the military. you name it and there he talked about his relationship with me and he explained why he wanted a son. he told him how to deal with racial discrimination. anything he could think of he thought this beebee would need to grow into being in may and is in there and he meant for it to be a conversation with our son that would last over the years. so, he sent the book back to me a couple months before he came home on leave to meet jordan, he only got to meet him once for

two weeks. but when jordan was just born, charles called me from iraq and he was shaken because he was in charge of 105 men. he was in charge, i asked before he left with this that mean, what will you be doing and he said my responsibility will be everything from making sure they get their mail to recovering their body and literally that is what he did. balkan he called one day and one of his soldiers had been blown up in a tank and charles had to go and recover his body piece by piece out of this tank in the middle of the night and they shook him up so he called me and said i'm going to send the journal home to you. it's not done but if something happens to me you will have this and jordan will know me so he sent this to me and i started reading it while jordan was sleeping beside me. jordan is running around here somewhere with my nephew so hopefully you all will have a chance to meet him later. he is three now but anyway, i read it and i fell in love with this man all over again.

charles was this really tall -- i don't know if you can see some of the picture's -- muscular soldier but he was gentle and incredibly shy. so he didn't talk of what so when i got this journal where she's talking about the beauty of rain storms and rainbows and what he thought about when and -- they're stored in -- i couldn't believe it and so i thought to myself what a beautiful gift he's given to our son but of course at that point i'm still thinking he's going to come home so when jordan was six months old he got to come home for two weeks and beat him. -- and meet him. he would have been home in literally 30 days, one month when he was blown up by a roadside bomb. well, the first weeks and months after he died i wasn't thinking of writing a book. i went back to work and i

thought i just can't bury him and go back to work. i've got to do something with this grief so the first thing i did is i decided to bite into new door times. i said to my boss i am probably the national journalist in the country who has lived with their grief of this war first hand having lost a loved one plus he left this amazing journal and i would like people to know about him so i wrote about this on the front page of the new york times. the response from their readers was completely and utterly overwhelming. i have to tell you that was two years ago and i still receiving phone calls and such by people who read that article and that prompted the book and it's called a journal for jordan and what it is a memoir. i decided to take the journal entries and expand on them and tell jordan the full story of his parents' life together. i decided i am not pointing this has a fairy tale.

he wasn't a perfect man. all i am not perfect. our relationship wasn't perfect but it was as good as i have ever seen and i don't want jordan to think his father was a saint who he couldn't live up to, you pause and but he was honorable and strong. he was a strong black man and an american hero and this book has been so well received it's been sold in australia, brazil, holland, several other countries, poland, tie one, and to me i am so proud of that not because what i did. i feel like it's is it about me and vehicle for telling the story that people all over the world would embrace this story about an average black family and this warrior who literally died for our country and the sort of sacrifices he made. you know, charles was a complex man. on the one hand as i said he was incredibly shy and didn't talk very much but on the other hand he was also an artist.

you will see over there a picture of an angel. that was one of the last things that he drew. said he was a guy that could block a battlefield, lead his troops into war but he drew angels and children and wrote a beautiful journal. so like everybody else there were many dimensions to him and i wanted a worse time to know that and understand that so that's why i wrote this memoir. i also, even though i wanted to share it with the world i wanted it to be personal for jordan so i wrote it literally to him. every chapter begins deer jordan. it starts from the beginning of the relationship and goes all the way through up to the decision to have him, his father leaving for the war and what happened after and interwoven in that are his father's words in his own voice from the journal. i also wanted people to see the journal. so, i literally reproduced some of the pages so you could see charles and writing and hear his

voice. i would like to share some of it with you. but one of the things i want to tell you is that a remarkably there are things that come through in the journal and i don't think they were intentional at all. i think he had no idea that he kept coming back to certain things but when i read it became immediately apparent. the first was the power of prayer and faith in your life. he probably rights that a dozen times or so in the journal. the second thing that comes through is his profound love for the military. and how he was proud of what he was doing protecting the country. and the third thing and this comes through over and over and over, is his respect for women and how he expected jordan to be a gentleman. he writes at least a dozen times how to treat women and what to look for in a woman and 93 proud of that. i knew that about him but to read it in his own words is

really extraordinary so even though he couldn't be here physically i feel like he is here with me helping me guide this little boy because when he needs to hear about dating or when he wants to know about discrimination or when he has a question about god or maybe is doubt in his brief i will be there to help him but i am a mother i don't know how to teach him to be a man and he will have his father's place guiding hand through life. i think the journal will mean different things at different points in life. there are certain entries meant for a bowie and certain entries written for a man for instance he tells him about sex in the journal which for a man -- whenever he needs to. but the book i wrote will be for him when he is a young man.

i would like to share some things with you from the book. one of the entries i want to read is about charles' decision not to come home for jordan's birth. the thing about that is he wanted this baby for all long, long time. we talked about having a child over the years and he was so excited but, you know, and he promised me he was going to come home when he was born and we had probably the biggest fight of our relationship which i write in the book over his last-minute decision i was eight and have months pregnant not to come and what was remarkable, it wasn't remarkable at the time, i was upset, it's the kind of sacrifice soldiers make in this country every single day without a book ever being written about them. and he made a personal sacrifice to put his happiness aside to defend our country and it was hard for me and the reason he

did it come he left to go to the war and jordan was born in march, barely three months later, he said his young soldiers, and they were young, many of them were just out of high school. many of them saw him as a father. he bailed them out of jail, some of them, he talked about birth control, taught them how to balance their checkbooks, some of them had gone to the prom the year before and he said i can't leave them. they are scared, they're just getting acclimated to the war and getting used to being in my back because they spend the first month in kuwait and he said if something happens to these guys because i left them -- i'm their leader. i can't do it. i know you need me and jordan needs me but they need me more. i was furious and scared. .. what does this mean? and my doctor had arranged to induce me awake early so that we could cornyn to schedule and he could come from iraq and suddenly he was in coming. well, we worked through that and

i understood it. i am proud to share that story now because even though many have you understand the outrage of felt at the time i think you'll also see what kind of man of character he was. he wrote a journal entry about that and this is what he said: jordan, i could not be at your birth because of the war. remember i told you all about the themes, theme about women comes through in this as well. i could not be at your birth because of the war but you were surrounded by strong women when you were born. all of these wom all of these women embodied the reasons you should never ever disrespect or lay your hand against a woman. remember who taught you to speak, to walk and to be a gentleman. these are the first teachers might little prince, protect them, embrace them and treat them like a queen. women without ward qdr a dime a dozen that being with a woman with these qualities of loyalty, trust and caring for who you

really are will have a lot more meaning. never listen to your friends, follow your heart and look for the strength of the woman. powerful words. [applause] thank you. i am so proud of him. and the things that he's left for our son to read about life. and their things that he writes about me that make me feel like he is still with me and that he is still flirting with me, and i sometimes, when i miss him, read them and it just helps me to understand that there is more to life then just our physical presence. there is our spirit and not only the war could keep him from

leaving his spirit with his child. not even that could keep him from leaving his words and his wisdom and being able to talk to his son. he found a way to continue to take care of him even after he was gone. you know it is interesting to me that among the things that he writes, are just everyday things that he wanted jordan to know about himself. i want to share one with you that i think it's kind of funny, because he wanted him to know him so closely that he wrote a lot of things in the journal that i didn't know about him. i didn't tell he had his first kiss in the eighth grade with a girl named denise. but then there were funny stories about his childhood that are his way of letting his son know just who he was as a boy and as a young man in the presence of the rights for example about fashions in his junior high school.

they were black that leather with a suede healed. gramlich kenwood abizaid stack keele were no good for your back. i guess i had to learn the hard way. i was walking downtown and glanced at my reflection in a department store window. i was walking like an old man. i had to throw them away. i loved that their personal stories like that in here. there's also practical advice about have to deal with life. hears woody rights to jordan about racial discrimination. son, every situation dealing with discrimination is somewhat different. discrimination comes from people being ignorant or not knowing about a person's background. i guess it's human nature for different cultures to profile one another. it is not fair to judge someone by the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. lets the person is true or not just keep your opinions to yourself. you never know what kind of hidden talents a person might have to share with you. life would be boring if we were all the same. appreciate people for who they

are in learn from their differences. [applause] i think that there is no way that jordan's character won't be shaped by these powerful messages and words from his dad, and so i just had to share the story with people. there is another thing that he did in his journal that i thought was just incredible. now, there two chapters, only two chapters in the book dealing with war. what is a chapter explaining what his life was in the war and what he was doing and his leadership. the second was the reconstruction of the day he died. now i had to interview his soldiers for these chapters, and i probably talked to about 20 soldiers, his bosses, his commanders and so forth. i went through the pentagon and got some documents that i needed. i interviewed the doctorate the hospital in baghdad when he was brought in. i extensively researched this and one of the things the

soldiers told me after the guide is that he would start is days in the gym at 5:00 a.m. and iraq, 5:00 in the morning working out in iraq. imagine the fortitude, then go out on his missions and come back and write. they say that he was this the ears, tough warrior. i never knew that die. they would say to me when i would tell them how gentle and sweet he was and how he would pack a picnic and we would go to central park and have a picnic and a romantic evening, they said maam, we never met that guy. so, there were two sides to him but one of the remarkable things i found up from talking to them after he died was that he used lessons that were happening, situations that were happening in the juarez lessons to write about, life lessons to our son. imagine going out on these missions, something happening

and you come back and turn that into a lesson that you write about. it is phenomenal to me that he had the fortitude to do that. here is an example of that. the first of may we lost their first soldier. it was very sad. everyone cared about corporal like. we had to get together the night before the memorial so everyone could have a chance to speak about how he lived. the soldiers had some of the while the stories to tell about robbie. we laughed and smiled think he about the crazy things he would do to make us laugh. that was the healing night, a chance to a fallen soldier. laughter is great medicine for the soul. he also wrote probably two dozen letters to me, love letters from iraq. i incorporated some of those and in one of them, he did write about the use of losing his soldier come a 21-year-old young man whose wife was pregnant with their first-round linney die. this is what it writes about that and when he refers to mom,

that with the nickname he gave me after i became pregnant. i know you have for the bad news. it was something i hoped we would never have to experience. it has been a rough two months ago this week it's been the most painful thus far. i can begin to tell you. today's a tough day for my company. we had a memorial for one of my soldiers killed in action. you would be proud of me. is hard talking on the fun. you can see everything you want to say because of the restrictions. yes we have been in a lot of pain. everyone in the battalion has been supportive. i will be glad when this week is over. and umi soldiers not the my door that night that i would have to face the inevitable. what i'd be able to handle it was the question? don't worry, i did above and beyond. the memorial was the toughest do we came through and give our comedy goodsen the. don't you worry about me. we will keep the memory of our friend with us as we continue on with our missions. [applause] thank you.

there is another entry in the journal where he writes about an experience during the war to teach jordan a lesson. this was about some soldiers from another company who were killed then this is what he says. the 18th was a long solemnize. we had a memorial for two soldiers from another company to were killed by an improvised explosive device. none of my soldiers went to the memorial. there excuse was that they didn't want to go because it was depressing. i told them it was selfish of them not to pay their respects to two men who were selfless and giving his lives for their country. things may not always be easy or pleasant for you. that his life but always pay respect for the way people lived in what they stood for. it is the honorable thing to do. [applause] you know, i started out saying what i want to say again a which is that as proud as i am of this book at which it did not exist.

i wish he were here and we were struggling with the things that all parents struggled through together and enjoy our little boy. but, so rarely do we hear the stories and about the lives of the soldiers on the line for us in iraq and afghanistan and other places. you see on cnn or on the news to soldiers killed in iraq, and rarely do i think people stop to think there's a name behind that person and a mother and they live in streams, so i thought if i have to open myself up and sherry bid of my privacy and my private life to be able to put a name in the face to the war then i'm happy to do that in that is one of the reasons i wrote this. i wanted people to know every one of those soldiers over there has dreams and as the like to get back to an sacrifices they are making on behalf of our country. as i said, most of them will never have a book written about them but i hope that in some ways this helps to one of them and i have heard from a lot of

soldiers and their families, who have been proud about this. i have had a chance to go to the pentagon and speak to soldiers there. i am a chance to go to a convention of a creeping military the families in. >> to 400 families bloodlust soldiers', so many of them are happy that this book exists but the primary reason i did it was selfish because i needed an outlet for mike wreath and i wanted to create something for my little boy over there. aidoo thank you all for letting me share our story with you. [applause] are we out of time? >> what a moving, moving story. this is truly a gift not only to jordan but to anyone that will pick up this book and read it. we have about five minutes for questions. again, if anyone has something, a question they would like to pose there is a mic over here to

my left so please step up to the mic and let's take the image of the remaining time that we have, and pose any questions that he might have. anyone? >> my name is lovette harp brand i am from sarasota florida. i don't have a question but i have a comment. i feel very proud of you. >> thank you. >> for doing this for the rest of us. thank you very much. i did see one sees been initially when you first wrote this in enjoyed that interview. >> thank you so much. >> i really appreciate that. [applause] you know, it is than the toughest time of my life and as i said i had to do this but i feel like it is really not about me. i do appreciate that but it is about that little boy over there

and it is about his dad and the other soldiers. i feel like god used me as a vehicle to tell the story so i am proud to do it. [applause] >> someone else want to come to the mic? >> hi. my name is cheryl mcfaddin and i am a teacher in philadelphia. one of the things i hate to have in common, it is not this is fairly a question. i thank you for your courage. i thank you for your willingness because it takes courage to revisit pain, but we also know that pain is healing so you can really expand the healing but i also want to thank you for telling a story about men. aidoo lot of work with males in philadelphia between the ages of 13 and 18. so, it helps and i will be using excerpts from your book in my

classroom, but it shows the humanness of males that we often don't have a chance to experience either because the things that men do to mask or the things that get meth so i thank you. >> thank you. thank you. [applause] >> hello. i don't have a question, but i also am of i hearing you share your experience and i cannot help but thank you and also to kind of stand with you. i am a college professor. i am also a writer. i write various things but poetry is, has become my passion. like you, mike courage to right

here from losing a baby. >> i am sorry. >> thank you. as a teacher i have also come to say that writing is a wonderful way of gaining control over your life. it is there a the and i keep telling my students that. i am going to share the testimonies that i have. i actually wrote an essay titled , poetry, child loss and something-- it has to do with coming out of it comes to dealing with pain, something along those lines but it was my way of kind of using that experience to also teach and share my insights and it is wonderful to hear you talk. malcomite you have spoken from

about how the book came about. can you do a little bit more to your organizing principles? >> thank you. do you want to say hi first? say thank you for reading our book. >> thank you for reading our book. [applause] what i decided to do was to do it chronologically in to tell the whole story. from our childhood and the things, the forces that made as do we were and do it that way, and the remarkable thing is that because the journal was so comprehensive, charles talked about nearly the same thing so i felt like we were writing it together. i would write my part in a flip through the journal to find something relevant that i was writing at that point and put his words and so we were both having a conversation with them together, and that is how i organized it. >> terrific. that is all the time we have

four questions and comments and i would like to thank you all for attending this moving and presentation. >> thank you for coming. >> okay. we have a ten-minute break before we listen to and get the chance to hear gregory walker. that will start at 12:45. actually, that is about four minutes. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] live picture from the langston hughes auditorium as the dana canedy rats supper presentation. coming up next, gregory walker, the author of "a journal for jordan"-- "sahdes of memnon" the african hero of the trojan war and the keys to ancient world civilization.

>> this summer booktv is asking, what are you reading? >> peter rosson us is the founder of public affairs books. mr. ross knows what you plan on reading this summer? >> one of the first books that plan on reading is by peter carlson which is being published by public affairs but i can see that i have been had a chance to really get. everybody tells me that is absolutely marvelous. peter was a reporter for "the washington post" for many years and he tells the story of nikita khrushchev's visit to the united states in 1959 i believe come up when he came here at a time of the cold war was that it be. he was the quintessential russian galumphed and he came here in the travel the country and he went out to i went and looked at how the corn stocks were and he went out to

hollywood in went to disneyland. he captured that moment in american history in told the story with what i gather is enormous good humor. it is also a history of a very treating kinds of that is the first book i will be reading. >> the second book i'm going to read his chris buckley's luzhin bomb and pop. all of us to follow this kind of thing have heard a little bit about the book corsi net one way or another the now famous line what he said to his mother on her deathbed. he looked at her as he was about to take her last breath and he said i forgive you. what i'm hoping is my grandchildren don't say that to me when the time comes but when i read the excerpts of the buck in "the new york times" magazine i realized, how truly revealing it is about the way in which families of a certain kind live together and how you come to

terms with the fact that these extraordinary people that you grew up with their breached the in and it sounds to me like something really worth reading. >> to see more summer reading lists and other program information visit our web site at booktv.org. >> next, more live coverage from the 2009 harlem book fair. coming up, gregory walker, author of "sahdes of memnon" the african hero of the trojan war and the keys to ancient world civilization and the keys to the ancient world civilization.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> good afternoon everyone. the president and founder of the african-american literature book club has indeed been my pleasure to introduce the author talks this morning and this afternoon. i also want to make sure that you knew that all of the author's books that have been presented here today are available for sale on 131st street right by the main stage, so please support these authors by purchasing their books. next up, and the final author in this author talks series is brother g, gregory walker is a chicago-based journalist, poet, historian and author. well working part-time for the "associated press" rather g span ten years conducting research for the african legend genre,

writing shades-- "shades of memnon" in developing contacts and archaeology anthropology and linguistics worldwide. he is also written columns on comic books and graphic novels for the american library association contributed to national news publications in these times and is one of the popular group of chicago poets who have inspired the motion picture, love journals. it is my pleasure is we join gregory walker. welcome brother g. [applause] >> hello there. alright, i want to thank everybody out here for coming. i know you have a lot of things he could have been doing besides coming here. wanted thank c-span and i want to thank everybody for coming

here. i have been waiting a long time to speak about this in such a forum and the subject matter i am speaking on his been waiting a very long time also. how many people are familiar with the trojan war story, the trojan horse, helen of troy becoats you got achilles being shot in the heel. all these things are mainstays of what we called the foundation of western literature. what people don't know and what i am going to reveal and what i have been working on for the past 20 years is the revelation about the third book of the trojan war, that very few people know about. everybody knows that achilles was a great he wrote in the story of the trojan war. very few people know that the greatest hero, not according to my opinion but the greatest hero according to the ancient greeks was the hero named memnon whose names means war.

in my studies about memnon i kept happening upon one astonishing thing after another after another after another because memnon represents those and the ancient greeks called the blameless ethiopians, the plame's ethiopians for the one that was doing my research, i kept on saying these references all over the place. but before that, let me give you a little bit of a foundation. because since i have been, i had the "shades of memnon" book series, it is a seven book series, three books are out now but since it has come out, almost miraculous things have taken place around this book. the book has been used in dozens of schools all over the country for good young men who had a gangster rap mentality to read the book, totally change their ways. i have had white people who read the book who let out a sigh and

they told me spinally somebody is doing a multi-cultural book that shows all the different people in the world based on real history. holly with has come knocking at my door several times and i finally settled on the deal and am working with wesley snipes to do a series based on my work. [applause] no come up the way this came about, i guess a little bit about me first. i have always been a nose the individual. nosing my way into things trying to find out what needs what and who need to even if that meant i got in trouble. and so before i even graduated from college, from columbia college in chicago i was a multiple award-winning journalist for some investigative things that i did. after i got out of there i went over to the "associated press" and i stayed at the "associated press" and than that fast-paced newswire atmosphere i was able to hone the things that i was able to use to create this book

series and it was a great place for it because at "associated press" you have to make snap judgments about what is worth doing, so those types of things were critical and crucial. now i spread my wings when i was doing it so i wasn't just doing things for the people. i used to be a really huge comic book above and i still him. i started writing columns for the american library association and believe it or not for a while, for several years i was like the sysco and ebert of comic books. i would do a review for the american library association and a graphic novel or a series of comic books would make a lot of money so a lot of people in the comic book industry wanted to buy me dinner when i used to come to the comic book shops into the comic book community. so, i use my influence for several years and i tried to so

they needle some of the big names and even some of the small names in comic-book publishing to finally pay attention to presenting some african characters and other characters of color and an honorable and respectable ways. they assured me every year that the comic book festival that they were going to get right on it, but of course they did not. after a certain amount of years went by i said i am wasting my time. here i am pumping up this thing, selling a lot of books for these comic book companies and they are not coming through for everybody else. so i said what am i going to do? i am going to give all this up. i was building a comic book review empire. i had people calling me in sending me notes from all over the world wanted me to come and speak about comics and how comics can be used in schools. i have a nonprofit organization based on that and i turn my back on all of that and i said i'm going to start researching

history, real history to see where real african people have real african hero is. so, i turn my back on all of it. i turned my back on a whole career and i started doing research, cross-cultural research into ancient history. i kept on saying two things for god kept on saying this name, memnon. everywhere in but, memnon the sense of one that. and particularly the ancient greek people so i sought to delve into it, to try to find out who were these ethiopians that the ancient greeks keep talking about and he was this memnon who was supposed to be the king of the ethiopians? i started doing some astonishing research and started finding things out that were so astounding. in my mind i was like why is this not been presented to the world before? what happened to this? were in the world did this great

epic history and tradition get fleshed out in mate in accessible to the whole world? particularly when you are talking about something that is not on the fringes of western literature. we are talking about something that is the basic foundation of white european western history which we are all supposed to be getting in the schools according to what most people are subject to so i started to do research and it became very apparent to me purdue it became apparent to me particularly when i started doing research into the ancient authors, the aged and the medieval authors of the whip to the 20 a century. it became apparent to me that anyone who used to have a classical education your talk about memnon and why was that? because of what was a direct part of the trojan war story. the story of the odyssey is about of course odysseus making his way home.

the story of the illya is the story of the were proper and showcases achilles coming in and hector and all of these things. the hidden book, the ethiopis is about what happens between those two things. there are books still being taught in the in libraries all over the world that are lying to people. they are telling people vast ms. truths because somebody wants to cover up the whole misrepresentation of african people in this. the story of the illya ends with the death of hector. anybody that saw the movie starring brad pitt for years ago, brad pitt, nobody could stop him. he could throw a spear the length of two football fields in hit a fly. what they did not tell you is that that point, they should've shown memnon. memnon came along at the end of

the illya and the end of the illya is one factor is killed. if anybody remembers the movie jury when achilles was dragging the body of hector around, that is it for the illya. the rest of the things we generally know about, achilles getting shot in the heel, the whole trojan war thing, that sixth place in a hidden book called the ethiopis. which literally means the black people. ethiopis among ancient greeks meant burned faced people. the leader of the ethiopians was memnon. among the mind blowing things that i found about the whole memnon saga. i caught up in the early 90's. i have been working on this since 1989 and i caught up on the work of a gregory notch. he is an imminent greek scholar

and he wrote a book called the best of the atkins. adkin is another name for the greeks. in this book he talks about the greatest of the great among the greeks, hector, achilles, abesamis and all kinds of other characters but then he gets to the chapter on the ethiopians in the talks about, he goes into collaboration and a lot of things that i had seen up to that point. he can read greek and he is a greek scholar and i can't read greek. i am more of the researcher. this guy revealed some very amazing things because when i was doing my research into the ancient ethiopian ti-cat seeing references that the greeks kept saying, they called the blameless ethiopians, the most favored of the gods. and i was puzzled by that. i did all kinds of research for a long time to try to find out why they would call these black people blameless people.

gregory and notch revealed the history for me. it turns of that in ancient greek times, everything was based on praise and blame. if you got a lawyer, your lawyer would come to represent you and he would find people to praise you and if your opponent got a lawyer they would find somebody to blame you. the highest compliment that you could give an individual or a group of people was to call them blameless, a blameless people. this was written about by helmer, is, all kinds of fantastic riders among the ancient greeks and as a matter of fact if he slipped into and go really deep into particularly some of the older versions of the illya and you will see in chapter 11 where homer says and this is mysterious for me. i have to take my hat off for this. this is very mysterious for me. he said in the elliott

chapter 112 tory commandante hero came of nobler line or nobler was done in. why would he say that? why would he say that about an african hero it was the enemy of the greeks? i come from chicago. i was there and i was in the heyday of the michael jordan era. when the arch rivals of the boles would come to town there would be in the restaurant in mead on the street and start talking trash to each other as best ballplayers do but then michael jordan would walk up. the talking would stop or go down to a minimum and everybody would go down to this brother, whether you were in emmys, or not, when michael jordan came in he transcended with his greatness. he transcended all the

pettyness. eastood above all of that. this is what memnon is. this is what memnon represents. this is how he came to represent the ancient greeks representation of the highest of the high in terms of manhood, in terms of morality in this is what happened in the ethiopis. this is, this is probably going to be the first varied white retelling of the zero ethiopis story in almost two dozen years and as a matter that no one has written what i have written to bring back the memnon tradition and the tradition of the ancient ethiopians. no one has done this and over 2,000 years until i put this book out in the year 2000. this is the reason why so many people, teachers, administrators, people in the entertainment industry, once they got ahold of the books and started reading them they said this is astounding.

this is unlike anything that it's ever been done. the ethiopis, after hector is killed, they call the person who at that point in history with the greatest he wrote in the world. let's the matter of fact prelim, the uncle, he was the king of troy and he was memnon's nephew. there were blood ties all of the world, the same way you have the situation in england in europe where you have the royal families that are intermarried with each other for diplomatic purposes. so, he called his nephew, his nephew, memnon to come and help them. memnon was known as being unstoppable, unstoppable. he and his ethiopian army came. they came on the heels of another hero, which is a heroine from ethiopia. this is also fantastic.

these-- memnon came to help the trojans. a group of them sons came to help to fight against the greeks on behalf of the trojans. the amazons were defeated and then they called memnon and the plymouth ethiopians. when the ethiopians of rye, the trojans for overjoyed. they knew no army in the world kit beat memnon's army. in fact in the ethiopis some of these, one thing that happened that showed the nobility of memnon in the plymouth ethiopians is the fact that an old man rest of the field to fight. the rest upon them and produce sword and memnon saw that this was an old, elderly man. memnon drew back in said i am not going to fight you. i did not come to the field of battle to demean myself by striking down old men. please remove yourself from the field of battle. the old man left.

this was an example of the nobility, the nobility that this character memnon represented and the inability of the plymouth ethiopians. after that happened is memnon killed a bunch of different-- from the ancient greek tradition and finally, achilles came out. akhil lease came up. a few lease and memnon, the two most epic characters, heroic characters in the trojan tradition came out and they were going at it, fighting toe-to-toe. they fought for days. let me backtrack. this is what drew them out. memnon's army chased the greeks although it back to their boats and in ancient times if somebody chooses to backed your boat that either meant you were going to get on that boat and sail away or you would wait until the sun rises the next morning and supper your fate. this is something that they

never showed in any of the movies, in the of the books are in the the representations' but it is in the ethiopis and other places all around. the greeks were so scared that when the sun rose the ethiopians were going to descend upon them and kill them all they said look, we know the ethiopians are honorable people and they don't like to slaughter so ask for a single comment, manning if you think you are so bad you said that your greatest hero and we will send out our graveness hero and whoever loses your army has to leave the field. thus, saving us from being killed ourselves. so they send out the kealy than they send out memnon. if anybody remembers the movie clash of the titans, if anybody remembers the show of hercules, there is a tradition among the ancient greek god that something is happening they do not like they will interfere. the greek god sis interfered in the fight between memnon and

archille zen katsas belland memnon and achilles killed memnon. then, right after that, the normal stuff we all know happens where achilles ran through the walls of troy and an arrow shot by paris guided by apollo, show dominik heal andy died but what they leave out is the fact that memnon's name means the mortal. it means the more the. meaning that you can't kill this brother and if you do you can't stay dead. liness memnon was killed, memnon's mother who was the goddess of the sun, or goddess of the sun came in most of the gods and goddesses came to the throne of zoos and they said what you did to memnon was unjust. he was the greatest of the god's. he was for righteousness and so we came to complain about what you did to this man come mrs. dues said you are right, i got my way.

troy as fallen so since it is all do you say he is i will provide memnon and he shall live again. for the mark, and this is something that was not done in any of the greek counts and for the more i will make memnon an immortal. memnon will become immortalize. they gave memnon the opportunity to lived on mount olympus with the rest of the god's and memnon declined. he said i'm going back to my home to the place where the blame as ethiopians live and there is where i will dwell. the stories i just told you was first told of round 750 b.c. by a writer. this guy took it upon himself to finish writing down what used to be an oral tradition. what was or-- an oral tradition

that the writer poet homer left out, so let people think of the contemporary of hallmarked, a lot of people think he was homer, but the thing to remember is that according to the ancient greek and nails the greatest of the great heroes was not achilles, was not hercules, it was memnon and as a matter of fact if anybody knows in this deep history or this tradition about the odyssey, when odysseus makes his sojourn into hades he sojourns at the hades in these these all these dead people that the new. judith ccn haiti clicky sis achille's and achille's said and i quote i would rather be a beggar on earth then living in this land of suffering shades and the land of the dead. no, i stepped back and i went, why would the gods according to the tradition deem to leave the

great and mighty achilles in hades and suffering in provide this african hero named memnon to go on in the world? why is that? what would happen? why was that so? and so, that is on to another round of research. the of the round of research was to find out, there must be something about these people that they called the plymouth ethiopians. this is not just one character he was just standing by himself. this is a character represents a group of people. he represents a group of people and a group of people with a certain way of life and this is what i found out. in the elliott and the odyssey they talk about the fact that the gods would leave from mount olympus and go across the western notion to sit and dined with the blameless ethiopians. everybody else in the world including the ancient greeks themselves set to go to the temple and make sacrifices to the god's in order to interact

with them. but the veal fans sitting across the table with them in meeting and dining with them. this was a fantastic thing. this was something that was so astonishing to me, particularly when we think about the way black people live in portrait in western civilization over the past 100, 150 years. a flip-flopper coe the direct opposite of what has always been portrayed and not something that brother g made up and not something that a bunch of afro centric people made up but there the ancient greek people in the romans and other people themselves actually said about the age of black people so i did a lot of research and i found that to these people were. the ancient greeks called them the ethiopians. they called themselves the kush sites and eclogites went around the world doing amazing things,

raising of civilizations, helping people doing all sorts of fantastic things. [applause] we will give brother g the opportunity to answer questions for the next five minute simply step up to the mic to make sure everybody can hear the question. [applause] >> please step to the mic. he is saying it is okay. >> yeah, i am really happy to be here and to hear you because the way you talk about the blameless ethiopians, i also found something you found that and i

took time to find out who the limbless ethiopians are. we have been dealing with the homeland apart from the drake materials that you have, which we also have gone through. if that egyptians knew about these people, someone asked me about the empire of nock. someone asked me about it, so we have information. in fact the research i did was that you have done from the homeland. that limbless ethiopians, you called them cush. that is black. what we studied was statues made by the ancient people to represent these lots of time and space so each appears to face

and the name of all of the great masters who went to the different parts of the world and brought civilization. we would like to give you a copy of our books and you can see. [applause] >> i been doing this for 20 years. since 1999 has started to research this. the first book did not come out until-- 1989, and the first book came out in the year 2000. over and over and over new discoveries about africa and about the representation and the interaction of african people all over the world have done nothing but back up my work over and over and over again so thank you sister. >> brother g, my name is steven thompson. >> greetings. >> my question, memnon, would this be the same personality that the greeks would make a

reference to? a nuking them, pharoah, because that name seems like it was used from time to time for him. >> my brother is bringing up a very interesting point. win alexander and the rest of the people took over in ancient egypt around 320, 330 b.c. what they did was they named these two statues and the statues were of an earlier king. they renamed those two statues statues of memnon. why? because they thought from their perspective the greatest hero in the world was memnon and these of these giant statues and the renamed the statues and the statues, the name for the statues that stuck to this very day. now, here's where the magical part of the memnon tradition comes in. in 27 b.c. an earthquake took

place in egypt and those statues became? frickler least one of the statues was cracked and for a couple hundred years everytime the sun rose the statue would let out a particular sound. there were different people that said it had different sounds. sometimes it would say it was like the harp, some would say was like singing but to the ancient greek people and the romans what this actually meant was memnon was speaking to his mother was the goddess of the sun, the goddess of the sun, so this kind of stuck with it, so you know the among-- here is one quote written on the, on the feet of that statue. this was from some anonymous creek writer bren 15 bc and he said, both the this-- the this is a key lee's mother, this the

know that memnon still speaks to his mother when warned by your light on the bank by the mount from the gaited cities so proud of the voice of a keeley's bedell praise boykin no longer be heard either increase or in troy. so, the legends about him when don and other people, other people wrote about memnon alta red, medieval times all the way up until almost this time when a few years ago a young group of hip-hoppers it read my book and decided that they did not want to be gangster rappers and more after they have read my book, and they wrote this. this is a hip-hop recording the made based on my work. dark like the shade of my mother and father, the dark like the shape of my sister and my brother, dark like the shade of his color, the shade of memnon. [applause]

>> thank you all for coming to enjoy these author talks. the next thing that is going to started 1:30 will be a panel discussion called life is short and wide, memoir and biography of the diaz bracketone:30 and again i thank you all for joining us and we welcome the c-span family for joining us as well. enjoy the rest of the afternoon. [applause] one final announcement, again i encourage you to purchase these authors titles. they are available outside on 135th street. please support the authors and their work. does not only their work, it is our stories as well. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

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♪ >> that was gregory walker, author of "shades of memnon." you are watching booktv's live coverage of the 11th annual harlem book fair. coming up next a panel on biography for gomore from the 2009 harlem book fair after this break. >> paula caymen, who with iris chang? >> iris chang was most known for her 1997 bestseller that was the book, the rape of nanking, and it did huge things to raise awareness about japanese atrocities during world war ii and that was she wrote great detail about the massacre and raise awareness about atrocities through asia.

became a whole movement. >> who is she is torian? >> she was both an historian and a journalist, so she did not see them as mutually exclusive. so, historians, a big part was archives and she spent days and days in the national archives and other archives but then she also went out, confronted people face to face so she is all of those methods. >> where was she from? >> she was from our bennett illinois. we met in college on a daily. i knife at the university of illinois. it was mid-80s that we were friends since then. >> what kind of relationship did you have? >> at first i did not know what to make of her, she was many steps that have made but every time there was an she would get it. by the time i would have applied to it she would have already got it. she was always so far ahead of

us. she had the idea to write for "the new york times" as the u of i correspondent. she just called them up and soon she had stories in the front section of "the new york times." who does that? i did not know what to make of her but i saw just what real talent backed up this incredible there and i decided to try to emulate her and said seeing her as a rival, and through the years both the buzz wrote books and we were both sounding boards. she became a huge role model and what it meant to be a successful author. >> what happened to her? >> this was the reason why i wrote the book because it was one of the most shocking things that i had ever experienced, she committed suicide, which seemed for no apparent reason in 2004 when she was 36 years old. there were lots of rumors that were swirling everywhere that there right-wing japanese had

assassinate her. she had a lot of them and the-- enemies. >> because of her book? >> yeah, she was very vocal in criticizing their history books and their political leaders. there were also rumors that the u.s. was somehow behind it, that she was very active in trying to get the trends of the bataan death march to sino-japan for their enslavement and the state department was not so happy about that but it turned out that she'd fit a lot of patterns of manic depressive illness or bipolar disorder that got worse after she had her son, which often happens with women and was exacerbated by a lot of real pressures that were all around her. >> so, what was your last conversation with her? >> she called me just three days before she killed herself and that was the first time that i

ever said something was very seriously wrong. i realize now it was a bike call. then it just seemed like a strange, bizarre thing and i did not know what to make of it but that was the first time i had ever noticed her as really depressed and disconnected from reality. she was so depressed of was hard to get the words out. in retrospect by sauve that she was explaining to me why she would do this. she talked about a lot of guilt, the ways she had raised her son. she talked about a lot of fears that she had and, said the die had been a good friends to her and yeah, it was very, very disturbing but as disturbing as it was i did not think that her life within a few days later. >> what did you find about iris chang? >> that she was very, very complex.

there was a lot of kind, this the near perfection that all this basically saw her as having the absolute perfect life from being the perfect person to the extent that we didn't even want to share problems with care because we did not think she would understand having problems, what that was like. she was incredibly, incredibly driven and that is what helped her to uncover all of these tough parts of history and atrocities in japan. with the mental illness i think she did not know when to stop and she did not know about any kind of limits that she had come so she was inspiration in her drive, not saying limits but ultimately it was the weakness and not getting treated for the mental illness, she refused to accept that she had it. >> is there a stigma with mental illness and asian-americans? >> in every culture there is a huge stake, but an asian

culture-- culture it is really extreme. agents are much less likely to be treated with their pure medication and when they to go for treatment is usually at the 11th hour when they are already at the silicotic stage, when it is really hard to reverse what to reverse.d. just because her family forster. then he was telling her. >> what changes have you made in your life because of her suicide? >> no one has ever asked me that before. i -- i appreciate living. a lot of it is corny. i appreciate living in the moment. i am having my second child in several months. just looking a lot more clearly toward the light to things in life and enjoying them. i have returned to writing about

tough topics, but just knowing my limits. it's okay to take time off, not be so driven every second of the day. >> besides this book what other books of the written? >> i wrote three other books. the one before this one, all in m y head." 18-year migraine. all that is about pain and how it is all in our head. then i wrote two feminist books, "feminist fatale." and then one called "her way" a

lot of young women and sexual attitude. more status. >> we have been talking with paula about her book. >> this summer book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> this summer i plan on reading several books. a couple of them that i need to finish right now. one of them is on william wilberforce. he was a great man in history responsible for eliminating the slave trade. he is one of my political heroes and life. the abolitionists in america looked to wilberforce and his example of how to get rid of slavery in the united states. so almost anything i can read about wilberforce i usually try to get my hands on. the book i am in the middle of right now i want to finish this

summer. it is a tremendous book about his life and how he brought people together to limit the slave trade in great britain. another book that i am going to read this summer is called "the longest day." it is about the terribly long day when we invaded europe at normandy. eventually it led to the end of world war ii. a friend of mine recommended it to me. so it is just an amazing book. so i am excited about agreeing that. some recent books that i read i would recommend. one written by a navy s.e.a.l. about his experiences in afghanistan. it is called the "lone survivor." he is the lone survivor. it is one of the more remarkable stories of human courage. it is really a tribute to the courage of his comrades who lost

their lives in that time in afghanistan. but it is a tremendous book. th" it is fascinating in that it talks about the french revolution, the american revolution. it ties history together better than any book that i have ever read, especially how each one of those countries affected each other. so it is one of the bitter history books that i have ever read. >> to see more summer reading lists and other information visit our website at booktv.org >> now back to more coverage of the 2009 harlem book fair from the langston hughes auditorium

at the schomburg center for research in black culture. starting shortly a panel on biography. [inaudible conversations] ♪ [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. please welcome. >> thank you very much. [applauding] >> and i am happy to be here, and i so happy to see you sitting in the audience. as you know, writers need readers. so we need the dialogue and the conversation. without you there is no conversation. so thank you very much for being

here. i am going to begin with my biography. the other writers are on the way. they phoned us. they're stuck in traffic. as soon as they come they will come up to the table and tell their stories. all right. i am going to begin by giving you some information. the masterpiece. it has been translated into many languages. however, we have not heard about his literary sister. she also came out. 1966. published by heinemann that made

her nigeria's first female novelist. she went on to publish more novels, more sure stories. after being a commissioner. let's say after administration she decided to open up a publishing company. so she became africa's first female publisher. says she is a pioneer in writing and publishing similar. now, what do i do in my biography to back up, after living in nigeria in the rural area . after studying flora nwapa's

books i wanted to know how come this village girl was able to evolve into an international author. and it was through research. i did get some grants, but i found out that flora nwapa came from an illustrious family. for example, her grandfather was the chief, what we call a warring chief who was appointed by queen elizabeth the second to collect taxes and to introduce british life and culture to the nigerians, specifically in southeastern nigeria. that help the whole lot because it sends her grandfather was all warring chief definitely she was exposed to british life and culture. another significant factor, a family member, her

great-grandmother was what we call at trader, a trader and palm kernels. the british election. so it was the trade that the women carried on that helped with the growth of flora nwapa into the international world. specifically when the portuguese and the british came to a southeastern nigeria oguta, where flora nwapa went to school and lived, the missionaries with her, relatives going on to study in england that had had of veryt influence on flora. why? well, she was introduced to not only what we call traditional african culture, but alongside with that was the introduction

of the british culture, specifically her great-grandmother's and grandfathers would decide proverbs. they were what we call the custodians of igbo culture. flora nwapa learned. let's say modern culture. so what is beautiful about flora nwapa is she was able to a straddle both worlds. in other words tonight you will find in her books proverbs and let's of traditional customs, but you will also find that she was able to master the english riding, reading, and publishing so definitely families helped her become a great writer. next we have the introduction to what we called missionary

education as a student at t they she was able to learn more dearies of writing and perfected rfected her skills. so flora mwapa went on to study at the university of edinburgh in scotland. she came back to nigeria, started teaching and writing, and we are so happy that she is one of the role models for african women all over the world. last night we had the flora mwapa literary award. flora mwapa was one of the role models. she was a trailblazer that,

so many women writers. so in this book it gives you traces of history of the mothers. the influence of missionary education. all of these people and persons influenced and transformed the life of this village girl into an international star. there are other secrets in the book, which you will learn. and certainly going to ask you to buy the book. you will be inspired to find

srrxdile1rnivt and become a@ thanks for coming all the way to be here with us. many years ago i wrote a book.

all these nasty things about the caribbean. i felt that i should write a book to say, listen, there is another reality. i began to read that book. in the course of writing the book i showed the book to another famous literary there from london. weber. the first point i wanted to make was that he was not the first person to write about the eastern experience in the caribbean. in point of fact the first person from the caribbean to write about the eastern experience was this fellow, a.r.s. weber. i had never seen the book.

did not know where it was. so i had to run down to the british library and the library of congress. that founded in the archives. and that sent me on the path of this fellow called a.r.f. weber. this little island. was born in 1880. the place where you have the mining of gold. and he went down and began to work in the mine fields speculating gold and diamonds. well, one year or one day they

sent up a shipment to england with all of the diamonds. and when it got to england it was full of lead. somebody had stolen the gold and diamonds. of course business broke up which led him to leave the interior of round frontier town, as it were, to go into georgetown, which is the capitol. of course he got very much involved in the politics of the day. needless to say he a rose and became one of the most important thinkers in the caribbean. one of the guidelines here, what do all of these writers have in common today? well, they all have in common that they were born fighting a very strong racism and colonialism and had to get out there and fight the man whether

it was new york or ghana. and he was leading the freedom fighters. my task then was to try to recover and to recuperate mr. weber. it was recovered by a very important woman. you all know a book called "in search of my mother's garden." but one thing that guided me in my writing are these words of alice walker speaking. this is what she says. we are a people, but people do not throw away -- do not there their genuses away.

it is our duty as authors and writers for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. and if necessary bone by bone. and so i thought that my task was to go and find out about this. discover to make him available. one more thing before i read. one of the purest cases. these guys are so very important. they are left by the wayside. one of the contributions is that long before -- wonderful and marvelous.

long before he came to talk, weber was talking in 1931. if you don't know that you should get that. it's very important really get these to know what we have done and try to recuperate them. i'll read now from one section of his poems which reminds me somewhat of bob marley. one has to live. one must live. the next piece he comes to new york. the heart of the renaissance. he talks about his experience there. all read the first section. life and death. the intricately woven connection. helen read from my book on page 32. weber argued that death and life are intricately woven together.

but he said if death is a part of life why is then at death we shrink and shiver? is joins us to eternity. the answer echoes similar sentiment. he says for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. now i know in part. then shall i know even as i am known. weber, however, puts it. he uses it about another writer. this is what weber says in his book of poems. he wrote about economics. he says time still tell me. you may not.

i must shred the hidden way. knowing all and yet the pad. struggling, fighting, still in bracing. another poem, an examination of death. and this poem he sits and ponders on the mystery of life and death. teach me than to tear not death. to weber that is but another stage on an unending journey of a person's existence. but at this mighty stream. he beckons all to sit with them.

learn from the furnace of the deep. in the life and death all he indicates that only time will reveal the mystery of life in which we in our blended state cannot but fathom from the standpoint of our own material existence. yet they are things we can do to make ourselves ready for death. as some would say i will live for a cause. if i die in the process then so be it. what then should we care about death? according to weber we should

only see your the life not lived well. may i repeat, what we fear about death. according to weber we should only fear in the life not lived well which to him is worse than death. suggests living is the walking dead. this is what whether -- weber says. tilt your chin and trying and say what chair.

he goes on. the last one i go to. he lived and died by it. he took in every aspect of the world around him. his interests were wide and all encompassing. he believed and living. he was a man in search of life. even if death would catch him. and he does it all, but he says fear not. the fear of death should only be. what is there. so again the fear of death should only be what trails of glory we leave behind. we live our life courteously.

what did we had? that is from the palms of webber. just a second thought. we will take me to my last. weber, of course, fought the british. like all of the great caribbean writers. he fought them tremendously. but he pleaded for independence. be allowed to travel and go around. and here, of course. coming to the heights of the harlem renaissance. this will be my last section. of course, anybody knows new york rush hour. underground rush hour. i don't care where you are.

here we are talking about the rush hour in 1925. he offers a descriptions of new york rush hour subway experience at 5:00 in the evening. he claims it was one of the most amusing and sometimes exasperated experiences of the traveler. the sense of contemporaneous this which and what he might have been describing the first decade. 1925. this is what he says. being at rush hour in new york. remember. they come up to america. he says, and the rush hours mostly about 5:00 passengers in the subway train our stacked absolutely literally like

sardines. made and jammed together. just who does the pushing is nothing. squeezed tight and fast. now that is all very well when a man happens to be waged or a woman between women. all are mixed. though world seems to be riding in the subway at that hour. and it is male and female. as only some room is available. one has to be cautious with o ne's hands. it was the latter.

and then your number @rt6ñ%ipñpñ wear overcoats. one wonders what must it be like in this summer when clothing of both sexes is quite not so copious. that is weber on the subway in

harlem. thank you very much. a.r.f. weber. thank you much. [applauding] >> good afternoon. first of all, i would like to apologize for being late. i was actually coming from another one of these wonderful panels being presented here at the harlem buck pistol in 2009. of what tenth bank you for inviting me to this panel. means a lot to be. i am an author, publisher, a former journalist. a book that i am going to be talking about today is called

harlem godfather. it is actually a collaboration. i don't know how many of you know who he is. okay. that is what happens. with those of you who don't know bump johnson was a harlem gangsters who pretty much to reined from the 1930's until his death in 1968. one of the challenges in writing this book was i did not want to glorify a gangster. i did not want to put on a pedestal someone to do so much harm to the community, but my problem was i knew bumpy johnson.

a -- i want to tell you a little bit. when i was nine years old i was selected for the gifted children program. of course they don't have one in harlem. when i get to that meant i had to go to ts166. so this was a big deal. to everybody except a nine year old. i knew i could not possibly dress well enough to go to school with a bunch of white kids. i had never been around a bunch of white kids. the only thing i knew about white folks, this is 1956, is what i saw on tv.

what they knew about me, what they saw on tv. she made this big deal about awarding me or rewarding me for receiving such an honor. she convinced my mother that my record was to be to write a around with her her that summern her big black cadillac, 1966, an african-american woman with the big, long cadillac. running around meant riding in the car with her while she did the number runs. she turned out there conditioners. we came to the gramm apartment

complex. it's beautiful. the brass chandelier in the lobby. brass doorknobs. marble floors in the lobby. high, really high. you know how in harlem we love the high ceilings. he looks like a linebacker. so it looked really funny. you know, come on in. so i go in with madame. all right. you go sit in the corner and be quiet. don't say anything. all right. i hear her arguing. they are arguing.

raised voices. i am sitting there. there are four guys. not watching their words. i'm sitting there. okay. then i hear the voices from the rob -- room coming up the hall. there is this man's deep voice. and he is telling madame off. as he is walking into the room. and let me tell you just -- hello. how are you doing? hi. and madame said, let me introduce you to my darling, my god child. okay. hi, mr. johnson. well, hello. how are you? and what are you doing here today? well, you know she's just won an

award at school. she has been picked to go the igc. one of only three children in manhattan to get picked for the program. well, that is nice. we have to think of something nice for you. how would you like some ice cream? yes. what do you say? yes, sir. well, okay. go get some ice-cream.

>> he told me what a nice a guy he was, and then restarted talking. one of the things that i realize the reason why madame brought me over there is mr. johnson loved kids and madame was always in trouble with mr. johnson. but if i was with her, and he treated her nice. so she always brought me with

her. and even got to the point* where i demanded air-conditioning. he got me to finally admit i did not want to go to itc and he asked me why? i said because because when you are in nine years old and that the answer to everything? i said because. he said because why? and i said they will make fun of my close. the and i was very serious. he said miss kk you don't go to school because of your clothes. you are supposed to go the reason is to get an education. >> host: i was in school people used to make fun of my close this is a man i am nine years old i don't know anything but you could tell

these were some threads and i looked at him and said mr. johnson people made fun of you because of your clothes? he said yes i said why did you do? he said i'd be that much. we were never in a room alone the guys started laughing and they instantly stopped. he said i don't want you to beat them up. i want you to go and show them that you are as good as them. i thought, all rights. shortly thereafter he was arrested and right after that we had two men knocked on my mother store -- door at 10:30 p.m. and when my a mother opened the door they gave her a white envelope with

two, $100 bills. 9056, two, $100 bills was enough to pay for school clothes for me, my older brother and my sister for the entire school year. you old-timers know, for about $25 you could buy all the clothes that you needed. the funny thing is that i knew that mr. johnson, his name and i knew there people that called him a bumpy even in parliament nine years old i knew who bobby johnson was at nine years old i could not make the connection because my mr. johnson could not be that old murderer that gangster

that everybody said. i could not bring myself to make that connection until more than 20 years later when i now thanks to mr. johnson i went to school and made something of myself. i am now a reporter at "the philadelphia inquirer" which is one of the top 10 newspapers in the country and there is a program that comes on a and the that is several of the rock and ended in mentions bumpy johnson a notorious harlem gangster who is rumored to have helped with the only successful escape from alcatraz and i am talking to my daughter but i am listening but not looking at the program so then something happened and i just happened to look up and they were showing a picture of bumpy johnson and it was my

mr. johnson. and as soon as i saw it i thought of course, it is bumpy johnson, mr. johnson is bumpy johnson. so then i had to investigate. i felt compelled. my journalistic and uses kicked him. i thought of it day she started to do research and interviews and all kinds of events this schaumburg became my second home. one of the people that i talk to was dr. john henry clarke [applause] he knew bumpy johnson and the things that i wanted to know from him more than anything what bumpy was like because this time i was wanting to

know was what was wrong with me? how can i admire this man that i know has done such dastardly things? and i was kind of afraid to bring that up to him because i did not know how to articulate. he was a real guy. and after he called me down and gave me tape-recorded that worked, the feelings put me add these gummy he said the saying is i admired bumpy as well and i still do to this day. this was in 1995 or 1996. i said how could you? he said because people are three-dimensional and there is more than one side. he said everybody exploited

carl umbro bumpy exploited harlem but he gave something back. he was a gangster but he w@@ú@ú f leaving in the wards but including some temples. because if you want to know about my past i will tell you

that but on the surface middle-age middle class african-american woman a best-selling artist with awards blah, blah, blah you do not want to know the rest of the stuff. and if i can be three dimensional then so can bumpy. i met his wife, mamie john sin in 1993 or 1994. and we became so clothes that she called me her goddaughter i love to maybe johnson so much. i loved her so much. she recently died. she shared with me a lot of stories about bumpy johnson and throughout the years when i was doing this research it was not for a book. i don't know why i was doing the research. i have absolutely no clue but i felt compelled.

she was encouraging me and said this person will talk to or this person so she was giving me leads and it was wonderful. she then decided we should write a book about the time of american gangster there is a movie that came out about 1997/98 that got everything wrong about his life. and maybe thought the movie was funny. she was not upset. her thing was they got it wrong, they did not know. when american gangster came out, she was furious because frank lucas did no. he knew her husband and frank lucas was not her husband's protege. he was more like the ninth

funky you take out the a garbage. or go pull the car around but in the movie he made himself and and maybe was furious. she said comment kk kk we will try to this book so we sat down and wrote this book i would say 80% of the book is based on research that i did back in the '90s before i knew i was going to read a book the other 20% came from her memory and anecdotes that she told me so it was a true collaboration. it was her life stream to write a book.

she always wanted to write a book but did not know what she wanted to write about. at 93 she became a published author. can you imagine that? and then she passed away may 1st of this year. but at least she saw the book published. of like to read an excerpt from "harlem godfather" if you don't mind? [applause] >> just a few minutes. >> of this is the charleston years that made it bumpy who he was. he was born october 1st 1905 in the negro section of charleston. when bumpy was 10 a crisis of

the family his 19 year-old brother was accused of killing a white man. this was south carolina a state whose unknown taking matters into their own hands when it came of accusing blacks against whites. in 1904 when year before bumpy was born one of the most atrocious lynchings occurred and berkeley county only 40 miles away a 21 year-old was fishing with six white men on the way, argument ensued who had earlier o molested his sister and he threatened to face a man but when the group returned to town bookie was promptly arrested and when he could not pay the $5 fine he was thrown into jail but later that day of a small group of white men went to the jailhouse and the man he be released they took him to the riverside and scalp him, poked out his eyes, cut off his genitals, cut out his tongue

and then tied him and he was reportedly still alive to a great and threw him in the river. the crime was so heinous that even the south carolina governor was second when he heard the details but nobody was brought to justice. this was the south carolina that dean anger up when he moved to harlem in 1919 his character was already formed he was sent to harlem by his family because he had decided he was not going to back down to the white men and they did not want to get him killed. so "harlem godfather" was published last year and actually published it through my own publishing company. with is a tribute to bumpy johnson, also may be a but

also a tribute to kk who is still trying to figure things out and excepting things for what they are. thank you [applause] >> good afternoon. i am from chicago [applause] and i am happy to be here this is almost like a second home to be the schomburg center has been a part of my life is not quite as long as the chief but somewhere in the vicinity. every time we come with third world press the chief allows us to come to this grand institution over 75 years old and we are very fortunate to be here and most certainly for

the harlem book festival 11th anniversary. thank you for allowing me to say a few words to you. my wife is in the back taking note [applause] we have been together since 1969 [applause] and we always sell brothers that the way a marriage last may always marry a woman smarter than you. [laughter] then you lakisha tell her that then you say why do right to memoir? this is my memoir, the yellow black and this is my mother it is a book that took 50 years to get out of my system and i open with a poem that is titled yes i have nothing but

my mother's memories and no piece of cloth or reread books no recipe for spaghetti or cake or coleslaw no photographs of the two of us laughing or holding hands i do not even remember her voice all i have deep inside of me are her last words, you are smarter than us, use the library and take care of your sister. and learn from what i have done wrong. coming from the lower east side a detroit michigan and chicago i group been a situation i would not wish on anybody. i was born in little rock we migrated up south to michigan. my father left when i was quite young and my sister was just born. my mother a very pretty

woman, "yellow black" she is not an educated woman she could read and write and computer to figures but she was brought into the sex trade at a very early age through black ministers. we were trying to move to detroit we moved into a place that was not suitable for anybody we went to largest black church in the troy doubt the time and sat in the front pew and the minister could not take his eyes off of another. has taken out after the sermon he whispered in her ear and one week later we move to one of his apartment buildings he was a rich richman and she service tim -- serviced him every tuesday and thursday

until he ran for the national presidency and somehow fell and hit his head and died and within the week the wife put us out and said don't come to a funeral so since we realized servicing ministers is not that dangerous they continued but it was dangerous. why write a memoir or write an autobiography? my life has been a long journey. in the beginning my sister and i essentially lived on the streets of parts of our lives. my sister was a year and a half younger one child of 14 another is 16 and other at 18 by the time she was 27 she has six children and never married and five fathers for the six children saw her life for the

most part was in a very difficult situation. i left the strike and came to shove go to live with a stranger who was my father and that lasted about six months. i finished high school and ended up going to join a magazine selling group that travelled across illinois into misery selling magazine prescriptions to stay alive. fast for i could not make a living at that i ended up in the military in the united states army. i was trying to join the reserves but they're not taking reserves in 1963 by went to the regular army. why is this interesting? by that time i was reading and was saved my life, brothers and sisters, was art.

literature, richard wright slapped me in the face, wake up in the gross why began to question the world a little differently. i was listening to louis armstrong and he was the baddest to trumpet player in the world negative not care for his mannerisms but i did understand there is a genius working with that horn than another called miles davis he was tall and black and clean all the time and played that trump could the way the wind gravitated to him like a free shoe store. [laughter] [applause] i decided i will place some trumpet. i was six-foot one inch, 131 pounds like a walking skeletons and the guy

said you do not have enough wind in you. i was walking home dejected and passed to the poor man's bank. what is that? the pawnshop. i walked in there and a man said i said what is the cheapest trumpet? $303? that is like $350 today. i said he said i will sell it to $3 down and $1 per week and i will teach you how to play it. it is a deal iran home i came back the same night and to start playing trumpet and then i became first trumpet when i went back to school and default. [applause] music and literature, the arts

saved my life for as i move been i began to understand the importance of our and as a result of really began to ,ñ black-and-white to prostitute

themselves in the name of jesus like use razor blades to justify the cowardice and to corrupt brought all of my life i have been trying to move to that level of how would you be a good man and how you make something and bring it back to the world in a much better place? so for me, regime became the answer. started reaching a high school and as i move to the military at that time it was a hurry up and wait so there was a war but i waited with books and i read about that and "yellow black". i write about my mother her name was maxine. this is one section. once accidentally walked and on my mother and a customer having sex. she was covered by his body and i early age knew that she was working. i saw no enjoyment in her eyes

and heard you cries of pleasure and the room i shared with my sister were i was always instructed to go when she was working i consumed black literature. i soon realized that sex was also an empowering tool for beautiful women who like professional athletes have less than a 10 year window to find another trade. my mother and hurt 304th year on the other side of men at lining up of four flavors -- favors in behind a bottle and annual and it up clearinghouses. seen her like that there applaud my perception of the world and help to determine my decision and a lifestyle that i never drink alcohol, liquor, i have never been high or smoked. i view drunkenness as a weakness and a curse and without knowing it up 49 was searching for a healthy

lifestyle and eventually i would find it and the literature and the music i consumed. i am somewhat of an anomaly. i am may begin. i will not even if runs from me i will 96. teach chase it. i came into the health thing but i am also in two black people. i love black people so what we try to do in chicago is we have built these institutions we have four schools from the national charter school we service over 1,000 black children per day and my wife has been primary in this endeavor. so in 1967 i found an

apartment about the size of this table for $400 and now you come to chicago we own one-half of the block in the middle of the black community [applause] when it comes to the schaumburg we say beauty and ourselves of you come to third world press you see the same thing. what we do it two 1/2 years old we teach these children to love themselves. to love themselves. relive that loath with that knowledge about themselves as they come through our program. in terms of 1969 we have young people all over the country who have come through universities, colleges, now lawyers or doctors or anthropologist or architects because my wife and i and others decided we would dedicate our lives to our people and ourselves.

i am as a writer or a poet or a man who loves humanity, was people, we realize quite early my wife and i and others that essentially we can do what we work to do. we did not come into the world as a big ears. somewhere along the way we lost our way that is why this institution is so important. they look at anybody who wants to control their own culture, is essentially that is what we are trying to do in chicago. what woke me up at 13 years old i was selling magazines on the south side of chicago. i am selling everything to stay alive but by 1955, let me read a section. killings arrived early for men

who did not appreciate their place. when chicago boy not much older than me doing to an ancestors in 1955 as one of the most brutal lynchings ever recorder. . . tongue

hanging loosely from the face like a child screaming for mercy before the final death blow, this was the place payment from the people of the state and nation that had never respected or acknowledged black people as humans. immaterial's body returned to chicago locked in a wooden box not to be open. already chopped into pieces. upon viewing his tortured,

mutilated, disfigured body. there was a national killing. a cowardly work of the christian sons, in material's mother decided her child's murder was not to be hidden in a cold classic, with lower combined with the highest sermon on evil and evildoers. the photographs in the 1955 issue, people lined up in news stands, and a new message in the nation.

the magazine was sold out in 48 hours. africans born in america now saw the end game, white supremacy, nationalism, rage, violence and ignorance. and now apartheid america was public news, national news, world news, jet magazine, win against convention. put on muscle, shoes and resistance, the shaking was beginning. and a march for freedom. she did not let his death become history's forgotten stage. a woman named rosa parks.

martin luther king jr. the united states was soon to meet hours and history, his future about to be rewritten. >> this picture right here on the left. and under it, paul roberson and w. e. b. dubois, is cultural grandfather. thank you very much. [applause] >> you know the panelists, karen hockey, if you would like, line

up to the left. the first question -- if you don't have a question, you would like to make a comment, come right up. the microphone is over there. >> let me just say that you all have here in the harlem book festival something that you can go to bed each night with a smile on your face, it is very important that these cultural institutions and structures are

not only supported, but carried from neighborhood to neighborhood, and when you live in the midst of this you don't realize how important it is and how critical is. after the day is over, go home on your evenings, sit down and jot a note, and say thank you. it would be appreciated. [applause] >> the other analysts may want to speak about the power of the media in terms of jet magazine in terms of awakening the consciousness of black america on the killing of an it feel, but today, as you know, jet magazine, every magazine in

terms of johnson's publication is petering to stay alive. i would like you all to comment on the significance of economic development and institution building in terms of sustaining the idea. new york city, the challenge you're having with the budget and the impact, as we think about moving forward to the next generation, how should we be preparing young people, they you guys have opposed, and institutions of second -- institutional and economic development. >> i will be very brief. one of the problems we face today that most black young people have no idea to they are. if you don't know and you are, anybody can name you. [applause]

>> this is why is so important that all people, particularly black people, the healthy development of black institutions. these institutions have to be essentially institutions about growth and development. our history is very important, but we can't live 5,000 years ago, we need to understand it, and understand what we are doing into the future. finally, if that is not done, what has happened is the lowest common denominator who can speak the fastest, knows the back roads, of will become a leadership. you have ignorant people telling how ignorant other people are. we have to be in the forefront of development in all areas of human evolution and finance is critical. one of the greatest weaknesses, how do we begin to make money not for money's sake but in order to conceive of the

development of our communities. one of the major@ú@ú÷ñpñ ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú ú e young men. if you are in an audience, get a degree in education. the problem is many of them do not want to go and work four

years. university work is work, it is not a time, it is work. you become an ambassador, first within the context of your own family. they all too often, those of us who have had the color of education, we do not talk to our own families first, you encourage them to go to the university. you become the next teacher within the context of the school, the elementary school that you were in, and for the administration, we need conscientious men like you, and women, i am not only going to teach, always keep your hand in the classroom but also understand, how can i move the school to the next level. our flagship school, the national charter school, we have

waiting lists. in the middle of the black community we have a waiti l see. for that school. [applause] >> i have another question. i am doing research in the area of studies, the cultural capital. modifying juvenile behavior. the elbows of education psychology, looking at children in terms -- they grow up into, finding, how do we get -- how do we get bring back the return. [applause]

the various venues at the bookstore, i see as eating food. for leaning, reading and writing. >> i can answer these questions, that is what we are doing all my life. i can tell you where you are culturally. the first thing is to clean. what is on the walls, the image on the walls reflect you. then to your book case, if you have got a bookcase. if you are reading, the children would be reading. the culture within the context

of a home. . auld this defines us. we are one of the few people who led alien culture into our homes and the fine us. in every black home, you find the most dangerous monster on 24/7. you can't multitask and read richard wright. it becomes the culture we develop. one of the brightest and most

important educator's in this country, american research education association, the largest body of researchers in the world, 25,000 members. my wife -- [applause] >> my wife at the university of chicago in three years. when she walked off of the state's northwestern grabbed her. she was inducted into the national education academy. she is going to have a workshop later on. she will ask questions more accurately than i can. >> all right. of wood like to thank you for coming but i have a question.

how are you? i am maia perkins. i have a question. you can ask pretty quickly. what you found out about yourself by writing the biographies, the biography that you wrote for mr. weber, and what karen quinones miller learned about, and even when haki madhubuti learned about writing this memoir, this autobiography of yourself over the first twenty-one years of your lives, how it came full circle, by publishing the books that you had written. >> i keep going back to the first question in terms of having the newspapers, the development of that. the last question in terms of how do we get our kids interested. nature of cognition, how we know

in 2009, is quite different from how we know in 10 years before. people learn, and what they know, is so different, we have got to find ways in terms of how we get people over the sense of who they are and utilize the take on your question of education. that is one of the challenges, you teach at one level, one way of knowing, the center kids are listening at a different level. that is my take, i should mention that. what i learned about myself, what i learned about our people is that we can to lose and forget persons who have contributed so much to development. a few minutes ago, on the street

just sitting there, i wondered how many people know how much has been done for our knowledge and development, i don't know what he has now but it seems to me what i learned so much about writing about whether, this very great man, he had done so much. i didn't read because of my time, anticipated the two great services in the nineteenth century. one is charles darwin, and the other is lord k in terms of economics. john winston was the taxonomist from whom darwin learned how to stuff birds. you never hear about winston but he is the guy, darwin went to the university of edinburg, that is what led him to learn about

birds and stuff. here is whether --weber talking about the need for government to intervene. he made those contributions, how i became an economic heretic, we know nothing about him. not just to know how -- talk about geniuses, embraced them as our own. >> our session is over and i would like to encourage you to do one thing. the commonality is we are booklover's. so i am going to ask you to buy our books, from one part of the street to the other, thank the authors and buy their books.

thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you have been watching the panel on biography from the eleventh annual harlem book fair. we will continue our coverage with a panel discussion on african-american language and culture following this short break. it is book tv, live from the 2009 harlem book fair.

>> book t b is asking what are you reading? >> i am managing editor of the hill newspaper, covering politics 24/7. tie would like to get away from politics at least for a little bit. one of the books i started to read but haven't finished is called caddy for life, written by john feinstein, one of the fastest sportswriters of our time and focuses on the life of bruce edwards for tom watson, diagnosed with lou gehrig's disease, it tracks his final few months on the pga tour. another book i am going to be reading is a book written by one of my friends called receive me falling. i will be reading that this summer. it has gotten some good reviews. another book my wife just

finished is called the shaq by william paul young. it is a fictional book. touchdown know much about it but i hear that you can buy this book so i will be checking that out. i have always been fascinated by the search for osama bin laden and i will be reading a book by michael scheuer, in charge of the units searching for osama bin laden. he got a lot of attention. i haven't read any of his books, but i should take a look at one of his books and this one is called marching toward hell:america and islam after iraq. the last book i will be checking out is the 15 club. i am a big golfer, is a how-to book focusing on the mental game of golf as written by a sports

psychologist. it has taken a few strokes off of my game and i can get all the help i need. those are the books i will be checking out this summer. >> to see more summer reading lists and other program information visit our web site at booktv.org. >> book expo america in new york city, i am with craig o. harris, founder of p.m. press. what is that? >> good to see you as always, it is a small group of publishers. we do different types of media, dvds, audio lectors including music and fiction and nonfiction. this all has ideas behind it, the ideas are political in the sense that we want to have an open dialogue not only about current events but how history has been interpreted, who makes history, who defines what is

important for people to know and how we could empire people to make the right decisions. >> this is your first year, you have a lot of books coming out, kim stanley robinson is one that you want to talk about, can you talk about a series he started? >> what is news to us, doing fiction, because what is important for us is to have ideas behind what we do. fiction is a place where stories can often be told and interpreted in different ways. we started a series called the outspoken author series which combines short fiction from popular science-fiction writers like kim stanley robinson, and long, in-depth interviews where they talk about personal politics, what they're trying to get across in the story, and demystify a bit of what the science fiction is about. to the reader, it can be shocking, as the author,

personal ideas are often covered up by these fictional narratives. but fascinating stuff. >> would be setting out with? >> kim stanley robinson's lucky strike, an alternative history about what would have happened in she -- hiroshima is the bomb was not dropped. i will not do away the story, but it brings into play how people are responsible for their own actions, from the lowliest soldier to us as individual consumers. these stories say what can happen when people take control and responsibility for their own actions. this is a parody of the left behind series of books where he gets his opportunity to blast the right wing born-again christians who we take great pleasure in blasting. >> you consider yourself a politically leftist publisher? >> i am uncomfortable with using

the terms leftists as with right wing because they carry too much baggage with them, but to the people who use that term, to the reader, i would say leftists are perhaps -- or perhaps extreme leftists would be the stereotyped. >> what other books do you have coming out? >> we have been working with an author, derrick jensen who is well known for his nonfiction. he has done a bunch of good books from climate change to history, from prehistoric history, native american history to the present day. what we are working on with him is a different turn, he has done a couple of goals under an imprint called a flashpoint imprint, where he is writing like most of our fiction, a story behind it. he has a tale to tell but he has a skill that involves what happens when men exploit nature and what happens when there's

climate change, what happens when there is a very bad relationship between those on top and those on the bottom, between the haves and have nots, he does these in fictional accounts that are gripping, good stories. we have done books with him where he interviews his own influences. we have done a book called how shall i live my life where the interviews environmentalists to spiritual folks to doctors, animal rights activists, and finds out for himself how people can live on a planet that is more just in a way that we can treat each other in a more humane and fair manner. >> you are a book publisher but you also want to talk about your dvds you are publishing? >> we have dvds and cds. they're all documentary's. we have covered everything, much

of our material deals with prison abolition. we do not believe that is the way to solve society's problems. we have done dvds would focus on political prisoners in the united states. we have done cds, audio lectures with numb chomsky and others who may be best known for their written books and best-selling books, but what they have to say on various subjects is equally important. we try to present the media, film, audio and book so people can explore these ideas in whatever format is easiest for them. >> in regards to format, outside of dvds and cds, the bucks were putting out, you are printing the book, are you thinking of putting books in other formats? >> we are making them as available as possible. come to our web site and

download any of the books that we publish, these books will be available as various hand-held devices, none of which i expect to catch on too widely. it is important when you are working from a perspective of getting ideas across in every format. that is what we are doing. >> what does it take to start a publishing venture? >> simple answer, an unbelievable amount of dedication and the ability to work 20 hours straight, the ability to go night and nights without sleep is one of the major things. it takes a lot of money. the end nontraditional publisher, we don't have a great deal of money. what we have is a sustainer program called the friends of p.m. press where people pay $25

a month. that way we have sustainable basis we can work on to help out with credit costs. >> book tv's coverage of the harlem book fair continues. up next, a panel discussion on african-american language and culture.

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] . >> you're watching book tv's live coverage of the harlem book

fair now in its 11th year. for more information on the harlem book fair visit qbr.com, starting shortly a panel discussion on african-american language, and culture. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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>> good afternoon. we can do a little better than that. good afternoon! and welcome to this afternoon''s panel. we be, you are, they is. black english, language and culture. we have two comfortable panelists, who are with us today, to talk about the status of black language and the importance of black language and -- in 2009. and we are going to ask them to introduce themselves to you, and we'll start with dr. datsun. >> good afternoon, i'm howard datsun, director of the schaumburg center for research and black culture and i spoiz the reason i'm on the panel is that i did a book a-a few years

ago entitled the emergence of african-american culture and, one of the chapter in the book deals with the question of the origins, if you will of what we call ourselves, call black english. and i'll be saying things about that and what its relevance is for this topic today. >> good afternoon, can you hear me? okay. my name is carol lee, also known as safashia mataboui with the school of education and social policy at northwestern university and founder and chairman of the board of directors of the betty shabazz charter schools and the concept development center, a school founded in 1972. and is still in operation, and i'm also president of the american educational research association. >> thank you, panelists. some call this period, 2009, the

post-racial period and you may agree or not agree with that but i'll ask the panelists from your discipline what is the relevance of this panel discussion, talking about black english in 2009 and why is it important and should it be important to the community specifically, the african-american community? >> well, i'll start, and i have really two points to make, the first one is that there is an old adage, that if you ask the wrong question you are guaranteed to get the wrong answer. and, this is one of those areas where i think we may be -- have been busy asking the wrong question. in the sense that, we have gotten ourselves caught into a conversation about whether we -- black people should be speaking black english or standard english and whether standard

english should supersede or override black english, and whether black english outlived its usefulness, all of these considerations and concern is. and, the reason why i say it is this wrong question, is that in the 21st century world, language is in fact your key to being able to negotiate this world. and, rather than getting caught in the question of whether we should have one or the other, it really should be a situation of discussing the merits of both, and the other languages we are going to be learning. i just came back from algiers. there is a pan-african culture festival sponsored by the algerian government and they brought over 5,000 people from artists, intellectuals, scholars, writers, et cetera from all over the african continent and some parts of the diaspora. and the first thing that struck me as i got off of the plane,

was that we were met by a group of algerian students, one young lady was 18 years old. and she was already fluent in french and the arab language. but, she was also fluent in english. and we had a conversation with her and we asked, well, you know, how did you learn your english? and she said, from watching television. and she literally had sat watching television, growing up over a period of 18 years and learned not just -- learned english, over and above her knowledge of the arabic which she already spoke and learned with her family and the french she learned in school. so, this is a young lady, 18 years old who is speaking three languages and able to negotiated and carry on conversations with people through those three

linguistic structures around the world. we here in the u.s. get caught in the quite frankly foolishness about english only. if we become english-only, we will become a people that are isolated from the peoples of the world. this is not the time for black people to be, you know, getting bent out of shape about whether they are going to speak black english or standard english. they need to be speaking both, a, but they also need to be learning, we all need to be learning the languages of the other parts of the world, and, this is not inconsistent with african tradition. virtually anyplace you go on the continent of africa, people who haven't been to school anywhere are speaking at least two, sometimes three languages. so, to go back to my original point, you asked the wrong question, you are guaranteed to get this wrong answer and yes, we should be speaking and continuing to learn and

perpetuate, have knowledge of, beacon verse sant in our african-american vernacular language but we also need to, yes, we do need to learn standard english. and, we need to be learning other languages so that we are capable of, among other things, communicating with the people here in this country. in this city of new york. they listed the number of languages and i remember, that is not ast nominal could be -- an astronomical number of languages and i'm fluent in english, standard english -- i guess i am -- i'm fluent in colored english, and i'm fluent in spanish and i learned spanish as part of my peace corps training, and i spent years in latin america. you can't believe if you haven't had that experience, what life expanding experience it is for you to learn another language and to be able to put yourself

intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and linguistically into another language and the addition of languages is something that strengthens you, enhances you, gives you more capability to negotiate your world, and to be a healthy human being, in the 21st century. i think we need to be having the conversation about how we make our children -- assist our children in becoming multi-lingual, rather than having a debate about whether we should be mono lingual in either standard english or black english. [applause]. >> well, i would like to piggy back on dr. dobson's point. as i indicated, in my introduction, i am the president of the american educational research association, which is the largest association of

educational researchers actually in the world and aera has now gone into collaboration with other international associations from around the world, to form what we now call the world educational research association, wera and as we were pulling together our representatives from these bodies from across the world, the scholars in the u.s. kept struggling over the question of, we have to make sure that we are able to translate, when we have meetings, et cetera and when we had the first meeting with these scholars, from around the world, it was not only the fact they all spoke english but they often talked, particularly, in europe, of having conferences in english. and, it just seemed sort of a minor detail to them, the idea that somehow people didn't speak more than one language. i think that there are three or

four sort of big ideas that i'm going to sort of put under the veil of sort of umbrella of a scientific study of language that is really very important, it is really important for to us distinguish between sort of scientifically, if you will, what we know about language and language variation on the one hand and the political and ideological kinds of debates and philosophies that are the reason that we even pose this as a question. language as howard indicated is very much tied to a sense of identity, of who you are. and this fact that black english has survived across these many generations to me is a very clear testimony that blak black people have historically understood the connection between our ability to speak black english in our intimate relations with one another and

our sense of familihood, our sense of our place in history, time and space. i think that these debates about the question of black english are very much informed by what is a fundamentally accountable whites supremist kind of ideology around a variation. they are all lansing, national languages, all have lots of variations or dialects, and sometimes these dialects are based on the region in the country, from where you come, and sometimes they are based on issues having to do with class status, i remember when i was in college, i had some -- for those of you who -- i was a delta cigna pheta and my colleagues were from new york and i was from chicago and they talked about soda pop and the airport and i thought it was strange and it was because they were black people from new york versus black people from chicago,

versus black people from alabama or california and i think we have lots of interesting examples in the this public media, to sort of help us understand, in parted the power of african-american english or black english and one of this points i often make is, if you listen for example to someone like oprah winfrey, who transfers verses many kinds of boundaries and most of the time you hear her speaking what we call the quote-unquote standard english, until she wants to get intimate, and when she wants to get intimate and bring the audience in close, and to have them feel that they are really at home, no matter who is out there in that audience she'll revert to speaking black english, and i think if you listen to our president, president barack obama, and when he is -- when he will be speaking this version of language we are calling standard english, but when he wants to be rhetorically powerful you see that not only the rhythm of his speech changes, but, also, the pronunciation of vowels, for example will begin to change. certainly, we have a long

tradition in terms of politics, the political rhetoric, particularly in our minute material tradition, because in the case, black english, sometimes, people want to associated black english only with sin tax, i be versus i am. and that is one aspect of black english be but it is also the rhythm of the speech, also the tone is tone ation and rhythm and your body when you are communicating and also certain kinds of language, there are people who have studied, for example, interestingly, the influences of african-american english on what we call standard english. that there are certain words, for example in the english language, certainly in the south, but even in terms of the general sort of median and public, that have as their origin speech in the black community. and, certainly, i think hip-hop has become another powerful example of the power of the rhetoric of black english that has had an impact all across the

world. all languages have variation, and one of the premier linguistses studying black english, dr. geneva smithem from michigan state university uses the term the language of wider education and what we call standard english rather than being standard is like the language of commerce, is the language in the business sort of commercial community, but it's not necessarily the language of in the macy. so, a lot of times, even at the university, to try to help students to understand this, the appropriateness of language to place, you could take a working class white kid who comes out of boston, who will come to northwestern university. and once he gets there, he knows the language of wider

communication for him there is going to be some version of this standard thing. but, when he goes back home, and is hanging out with his cousins who were the not going to the northwesterns of the world, and he is hanging out in the pub drinking beer with them he will not speak the same way. he will speak the language that he grew up with, which is a particular dialect or version of english. that has functionality in terms of place. someone has said, actually the difference between the language -- a language and dialect is an army, languages have armies behind them, to give them power. so, all i'm saying is that it is important for us to not get sidetracked into thinking that the debates about blook black english are about language, they are not. they are simply about power and there are -- is no place in the world where you will not find variation in the speech of people speaking a particular national language, that differs according to region, place,

class, and historical background. >> and i want to kind of add to that -- [applause]. >> i want to add to that, that this thing we call black english has its own, you know, counterparts, in other parts of the world and we need to recognize the fact that we come out of a very particular at thises historical moment and that historical moment has been critical in shaping the language that we speak. if you go back to the air r of the slave trade, the -- one of the realities of that experience was that the people who were captured and brought to the americas were very diverse people. speaking very, very diverse languages. languages that at times were not mutually intelligible. and so, when they arrived on

these shores, they are faced with the challenge of trying to figure out how to communicate with one another. and equally important, how to be able to communicate with those who are their captors. and, in the context of slavery, it is important for us to realize that these enslaved africans of diverse african backgrounds virtually invented this new language that we call black english. now, it didn't just happen in the u.s., and just happen in the english speaking world indeed every place you go in the america, there is a variation and a version of language invented by black people this those places, using the european based vocabulary to some extent, but -- or structure, and vocabulary, but, with a specific african

content to it. and so, in a place like brazil, there is an african version of portuguese that is spoken there, that is quite distinct from the standard portuguese, that is spoken. in a place like aruba, there is a language that you had popiamento that is invented there, a combination of the english that and dutch that is unique -- a unique african based language that we invented during slavery in order to be able to communicate with ourselves because we didn't share a common language. and, in a place -- in haiti, you have -- >> creole. >> and et cetera, et cetera and what we are call black english is not something that is simply a subset of what happened in the united states. it is a reflection, and manifestation of what took place throughout the americas among people of african descent as they tried to figure out how to

understand, negotiated and articulate in language that made sense to them. the nature of their experiences, and being in the new world. so, that is a first point and the second points, though, is that one of the worst things that happens to our young people when they go to school, is they walk in to the door and the teachers declare the language they bring with them wrong wrong. because, they are the not just saying their children are not speaking the right language, they are saying that the not only what they speak is wrong, but, everything they have lived up to the time they come through the door is wrong. in other words, their culture is wrong and it calls into question the very identity and being of the child, when you say that what you are saying is wrong and, there is absolutely no reason why the schools or anyone has to say this. all you have to do is when you walk into the school, say we'll team you another language, we'll teach you something we call standard english and there is a

place for our vernacular language, which, you know, is -- basically language is -- an instrument of kanucks, if it succeeds, in carrying the message i have to you, and you carry your message back to me, then it is language. it works. and it doesn't have to have all the pejorative stuff on top of it. finally i'll say we need to insist that our teachers in our schools stop in effect laying on our children this added learning burden. they can continue to know their street language, as i do, but they can also learn the new languages that are being offered in the schools, and they should be encouraged to learn those new languages because it will be one of the tools to their future in the 21st century. >> could i make one very brief and then -- i know you have a

response to that same question. and that is, two points i want to make. one is, the international examples that howard gave, the power of them is the power of african culture and identity. to have survived even in the lack of -- direct consciousness of it. and you are talk about brazil and you go through there and there are these huge yorba -- into temples. >> what do you call them where the gods -- riches, as tall that's inside of this building. and, that -- and many of -- of us heard the stories of the winos in the alley, saying i gotta pour a little drink for h ancestors. how did these things survive, you know, many years ago, i was

in guyana, in georgetown and someone had died, and they brought the body back and went in and, they had brought the elderly sister in from the countryside, and it was lake a wake and she was [humming] and i didn't know what she was saying but i knew exactly what she was doing and so you know, alice walker talks about this, to kill the language is to kill the connection, it is to act like -- to act like all of the ancestors' shoulders on whom we stand, the reason we even exist and are able to sit here and be here, to erase all of that, and so therefore it is sacrosanct to think about doing it and the other is african-american english, arficanized english is not simply a language of the street. if you look at our greatest writers, tony morrison will tell you when she wrote the opening of it may have been "the buest eye" i don't remember which novel it was and she wanted to have it as and in miment, wanted

it to be crafted in a way that was an intimate conversation, and she had to draw on the structures of the black english and we can go from langston hughes to alice walker and ceeley in the color purposing speaks the voice of her grandmother and my husband, and you can go on. and so, african-american english or arficanized english is also -- it is also a language cultivated for literary communication and not just language of the street. >> i a, all the time, you can't sing the blues -- in standard english. it just don't work. it just don't work! [laughter]. >> yeah. and in my haste to get this panel discussion started i neglected to introduce myself, and my name is wade hudson, and i am president of just us books, a children's book establish publisher located in new jersey.

[applause]. >> many of our young people only speak in black dialect. or the language of intimacy, as you would say. but many people point to the necessity of their being able to spook in the language of commerce and when we consider all of the points that you have made, the appearance of they political aspect of looking at black dialect and also, how the use of black dialect has been used in the art form, through literature, how can we encourage and let our young people know the importance of being able to utilize other languages? not just standard english but other languages? what ways can we motivate them and encourage them? >> well, one of the things that has happened, to be perfectly

honest, is that language has almost been stripped out of school, so-called foreign language. they keep taking more and more of the -- and so, if kids don't have the opportunity to do the study, and to -- as a structured part of the learning, then, it doesn't have the value it is supposed to have. that is the first thing and so, we -- as parents, as educators and others need to insist on the reestablishment of language programs in schools, grade school, junior high school, high school, college. it is one of the great weakness i believe of the american educational system, now that we are the not doing that. but, that is -- at the educational level, at the level of the students, i mean, the truth is, that they find themselves at a linguistic disadvantage, every day.

and, we are not -- i don't think we are doing enough to -- -- their response is to go deeper into the -- i'll call it the street language, and, to try to validate that as their sense of identity and authority. they can't find security there. and expect to be able to negotiate the world. and it is our duty, our responsibility, to insist that they learn these other languages. in the absence of it, they are in effect crippling themselves and we are participating in the crippling process. i would say we, as adults, as teachers, as parents, et cetera, have an obligation to, basically, insist that the young people know the languages and let them know what they can't do if they don't know them.

i mean, that is probably the most important. without the language, they are just -- whole aspects of the human experience, that a are cut from o off from and our responsibility as adults is to foster their human development to the max. and, if we are not taking on that responsibility, as parents, as children, we are failing them -- as parents and teachers and educators we are failing them and a lot of the responsibility, pressure rests on our shoulders and we have to bring before them almost on a daily basis the things they need to know in order to be able to be and to do. >> well, i think it is very important -- i don't fundamentally disagree with howard's comment. i would say that the challenges

in terms of our children, our young people, learning to speak this variation of english, are due directly to the fact that the vast majority of african-american children are in schools that are criminally poor. and the fact that many of them speak african-american english at home and with their peers is not the source of the problem of their learning. all of us... as human beings, we are have clear about what it means to read other human beings and figure out what we have to do to get people to do what we want. and, if what our children come to want is access to the market economy in terms of the

workplace, part of what they need is opportunities to experience it. our young people have very few opportunities for mentorship, internships, for example in workplace settings, very little opportunity to come to college campuses before they are seniors in high school, and northwestern university, we have something called "the center for talent development" and you have to be tested to be quote-unquote gifted to enter this little program in the summer, and they have kids from 4th or 5th grade up through high school and once the summer hits, the campus is replete with young people. and, hundreds of young people that are on there, you can counted on one hand how many african-american or latino students that you ever see in that program, but the kids who are in that program have a sense of what is college like --

college life like, what does it require to be able to get admission into it and once we make or schools into better places for our kids, which i would argue is one of the gravest political challenges that we have as a communities, in terms of responsibility that we take to allow them to continue to do what they do with our young people, then -- i don't think the issue of them learning to speak, another variety of english, is a huge matter at all. and i assume somewhere along the line we'll have some discussions, about the educational implications, of teaching from the strength that kids who are speakers of african-american english bring. that is what i do. i talk about it in my most recent book, "culture, literacy and learning, in the midst of a whirl wind" teachers college

press which is largely about how to draw on the kinds of things kids bring,@ú@úptlñ moderate and we were outside talking with others who have an interest in this topic and we have also asked to join us mr. rodney reynolds, who is the publisher of american legacy.

american legacy. yes. to get back to a very basic question, there is much discussion and documentation of the discontinue newts between school language and culture. and home language and culture. what do you think is an effective approach in addressing these dis continuities and it gets lax back to what you were hinting, camera, and i'd look a response from each of you, to that question. >> i think the first important issue in terms of schools is to help young people understand language. and to understand the structure of language, the functions that language serves. in my own work, i have shown how

knowledge of signifying, your mom is so skinny, she can do a hoola hoop in the cheerio, that involved in understanding the -- and signify, you have to understand figure tiff language and you have to understand irony and satire and so, our kids will come into a classroom for example, where they will be asked to read some literature for example, that involves figure tiff language, symbols, irony, satire, et cetera, and they have struggle -- may struggle in the classroom, because they are speakers of black english and the teacher thinks they don't have the capacity to deal with the complexity and as soon as the kid walks out of the door he starts producing the very kinds of figure tiff tropes that they ask him to done and i've shown in a number of studies how

helping speakers -- students of african-american english to understand the structure for example of something like your mom is so skinny she can do a -- hoola hoop in a cheerio, to understand the structure of that and how do you know, for example, in listening to hip-hop is another example, uses -- talk about in the book, the mask by the fujis, and there is no kid who years ago listening to the mask would think the reference to the mask in those lyrics is literal. everybody listening to it, the kids listening to it, understand the mask stands for something, but, they don't know -- may not know the word symbol and may not know what kind of strategies they are using to reject a literal interpretation, and to construct a figure tiff interpretation and so, what we have done in our work and what we call culture modeling is to help start kids with the -- examining the every day uses of language and the critical thinking that lays behind the

production and analysis of their every day language. and, then, show them how that then applies to the reading of very complex text. there is also -- has also been work by geneva smitherman, who i mentioned earlier is certainly without question the preeminent scholar of study of black english in the united states and she has shown the national assessment of educational progress and the closest things we have to a national exam in the the u.s., and she had shown, taking writing samples of 7th graders, looking at thousands of essay, that it -- had already been scored, in prior years, and, she found that the higher the use of black english, not in terms of i be versus i am. but, in terms of rhetorical strategies, the higher the grade that had been given to that assessment. so, the point i'm simply trying to make is that there is an existing body of work, one that

shows that by helping speakers of black english understand the power of the language they use, that that can be used to help them become bitter in this case, readers and writers. >> -- better, in this case, readers and write sneers i think it is important not only to know black english and standard english but i think it helps us to communicate effectively in today's society. especially i think it is important for our youth. the internet has been extremely helpful, in the society in which we live today, but, i think sometimes our youth, our children, begin to become involved in the internet and use computers far too soon, i think we need to get back to the basics in terms of learning how to read. the language skills. i think, that that is so important. i know that that was one of the things that we need -- i did as a parent. my wife and i did as parent, was

to make sure that our children could read early on, and i think it is so important. we have to interact in a number of different communities. not only in our own community, but -- because i might talk differently to my friends, but i have to know how to interact in the business community, as well. and i think that is so important, and i think our youth and our children need to understand that they have to be able to effectively communicate in two different societies, basically, today and i think that is one of the things that is so important. >> i went to chester high school in chester, pennsylvania. it was a racist town, and we had -- our junior high school up through junior high school it was all segregated and in the en high school we integrated and when we integrated our junior high school into the -- with the other white junior high schools,

that -- found ourselves in the a very competitive situation and those of us who had chosen to become academic majors found ourselves at a tremendous disadvantage and we started a study group, 8 of us -- actually, 9 of us ended up graduating and 8 of us were in the study group, and the way we figured out how to get through all of those courses was to -- we'd have our meetings, read the stuff in the standard english and then sit down and talk about it in the street language. and break it down into language that you know, you -- that we could understand. and by the time we got around to doing the test we knew the stuff, and if we didn't write it in the street language, we wrote it in the standard english but we learned it through the application of the street language, or african-american vernacular language, of the -- modalities and it worked.

so there are -- there are many ways in which that which we have learned as our basic language can be used to advance our, you know, situation and our being. we do need to be clear, though, that learning the other language is a different kind of work. and we didn't need to develop the same level of -- or mastery of it that we have of the language of our homes and our base cultures. >> could i add one brief thing, though, just to that? i keep trying to place this discussion about african-american english in the larger context of using language. learning -- a middle class white child who grows up in a home, speaking this thing that we call standard english, or language of wider communication, in terms of

pronunciation and sin tax, saying, i am instead of i be, when that kid, particularly hits middle school or high school, learning to speak the language of mathematics, learning to speak the language of physics, learning to speak the language of science, is learning a different language. and it's not easy. in other words, it is not that because you can speak standard english at home, that that gives you some sort of easy pathway to learning the academic english of disciplines. and for people who have gone to graduate school, they have often the biggest challenge there, first year graduate students when you listen to them try to talk about the content that they are studying, they sound like second language learners. because they are learning a different language. >> right.

>> and, your example, howard, would hold equally true, of a student who was bilingual in spanish and english, so the ability for them to talk their ideas through in spanish, and in other words, we -- so much of what happens in terms of talking about black people is situated as though we exist in some kind of special bubble universe for black people, or for colored people. we are talking about the issue of the kinds of challenges that are always attached to learning new varieties of language. and black kids are in a very -- the very same position as other learners are. the question is, what are the -- not that the challenges are so much different. it is the question of what of the nature of the supports that are available to help them do that, and the problem is, that

for black kids, who are poor, and who are speakers of african-american english, the supports available to them in school are of a quality -- qualitatively different order than they are for kids who are more avenue fluent, and or affluent and white. . >> i think also, the primary definition and purpose of language is to communicate. and i think one can speak the so-called standard english and system not be able to communicate very well with someone who may be more learned or may have a more broader vocabulary. and i think that standard english keeps -- from my viewpoint, keeps changing, too. because different words are added. every year. so, you know, when we really talk about standard english,

then my question is what are we really talking about? what really is standard english? is it the way commentators on television express themselves, is that this standard english? is it the way some of the tv performers communicate and express themselves? is that standard english? or are they using a mixture of dialect along with so-called standard english? so, i think sometimes we can get caught in the trick-bag of looking at standard english as the superior one, as what you are saying, and if the primary goal of language is to communicate, then i think we really need to focus on that, too. yet understanding that we need to help our kids understand the importance of being able to communicate on different levels. >> this point that you are making about language in change in very important.

we are living in the midst of change, not only in terms of vocabulary but in terms of what we call sin tax as well. so wade, right? >> yes. >> if i were to call you and say, hey, wade, is that you? you would say, what, it's -- >> it's me. >> it's me, english teachers would say you are supposed to say, what, it's i. nobody says it's i. why? because that is a structure of the language. that is in the midst of change. we are living in the midst of this change right now. if you listen to television, and all of the variety of people who are on television, speaking, as an english teacher, which is my training, i hear all kinds of errors. they are the not the i be errors, but they will be errors, if they have a subject and there is a long phrase in between the subject and the predicate and they will not use the appropriate congregation on that, and -- con you. >> gags on that and i have ph.d.

students who constantly write thing using the word a noun like "people" and pronoun like that instead of who to refer back to them and these are advanced ph.d. students. right? so there is a woman connie weaver who years ago did a study and wrote letters and sent them off to businessmen the people we think the standard english is supposed to gives this automatic passport to, right? and she would imbed in some letters, she'd put errors that were not associated with black english. and they didn't pick those out. they didn't even notice them and then, some others she'd put errors that were associated with black english and those they picked out, right? so, all i'm saying is, black people, we really have to move -- we live in this spiderweb of racism. where everywhere you turn, white supremist ideology has something

that we are supposed to be reacting to, and they say you don't have language, oh, we havñ ral phenomenon and it is important to understand it and get out of the game of always having to react to some kind of negative stuff people are putting out there. it is silly. >> and the politics you are talk about, of the language, i mean,

at a certain level, nobody speaks standard english. it is a standard written form. there is a standard written form that is a convention, if you will, that people embrace, but, the white people who come to school, don't speak standard english. the asian people who come don't speak standard english, et cetera. that is one side and the other is that yes, the language is constantly changing. and among the critical change agents in american english and maybe we need to state that it is american english, not standard english, because, there are other englishes. >> that's right. >> that's right. indian english, canadian english. >> canadian english and a -- and the brother and sister from jamaica!

speak something called jamaican english. but, right here in the united states, whatever it is we call american english is being transformed daily by our language, by our vernacular, by what we said and how we say it. and they are more -- i mean, especially among young people, they have taken -- take on through the music, and through the interaction with black folk, they take on the language that we speak. and so, that which is -- and i guess the real question is, the -- what we might call the language of the public discourse or the public environment where we talk. as opposed to the language of either the courtroom or the -- actually the newspapers, not even the television any more. those kinds of things, and so i think we need to make those

distinctions. within it all, know two things, this language we speak is over -- is as old as america. and that is the first thing. and, that it is a living, vital, dynamic language that is constantly changing and constantly introducing new vocabulary into it and that vocabulary and the way it is spoken is constantly impacting on what america and americans say and think and understand, and the ways in which they understand their world. >> we have had -- let me just get to our other panelists, who have joined us because i know there are questions of the audience, we have another panelist, and didn't properly introduce rodney reynolds, rodney is president and ceo of rjr xhuk rchlr communications a and publisher of american legacy and executive producer and american legacy television and thank you for your rance to the first question and we hope to get responses from each of you and we have had another, again,

another panelist to join us and i'd like for judy to introduce herself, because, having a linguist here, and historian and author and all of you are authors and a publisher, we also have a teacher, a high school teacher. >> yes. >> judy, will respond to very quickly, that -- the discontinuities between home language and culture and school language and culture and your approach to up bringing those together or dealing with that effectively, if you can respond to that, and, then, i'm going to ask each of you to bring it back around to the harlem book fair and to books, if you have a book or an author you might suggest that parents can read, that will assist or support with this or give to their children to read and then we want to go to some questions. >> okay. what's up! how are you duin', how you be? what's going on, girl! it's nice to meet you! what it be like, asante-san

amount, hello, i'm judy andrews and i have been teaching for 18 years at boys and girls high school in brooklyn. and i believe the language that a-- a lot of the students are speaking today is reflected in media and this in the image they try to perceive, that they actually do perceive, but they try to emulate. because of the curriculum that teaches teachers are given under the new no child left behind act, we have been forced as teachers to teach contrary to the culture of the student even though we have multi-cultural education. as a result of that, you have students who are african-american, who are speaking a variety of languages, even though they may be from the caribbean, and call themselves caribbean-american or they may be from what we call back in the day, the gullageeche. language which is a reflection of the slang the students are

speaking today, and when you hear your grandmother say, i reckon so, you can do that, or that is up to the notch or we have to hold on, we own freedom, that is still a spectrum of language that is still a part of the african-american experience and so in order for teachers, educators, parents, and the professional world, to look at the discontinuities of language we have to first started with the family and create a respect for language that we are not getting from the world and from each other:

>> to your history and to your culture. and that should not be separated. i think it starts with parenting and in the home where there is a respect for language. and then as you go into adulthood, you learn how to create your own i would guess nuance of the written word. and other spoken word. that kind of go together but you have to find your own place. and it's very difficult to do that in america because of the

media, the image and a lack of respect for african people and african-american people in this country. so we have to determine what is it that we are going to say that is going to create respect amongst us. >> all right. thank you. you each mentioned so many topics that we could actually get into, but we do want to get some questions. but to give our audience one or two books or authors or papers or essays they might read, parent should read or have their sons and daughters read to help them understand who they are linguistically and culturally. if you have a suggestion will you do that now? >> we have a mobile truck that we take around the country. last year we did about 15 cities. it's a mobile museum. it's all about our history and our heritage, and this past year we added another component to it that included a reading corner

that was sponsored by scholastic. and day, i noticed, on the truck there was a read and rise of books series that a lot of the students went to ever able to read the books. and they were culturally really geared towards the african-american culture, and it was also i think sponsored in part by the urban league. i think they have something to do with that series as well. so that's just one. and then i know as i was coming down, my wife mentioned, she runs a program called freedom schools in mount vernon, new york, and she mentioned that they believe the freedom schools all across the country, i think that's what she said, are supplied with books from justice books, i believe. >> thank you.

suggestions for authors or books. >> well, i would recommend authors rather than books. i think any of the work by abu g. would be a appropriate. baldy myers is an excellent writers for young adults and he has written what was 60 books that deal with the urban experience. and langston hughes. langston hughes writes the language of blues and the people, and i think he demonstrates the black english or ebonics, whatever you want to call it, is not an inferior language or way of expressing. >> well, i mentioned earlier in

our conversation that there are so many great african-american writers who draw a very powerful ways on african-american english and deal with themes that are things of empowerment and identity. and they certainly, you know, alice walker, mary barack is, langston hughes, i came up a booty. toni morrison. we could go on and on and on. a great issue i think about these great writers which i think is true of all great writers around the world, the great writers i believe are like priest who have the gift of second sight. that is, they understand powerful things about what it means to be a human being. and that one of our major responsibilities is to teach our children when they are very done to love books. to love books into love to read.

and once they love the books and learn to read, they will read a widely. and they should be able to read widely across all kinds of traditions, but certainly within the tradition of african writers who do talk in powerful ways about the conundrum of the human experience. and just as a very brief example of what i'm talking about. as much as i and howard have read about the holocaust or enslavement of african people in the united states, it was really not until i read toni morrison novel beloved that i had a sense of what it meant to step inside the shoes of a woman living, and a man, living at that time. or alice walker's -- not alice walker. toni morrison to the bluest eye to understand what made you stand inside the shoes of a young black girl living inside a world in which the images to find her out of existence.

and at the same time, understand the humanity of a father who would do the horrendous thing that the father does in the bluest eye. these are difficult kind of questions that great writers deal with, and that active reading help our kids to read widely will transform. it will also mean that rooms like this will be full of people because it's full of people who love books. >> thank you. if you have questions, where you line up at the mic here to my left, and the panelists will be glad to respond. >> good afternoon. thank you to doctor howard dodson and also to max rodriguez for organizing this very important discussion on books. [applause] >> my question is to doctor lee who made a point earlier on the importance for community control. when you are talking about how

it's important that our students be able to have people who respect their culture in terms of not just denigrating black english. and one of the barriers to that in terms of community control, especially as it relates to urban cities in this country seems to be unions. and particularly here in new york. you see how the ocean hill brownsville fiasco of 1968 really ended with the community losing control because of the teachers union. and being from philadelphia, i've heard from several black educators about the ways in which the teachers union there settled with a provision in the contract that limited the number of black educators. so if you've written extensive extensively, what suggestions do you have, doctor lee, for people within the union and for communities to deal with unions in terms of being more sensitive

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making educational decisions. and on the whole, i think that we are not, because even at the point of ocean's brownsville, situation, it was still a politically different one in the sense that the politics, it wasn't as direct as i think as it is now. the second point i would make is that there is, that unions in many respects are not gaining but losing power. teachers unions included in the united states. so i wouldn't necessarily at this point i point to the unions as the source of the problem, if you will. charter schools are not only on the rise, even in terms of some of the focus of the new administration in terms of education. charters are a major part of the transformation of schools, public education in the united states.

lots of black people resist it. my sense is it's out there, it's coming. when this started happening in chicago, we said if this is the name of the game, we are going to be in it. so if you want to have it, we have got to have some schools. so we have three charters in chicago with the intention of not only developing more in chicago, we've got our sights on new york city. we got our sights on new orleans. in terms of expansion, because we think that the politics of charter schools opens up an opportunity for those of us who say we've got ideas about educating our children, to actually take the reins and do that. and i think that's another opportunity that in every place, such as in new york city, you've got plenty of charter schools here. i think that black groups should be organizing politically to get schools and control them. >> and that's starting to happen a lot, i know, in east orange where i live. our church started a charter

school last, this last year. and we started with 230 students. so it is a growing movement, and i think that is one of the answers. >> very briefly. we have been in the business of education for almost four years. for most of that time we ran independent african centered schools. we charged very small tuition, even less than catholic schools. we made little money. when i was working directly in our schools i'd didn't make more than $400 a month. however, we still have to charge. with chartered schools, it's public money and kids can come free of charge. >> that's right. >> next question. >> i have a question and in a statement. the question really is for any panelists. i name is from african perspective. you talk about language. i want to address the issue

about naming your child, how much of a communal sense when you name your child. i'm talking about so why did he. if i hear someone else and no disrespect to anyone here, name their child alice a., or indication, and i'm not knocking what to do, but understand the power of the name of what that represents, and secondly, this is a wonderful, phenomenal opportunity but what we are missing in this audience are the young people and that's were i'm at in terms of their voice so we can hear what they are saying about the length which we are talking about. they need to be here too we are talking about. that's all. >> i had a student named ration a. [laughter] >> i think many students are into the rap culture. there's a lot of, there's a new thing called poetry slam, which is really an expression that was started back in chicago at a jazz club by a young man named mark, i think his name is mark smith. it was a way for students to express their feeling, because

they didn't have the money to go see a psychiatrist or a therapist. so poetry slam is this a new version of rap and hip-hop. it allows students to really tell you what they are thinking about the world and who they are. and we have national poetry slam contest. actually teach poetry slam at a boys and girls high school in brooklyn. the problem that we're having with culture is we have integrated to a point where we have lost julliard. and the only time we discover who we are in our language, whenever it is expressed when you are at a family reunion or family outing, where we can connect to the family. i stress the family a lot because it's not enough to just have a charter school like doctor lee explained. it's more to get the family involved in the school and education process. you should go. you shouldn't have to give a list of books to people because

we're in an age of technology now. where you can go on the computer and you can find out what your interests are, what are the things you like to read about. there is a multitude of information out there, and i think it's african americans we need to explore more and not have such fear about going into a bookstore, or going into the public library. it's more than that. you have to really have a love for books, and put that in the minds of the child at a young age. let them fend -- don't let them fend for themselves so we have to teach them. >> i have been told that our time is up, but i believe that our panelists will be here for a little while, or at least out front for a little while longer for additional questions. thank you again, judy, andrew, roger reynolds, doctor howard dodson, wade hudson, doctor carol lee, for this topic of

interest, not just african-americans, but to the entire community. and when we are asked who is at the door, when it comes to our understanding of the link between culture and language, the answer maybe it's me. it may be it is i. but it ought to be we are at the door to find out. thank you very much. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations]

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>> you have been watching a panel discussion on african-american language and culture. book tvs live coverage of the 2009 harlem book fair continues with our final event of the day, a panel on writer ama ata aidoo after this break. >> this summer book tv is asking what are you reading? >> i am not to sack a managing editor of the hill newspaper. hill newspaper covers politics 24/7, so in the summer i at least like to get away from politics at least for a little bit here and one of the books i started to read, i haven't finished yet, is called caddy for life. this is written by john feinstein, he is one of the best sportswriters of our time i think that focuses on the life

of a bruce edwards who was a caddy for a golfing legend, tom watson. edwards gets diagnosed with lou gehrig's disease. so it tracks his final few months on the pga tour. another book that i will be reading is a book written by one of my friend called receive the following. so i will be reading that this summer. it's on amazon.com. i will be checking that out. another book my wife just finished is called the shack. it's by william paul young. a lot of buzz around this book. it's a fictional book. i don't know too much about it but i hear you can apply this book to your everyday life, and so i will be checking that out as well. i've always been fascinated by the search for osama bin laden, and i'm going to be reading a book by michael sure your. he is the former cia agent who was in charge of the unit searching for bin laden. he recently wrote for the

washington post. i haven't read any of his books but it reminded me that i should take a look at one of his books. and this one is called marching toward hell, america and islam after iraq. the last book that we will be checking out is called the 15th club. i'm a big golfer and this is kind of a how-to book. it focuses on the mental game of golf. it's written by a sports psychologist bob rotella. and i would recommend it. i started, it's taken a few strokes off my game and i can get all the help i need. so those are the books i will be checking out this summer. >> is the more summer reading list and other program information, visit our website at booktv.org. >> the publishing imprint of 12

publishes 12 books a year. cary goldstein is publicity director at 12. mr. goldstein, what are some of the books you have coming out in the later 2009? >> this summer where publishing henry waxman's, the waxman report, in july. it's a look back at some of the landmark legislation that the congressman has been involved with. tobacco, clean-air, nutritional labels. and what he does is he explains to us how coalitions are built, how does get moved from subcommittees to the committees, how he collects both. and it's really a look at how it is made and of course has a couple of big bills going this summer so we expect a lot of attention. >> did you approach henry waxman or did he approach you? >> our publisher approached the congressman and thought that he would be a perfect person to explain how congress works. and i should add that josh green for the atlantic monthly has written to the congressman and asked for a job. >> another book by peter peterson. >> he has lived a fairly

phenomenal life. who was born in 1926, raised by greek immigrants, was born in the depression era in nebraska. worked in his father's beiderbecke found himself of the secretary of commerce for nixon. chairman and ceo of lehman brothers and later cofounded the blackstone group your kerry are in the greatest recession since the great depression, and he has sort of a birds eye view of this, that few people would have. >> who is pope bronson and ashley merryman. >> a journalist and writer of the number one bestseller. ashley merryman is a science journalist. and these have taken a look, much as they did for the economy, and friedman did for globalization. they are taking a global look at children. what they discovered is there are certain key twists that science is have overlooked. and recent research shows that conventional wisdom of raising our kids is all wrong.

so they want a national magazine award for a piece they did on praise in new york m%'@@ú@ú,ñ or a

full month. we are not distracted by other, you know, campaigns. and we can be created and we cannot just publish a book one way. we can publish one book several ways. on the one hand, it's a book about deception. robert is one of them world leading authorities on deception. he is the chair of the department of behavioral science at umass. i'm sorry, i'm blanking. he has written this book, when he was a young assistant professor yuan to the national archives. he thought he would listen to the nixon tapes and go to the greatest liar ever and learn a thing or two. what he discovered was remarkable, aside to make a remarkable. what he said was even he, an expert, couldn't tell when nixon was truthful or not. so the book is not about your medoc port clinton scalise. it's about the lies we tell everyday. each of us tells on average three lies every 10 minutes.

and icu, you look good. i feel well. no more lies we are told, the level of our own lives increases. clinically depressed people have more accurate views of themselves and powerful people, who tend to maintain a façade of strength in order to maintain their ambition. so he covers all these things but it's not just, like i was saying, it's about how to handle lies in the office, lies in your bedroom, lies at the dinner table. that we published it so psychology book, a book about business, it's a book about becoming a more honest person yourself. >> how far in advance do you plan your 12 books a year? >> well, we have acquired, we got books scheduled through next august. so we have august 2010. yeah, august 2010. so we are scheduled through august 2010 people are starting to think about the following fall. not all of the main script have been delivered yet but we know

what's coming up. there is some great stuff coming up throughout this next year. >> as an acquiring editor and an editor, what do you do? >> most of my job, 90% of my job is spent promoting the books. but i also have the opportunity to edit about a book a year. i edited one novel last summer. i'm working on one right now produced by jerry wind child. as an editor what most i do is look at the books that are coming in. i let them know whether i think we can spend a full month promoting these books. and that's one of the things that we are thinking about, is not just great writing first and foremost. a singular book, which there are in other books like out in the market but also at its a writer and a subject that we can focus on for a full month. beyond review coverage. >> twelve books.com is the website. cary goldstein is director of publicity.

>> book tvs live coverage of the 2009 harlem book fair continues with our final event of the day. starting shortly a panel discussion of the danae and writer ama ata aidoo. [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. this is a panel entitled

politics and legacy of ama ata aidoo. our moderator is very distinguished writer, novelist and anthologist. seven books. the most recent one is ama in between. doctor nunez is distinguished professor in the cuny system and is now the provost vice president at major evers and so it is with great pleasure that i introduce doctor nunez as our moderator for this afternoon's panel, politics and legacy of ama ata aidoo.

[applause] >> thank you. the guinean writer, ama ata aidoo, has left an indelible mark on almost every literary genre. from poultry, drama, fiction, essay, children's literature and more. equally significant are the values infused in her writing. the revolutionary dynamic she sets in motion since she began to write in the 1960s. from slavery to human and political rights of women, and the dispossessed, the colonial impact, to re- connections between africa and, ama ata aidoo familiar themes into pushback against the threats to our shared humanity and sense of human decency. this afternoon, we have four

distinguished scholars and writers who will talk to us and discuss the works of ama ata aidoo, and the impact of her work on our society today. we begin first with doctor carol boyce davies. doctor carole boyce davies is at the forefront of attempt to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of color. she earned her doctorate from the university in nigeria, her mashers degree in howard university and her bachelor's degree at the university of maryland. her most recent book is an encyclopedia of the african origins experiences and culture. the way we have structured this panel is that i will introduce

each one of these distinguished scholars, and we have sort of cleared sort of thing niche for them to speak about the work of ama ata aidoo. so beginning with doctor boyce davies, what i will ask her to discuss is the impact of ama ata aidoo work on the politics of women's rights. [applause] >> thank you, elizabeth. it's such a pleasure being in schomburg. always the center of academic excellence and scholarly conservation of our history. a pleasure always to honor that. i'm talking today about politics and the works of ama ata aidoo. and basically what i want to do is locate her within a series of context. recently, i was actually in algeria last week -- this week actually for the pan african

african altar and i was looking at c-span international which has a program called african voices. and in it they were interviewing a dg. and she says interestedly speaking casualty about things that occupied her that she was concerned about the idea that marriage is not set up for the benefit of woman, and indeed can be dangerous to woman, but that women are conditioned to behave and suffer the price. she is speaking casually, but her sense of any relationship to the kinds of work that people like ama ata aidoo would have already put forward. she says also in that discussion that her recent work tries to confront the hypocrisy of denying that same-sex relationships existed -- exist in africa. so what i wonder, put forward personal is the question of ama as the letter as a form of the. and it is my contention that her generation are able, are now able to put these issues

casually on the table while writers like ama ata aidoo had already set the table itself. i'm using this domestic metaphor deliberately. so while she claimed the influence as she should, even down to the fact of coming out of the house, technically having lived in a house, i am arguing that she is also coming out of another house and that is a house of african women's writing in which ama ata aidoo was indeed literary form other. so it's really critical than in any of our studies or considerations of this question of ama ata aidoo to consider that the feel of women's writings is now a rich one which is nice because the people like ama ata aidoo. so that works like susan allens is really important, women writing africa, which sort of fills in many of the historical contours of african women's writings, add further to the breath of that understanding of this field and earlier works at one with which i was involved

with with africa all press and icy catherine is in the audience, steadies the women in african literature. and in which two contributors who i know are here today participated, reveal a variety of critical studies on the various writers. indeed, we were trying to pretty much clear the ground at that time so that one can actually have an ongoing systematic study of the women and african literature. so now it's not unusual to find you know, works at actually tie to themselves feminism and african literature. so one does the casual e-mail search and you find all of these works coming up with their title. and indeed, the feel of african feminism can now be identified as a very rich one. meanwhile, the work of ama ata aidoo has progressed consistently in pace with this through individual essays, by scholars, works by people like vincent on the politics and

really against colonialism. whenever i see, and wonderful essays as well. i want to really highlight changes on its wonderful introduction by susan allen which gives you an amazing overview of the entire oeuvre of ama ata aidoo. perhaps now if i would just turn to some of the ways in which ama ata aidoo tried to articulate her own feminist politics it may be helpful. one of the first places in the collection called sisterhood is global and is by robin morgan which became one of the first subject of our reality of african women. in that short essay, to be a woman, which followed the statistical information on republic of gagne itself is that such a divorce, rape, sexual-harassment and so on engaged at that point. particularly striking was her assertion that as she came of age, she recognized that women were meant only to provide a variety of service roles and

then being a writer was therefore not part of that scheme. and as a result, she's been ,ñstpt effective as an instrument of oppression. it has put more than half of humanity through mutations that

are entirely humiliating and at best ridiculous purchase to make an interesting point which i see as another pretext to my own work in which he says that it is a radical struggle and the various national liberation struggle. go, the fact that a colleague understands a finer points of marxism or is the most fearless fighter in the bush does not automatically mean that he has the notion of women's capabilities. enter final receiver which was indeed, proves reality in several locations, quote, don't be shocked if when victory is one they return you to the veil as part of the process of consolidating the gains of the revolution. page 65. this is accurate, as you know, proven to be quite accurate for a number of locations. this was, of course, written in the heady days of feminism movement of the more recently published today from african

woman, published in 1991. then listing women who turned seven, it expected limitation that she makes a point that one should assess a series of things and looking at the condition of african woman. indigenous african society factors. the conquest of the continent by europe, and to be clear about the lack of vision or courage in the leadership of postcolonial african leaders period of. and it's a point that a number of african feminist would come to a really nice way, and some of them would say that it is actually the men who spoiled the gains of independence, if you will. and somewhat actually argue, and she says that if we were to really bring women into the picture, they should in this half of the world, then we can be sure that we have a more vibrant understanding of realities of the continent. this is a position that many other progressive areas have had to come to and it's often a sign

that if you work with educating women, you educate the continent itself. but you know, others would also come to that point later, for example, think a rough. but they see the emancipation of women as the last possible hope for ourselves and for everyone else on the continent. as we know, the african union is critical of the rights of women ratified by 23 countries. now, if we were to turn to some of the work itself, and i'm just going to briefly talk about two points before i stop. one is the whole logic of the creative theatrical. what i argued in her work is that she acts are sometimes put forward some of the major theoretical positions that she would also argue in some of her shorter essays. and she does this marvelously in a work called and a walk which really theorizes the middle passage. and it is actually might be one

of those works which has to be addressed seriously if we look at the whole iraqi were russians that come from middle passage sexuality. and she also along with that has really an amazing way of incorporating within that same text the logic of the woman caught as it were between traditional expectations and then of course the logic that sort of keep her back in a particular position. so i wanted to really make sure that the question of reclaiming the self for ama ata aidoo has to do with reclaiming the african for herself, the african self itself but also the black female body, the black female self. she does this marvelously working with her subject well which provide the african return stories suggest i will take you back to africa narrative which is really i think a small text within. it's like i'm going to take you back and all that, you know, to

the continent and make you a princess. so now she goes to africa where she is clearly not a princess and she is dealing with major issues. so the expectations and experiences are less than romantic, and clearly she is ill prepared as well to confront the realities of living in an african familial context. and of course, this is work done by skillfully as she allows the family of woman to really come together to work this difficulty out in many different ways of the husband remains. i mentioned, one of the ways i found her interestingly locating, in the big house, those of you who are familiar with the eyes of god and know this as well, that janie when she is the mayor's wife is a similar situation sorbent stalled in the big house and having to sort of carry out the sort of dreams of the male who is now sort of set himself as receiving the benefits of, you know, this colonial struggle, if

you will. but she resists this and find accomplice he with his relationship locates in the sort of economic globalization by the slave trade and the development of new capitalism. which uses its own people as commodity. and she is not afraid, ama is not afraid to confront this question about african complicity of those few who are able to profit from the slave trade itself. and what i found in changes, which is, and i'm conscious of the times or try to wrap this up now, what i saw in changes was an amazing ability to deal with the contemporary experience. she returned to marriage again, but she has a character who has to deal, read, reject an unsatisfactory marriage. but interestingly be reduced to eight wife and a polygamist marriage finds is also not satisfied.

and the entire text can be written as a critique of marriage with which we began. but without the losses for the woman this time. mobility is critical. motherhood is not essential even though she is a mother. instead, there is a lusty enjoyment of her sexuality and as she comes to be into claimers up under these conditions, as she continues to find answers to difficult questions. so let me just close with how ama sums up the situation. quote, so the marriage state but dramatically changed. all questions and answers disappeared. she had had to teach herself not to expect him at all. as she believed when he insisted that he loved her very much. she knew it was true, that he loved her in his own fashion. when she became certain of was that his passionate loving had proven quite inadequate for her. she comforter herself that made her boned blood myself, not her unseen self, would get answers to some of the big questions she

was asking of life. and this is how she answered. not suggesting that this is going to be a perfect situation, but suggesting that there are a series of questions that would still have to be engaged which still have to be answered and which i would suggest it takes is really directly into a future but also of other works, including with which i began. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, doctor boyce davies. i met ama ata aidoo about 20 years ago when i was directing the national black writers conference and invited her to speak, and was really impressed with her. and much of what you say, have said there, doctor boyce davies, resonates with me on meeting her. we're going to move now to another professor here, and this is doctor nana holy who is assistant professor of english

at indiana university, or are you associate professor? she was born in ghana and she is an accomplished artist who comes over tree, dance and fashion design among her means of expression. doctor hoying will. paul: is about the politics of motherhood and ama ata aidoo's work. [applause] >> good afternoon. i want to begin -- yes, some allows are short and nobody thinks about us. and did we forget ourselves how short we are when we come up to tall people.

[laughter] >> i'm glad i recognize that. i am one of the few people -- well, i possibly the only people here who can claim i have been blessed to know ama ata aidoo. she was my college professor. we became colleagues. above all, she has been my sister from day one, and i am proud to say i am also a well-known scholar on ama ata aidoo. so it's a pleasure to be here. i normally will watch this kind of thing on c-span, and i have always desired to be here. so it's a real pleasure and the occasion is also for me to share my love of this wonderful woman. those of you who are here. in all on ama ata aidoo that ideal, trying to come to terms with what brings the affairs

together, the topics that prevails in my head is the politics of mothering. mothering constitutes the foundation stones upon which ama ata aidoo constructs her artistic works. it's not surprising that that should be the case. ama ata aidoo also happens to be one of the lucky few to come from the system. and so she really is very strongly aware of herself as a gendered self, who is has a concept of femaleness. is very deep-seated and not confined to their narrow terms

of. most people see mothering as taking care of people. however, who also happens to be very strongly grounded in their indigenous culture of donna, she is a daughter of a chief. i mean, i can vouch for her. ama ata aidoo will not tell you but i know her and we shared these things. from the day i met her, the thing that struck me was how distinct she is, how academic and as a writer. i go to college for the first time and see a ghanaian woman who was your professor. who was profoundly. however, she always was not the professor. she was a big sister, the ghanaian woman, you know, somebody who always maintained a

meaningful, human, womanly relationship with people she came in contact with. i also was witness to a woman being in the very male dominated institution. and away ama ata aidoo handled herself, i mean, most people would say, oh, no, she's not a woman. who is a woman? ama ata aidoo is very much a woman, a ghanaian woman, an african woman, one who is raising the consciousness of herself as a woman and womanhood is really very strongly based in a very complex, diverse a fight sense of womanhood. which is a sickly mothering.

and mothering is not biological or sociological. where you nurture or, you know, pick up on people. mothering is the essence of human organization, and other ages is the fact that the ages actually do recognize woman as the human organization as development. that children born into the human community trace their descent through the woman. this recognition of what woman represents in humans development and organization actually becomes very healthy. it gives you a sense of responsibility, and also makes you a mother.

i have to say, that somebody called me and asked mother once. srrx'j been all kind of"tn creativity, which really i cannot say enough about. i don't care which ama ata aidoo

work you read. and regardless of how small or how young, if it's a female character, that sense of awareness of being the center of the world, it doesn't mean that she romanticizes. and women worship, no. women go through a lot. women are abused, but women are hardly ever there unconscious victims of abuse that we tend to find in many works. ama ata aidoo, any sa carol referred to in dissent, did say when people ask me, every now and then, whether i'm a feminist, i naturally answer yes. but i go on to insist that every

woman and every man should be a feminist. especially if they believe that africans should take care of our land, should take charge of its wealth, our life, and our own development. because it is not possible to advocate the independence for our continent without also be leaving that african women must have the best that the environment can offer. for some of us, is his a crucial element of our feminism. ama ata aidoo is the prolific. her works, i mean she has written in every possible genre. one of my favorite works of course is anaawa but i love every single one of her works. in each one of them ascends of what mothering, as he consciously constructive

ideology, is evidence whether it is the low child who is having the confrontation with another young person, male or female. and contemporary ghana, having one of those, no, you won't. no, you don't, that kind of thing, it still becomes a way of recognizing what mothering constitutes in the world. and it comes from women from a very early age on where knowing who they are and recognizing that the world literally rides on their shoulders. and every man is some woman's child. and that is the spirit that runs through her works. i want to show you a little excerpt from no sweetness here. her first collection of short

stories which was published in 1970. and the story that i want, it's called a gift from somewhere. basically it begins with a woman who has experienced child, twice already and has a third child, a boy. is in her mind already dead. and a medicine man from the north who is also in need of food, and more so than medicine runs into her. he is thinking of his stomach, but little did he know that the woman he was trying to hit for something so he can't eat was in dire need of a miracle.

so the child she believes is dead, and this man, you know, starts feeling his way around. oh, there is something. it in your stomach. so, you know the child is dead, right? and meanwhile, the man psychologically is like oh, my god, what have i stumbled into. all i wanted was a little food. but indy and the woman jumps, i mean immediately she jumped at the chance because she actually believes her child is dead. she is thinking of, god, now i have to -- three times, how much can a woman take? but already i know what i have to do, pretend that i'm used to this, and you know, prepare myself to separate again. the way that the woman is given pacing, what pacing is really deeply psychological and

political. because the plight of women and the way that the world takes what they do for granted, and also the fact that things to do with women, which is really at the center of creation, is oftentimes taking on, that's what women do. it's women. folks who bring this out. anyway, the medicine man does what he can and leaves. and the woman now is -- he tells her to go and bring some specific thing so he can work you know, some medicine for the child protection. when she comes out, he has gone. but she doesn't give up hope. she comes to believe that her

ancestors must have a sense to her. but you know this child does not die. it is wonderful. but this child did not die. the strange world always something to surprise us with. something, he did not die. somehow. to this day, was he not a just from god? and then the man is gone. but the woman, you know, respects the fact that this is the passing through. her child's life is restored to her, the mother. and following that, she had a

lot more children. of course, the husband marries a second wife. blas. .

what bane's meet is the way the father acts. that he should say, you are not following your mother. why couldn't he say, okay my son come today you don't have school, why don't you pick up your machete and follow me to the farm? i mean, constantly, women practice come a position themselves in ways that make it evident that the essence of mothering and without that there will be no human communities because the women stopped giving-- and go beyond that to take charge of ensuring they are racing to freshen the fruits or there will be no human community and there will be no wealth in no development and the world had

better recognize that. thank you. [applause] thank you dr. horne. our next speaker and scholar and poet is rashid the is mali. she is a retired professor from rutgers university and the city university, i believe you were there two and a poet. she will talk to us about the poetic artz of ama ata aidoo. [applause] >> good afternoon. i met ama ata aidoo in the '60s. we were both students at the time.

actually, ama ata aidoo and i are the same age. and, it was strange in the '60s here. not a lot of people, even though at lot of women or african women, were wearing african clothing, it was the dawn of a kind of consciousness that was very, very much involved and african women were wearing african clothing, but there would be a difference when an african born woman would work and effort can from the diaspora. one day i was walking down the street and i heard this voice. look at you. i turned around and there is ama, wearing blue genes. now, i cannot imagine, blue

genes and a huge head type. i was wearing just a simple-- if you were not an african you would not understand. you would just call it what you call it. she is standing with her arms wide open like that. let's get you. i knew this was a sister and we have been friends, we have been friends ever since. ama has two very important collections of poems. one is called, someone talking to some time and the other is called, an angry letter in january. these poems, like all of her work, show her politics.

it also shows her, her capability as a poet. none that was talking about ama from a point of view. because you know, the old empire which was one country from which i come on the other side but having some ghanian blood and they come from the more ghanian side, we do have a society, so for us, the earth and the mothering, it is central to our being, but on that same level, poetry is one of the essentials of african literature. the oral literature that we talk so much about is based on piano,

the structure of poetry, so when we talk about the poetic of any african writer but especially someone like ama than we are definitely talking about the very core foundation of the transition from the orality to the script, and he if you look at some of the ways in which ama constructs are poetry, and i was struck by it last night, just be doing it, i'd do similar things, but we tend to use words in a way that, that are following that praise, this song structure, which is metaphoric and not necessarily metaphoric in the western sense but metaphoric and the african sense. that is, what you called, what

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juxtaposes politics, where some of the earlier works, she is talking about black/white issues, she is talking about colonial versus the colonies the issues. she talks about class, and i think on that level, she probably is one of the early writers of the so-called postcolonial or pre-postcolonial era that does this. i was at a conference once on african literature, and somebody was talking about post colonialism. we have had this long conversation and ama ata says, sister, when did post colonialism actually occur? [laughter] i said, i said because they were speaking about it from a point of view that-- that it had

already happened, so i said i did not know that it ever occurred. i thought we were in the midst of it right now but if you read her poetry, she talks about that. in particular there is a poem and again, because we are mindful of the time, but in someone talking to someone, she has a poem where she talks about, she talks about-- and in the same poem, she talks about malcolm x's autobiography and she talks about-- in the title of it is of love and commitment. i think it is a wonderful title and titles, again, are an announcement whereas they serve a different form, a different format in western poetry and sometimes for the african born

writer, who gets, who gets a lot of their structure, and their artistic structure from their culture, it can be a clash because the ways in which titles, the ways in which form is used may go counter to the african essence of a piece. but, she talks about, she talks about it and she says i borrowed the malcolm x's autobiography to read, and then this is wonderful. she says, stokley, just stokley. it is on the line by itself, so again i am talking about the way in which she uses the words on a page which has to do again, i am suggesting, the poets of african culture. stokley with a? mac. stokley, then she puts a full

stop. these are not things that she has done because she does not know the grammatical structure of formal english riding, but i think that she is trying to say something here very specifically. she has a poem also called greetings from london and it is a subtitle, c c. cece is kind of a generic term that women use the monks themselves of all ages. sometimes it can be cece, and it just means that i accept you as my, as my sister but not from necessarily from the biological immediate family, but from a larger biological affiliation. and in this poem, she starts the poem just cece. cece is on one line in the next line says do you remember when?

i'm going to read this one piece, for lines so you can get a sense of how she constructs her poetry. cece, do you remember when grandfather-- in 1867, climbing palm trees, the machine and manchester would not die for lack of oil. that is almost an indictment, and you are not prepared for that because she set up by saying it is greetings from london said you think, i am in london and i have just seen the buckingham palace. it is really the most beautiful structure in the whole world. thank god i am in reach. my eyes see london because that is the dream of every colonial, to see the country and god forbid that you don't see the buckingham palace.

but, you have to really, you have to really read that and see that in her work. some people can read this and not see politics. maybe it is because they see politics and everything that i do that. i guess the other thing that we share is, we share our love what africanism. we both, as i say, are around the same age. we believe that it was a new africa of let and there should be these new people and that these people for the african personifier in the african purse ana was what we were constructing. this was going to be constructed out of three elements. one was the tradition, one was the traditional africa, one was the technical or the euro western trade and then the third was going to be a combination of

these two things, creating nano this new person who was going to come back to the people and with them joined them and construct this new africa. this was a non-gendered situation. men had to do the same thing as lemon. unfortunately many of the women found but that was not true and that our brothers who espoused africanism really have their own place for where women should be. and it wasn't necessarily along side them. one of the tragedy's of pan-africanism does not include west africa but if you look at algeria and a lot more needs to be written about bill jerry, the veil in algeria which is talked about a lot, was used in a very political way and women made those decisions and they participated on the highest level in the most difficult and dangerous situations.

that helps to bring them the liberation of algeria and a very woman consciously there, when he was overthrown, the first thing he did was to bring in the code of the family and the code of the family issued its first law that women would be back in the kitchen, back in the bedroom and back in the house, and the tragedy of the algerian women, who had achieved at that time college educations and a sense of out of the house, they all were put back hundreds of years. very few people ever about that, and i think that is something i will leave to my learned scholars to do. but, finally, in this book an angry letter in january, i think in this collection of poems, ama

ata is extremely in control of both her subject and heard genre i would like to see her do some more poetry like this. she organizes her books, these books in sort of sections, and some of the titles, images of africa, the century's and, after a commonwealth conference, no grief, note joy. again, this is just, just this one and i won't use, i will just use this one. the title of the poem is the title of the book, an angry letter in january, the first line so again i am going to just

read it the way the line is constructed. dear bank manager, i have received your letter full stop. thank you very much. threats, intimidations, and all. i mean, so what, if you won't give me a loan of 2,000, or only conditioned by special rules and regulations, because i am, and then she puts a space, not in italics, white male or in italics, a commercial fireman. i mean, to me, you know yeah you could say it is angry but it isn't really angry. it is just the way in which she is in zeroing exactly on the issue, exactly on the point in that to me is what ama ata does

most common most profoundly. she zeros in with out access words. no matter what her genre, she gets right to the point and she says precisely what is intended, what is needed but most of all, what she means her, and she really, really, really does not like to be paraphrased or to be assumed to have been saying something that she did not actually say, so i think that this is a very, a very good opportunity for some of you who may not know her work to hear these things and for us to reflect, because sometimes you know if you have read it. you think you have understood it but when you go back over it and you look over it, you really are once again not amazed but really

humbled by the profundity of an african-american woman, especially in african women who comes from sub-saharan because we do make sometimes those negative distinctions so subsahara is the stepchild of northern sahara, but anyway, she is a models writer and i would urge all of you to really try to find her books and i would urge you to look for the books that have been written about her by some of the panelist. ama ata aidoo poetry is really the kind of work that i think, especially some of the young women now who are struggling to find a poetic voice, i would really urge them to read some of her work, not that you want to

copy but i think that it would help a lot. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. i thought we had much more time than we do so i'm afraid i'm going to ask our next speaker, who is originally from sierra leone west africa. she teaches in the english department at the university of new york and she is the author of several award-winning books come including womanist and feminist esthetics. she is going to talk to us about the legacy of ama ata aidoo. i want to leave just about ten minutes for q&a. i don't know how we are going to do this, but here we go. [applause] >> good afternoon, and it is really appropriate that i should end this session because given the time factor, i am going to

sum up ama ata aidoo's legacy or give this some summary of what has been said in as short a time as i possibly can because i really would like to see or experience what it is you were thinking in the audience. but, first i want to thank my friends and colleagues and i should actually say my sisters, on the panel. i have known everybody here for many, many years including professor nunez. i was just saying that i was a regular in her conferences. in fact your decades ago, and i was really happy to see that she was tapped to moderate our panel. carol traveled from gainesville under the most arduous circumstances to be here,

because like all of us you simply say ama ata aidoo and we run@@ú@ú ú ú ú other things. so, legacy. legacy comes from old french to

medieval latin, meaning money or property left in there will. and the irony of associating legacy in terms of that meeting, of course we don't mean that. we mean something else. what has evolved to mean the bounty of good deeds that one leaves behind and is remembered by. and the deeds and words of course. in the case of the artists and writers, but if you think of the word legacy for ama, ama-- all of us refer to her in that endearing way, ama has been at the forefront of african writing since the '60s. in fact, the birth of modern

african literature you might easily say to continue the metaphor, that you have, you know, women actually participated in a large degree in creating and of course shifting this literature, but unfortunately, given the politics on the african continent-- continent, she has not receive the rewards of writing, the rewards of her labor. i can't stress that enough, that ama needs to be rewarded for her writing by virtue of having publishers publisher burt because when i spoke to her about two weeks ago, she is in seclusion writing a new novel. it is going to be a splash, just as we will be waiting for the

novel, and it came out and made a splash. okay. so, as far as legacy does let's make sure ama can also leave behind the monetary rewards of her labor. [applause] but, back to legacy as we use the word, even for people who create, you know, meaningful work and for the most part, we don't wait until they pass away. we actually start talking about their legacy while they are alive. this is-- i will say a couple of things regarding that. ama built a legacy on a ground that was filled with legacies

that she had to dismantle. so, we have a two-pronged process here. on the one hand, dismantling such a legacy and on the other, building her own. now, let's see. one of those legacies that she had was compared to dismantle. boy, the first that comes to mind is the legacy of colonialism and colonial education, and it has already been talked about here. now, the seas on books and shelves of books have been written on this subject but let me just boil it down to this, that the colonial mind actually tries to convey to the colonial subjects the benefits of thinking in duality. okay, right in the middle. life had to be split.

on one side this and one side that and for the most part, the first sight, which in discourse has been called self, was regarded as good and the other side, the other bad. you can just put a multitude of things in those columns. those splits were so dangerous for africans. i can't even begin to tell you, because i did have that education and it was left to parents and in my case, both parents, my teaching, to say no with a lot of wiggle room in between. so, ama, the colonial under current never goes away.

even though it has been talked about how it is time to give up this colonial bashing. 40 years later, what are we still talking about? again, once again go to her works and enjoy a mind, an original mind at work. another myth, another legacy actually another legacy in the form, that she had to dismantle was from the local cultures, the traditional culture. let me say, ama the doors african traditions. she is not about tradition bashing. in fact, african cultures shift the writers.

they actually are matched in nav because of you take them out of it, they are really like fish out of water. just watch those who have come to the new world for any state of political exile and watch how slowly they are writing. ..

the time she had to dismantle. it has been talked about. women's lives. experience in all of her books. number 2, switching to those saw you story elements of --

bringing them out. one would say he is idealistic. she is really valuing what matters in the traditional way of life. and the experience, the countryside as much as the city. and the original use of language. time is against me. and naked beauty. a giant that we should respect and honor. and her legacy lives in all of us in our works and in all of you. thank you.

>> that was a great job in summing up. we have had a great introduction, more than a great introduction to the work and life of ama ata aidoo. i have a question for the panel. acquistion near to me. the timeliness about this panel, as you know, president barack obama just came back from donna. some of you heard his comments, how would ama ata aidoo have reacted to this president -- visit and the comments that he made? >> i am sure ama ata aidoo would have asked michele. and the little girls. and amazingly emotional

experience, was able to address that so we can do that and come out and talk. i was concerned about him flattening it out to human cruelty. could have really highlighted the new world, so called, how we got to be -- and of course the political question we need to engage, i am sure you will do it later, the moment that was lost. >> he linked it to -- it was not just human cruelty at that point, a specificity of focus that would pull out specifics of african people's experiences in that historic moment and his return and what that means. and would have recognized his position, how he is respected in the world as a leader, not just

of the u.s. but as a black leader and also the questions of his place in history and its link to the past. >> a missed opportunity. >> he should have asked michele what she thought. >> i want to say something. >> one of the people who has constantly drawn attention to the subject of what happened between us and the rest of us. in other words, the silences that surround african people, and those of us in africa don't talk about it. okay? my grandfather is from jamaica. he came and settled in ghana.

we called in daddy, the white man. that doesn't mean, it is location. white is the west. white is a multiplicity of things. my grandfather was -- he was a black man in the colonial structure that existed at the time. even i grew up knowing that america, there is a toss, the sense of ourselves was based on the notion of this son of africa who is the product of this colonial affairband and an

african woman in jamaica coming back home. the irony is my grandfather -- he married my grandmother in ways that we do not mary. my grandfather was warned, but it is easier to cohabit. that particular one, you should avoid because she is the daughter of the traditional ruler and you don't really want to get that business. he did get tangled in his black male. >> interesting word you use about the silence.

and so -- >> that is good. >> from that standpoint, given that we can look at -- the comment by the media. missed opportunity. and a line him, happy silence. the atlantic ocean was difficult at times. >> just before they shut me out. before they do, i want to make

certain our panelists -- and jeter allen and professor a shiva -- i want to take this opportunity to thank the founder of qb are and the harlem book fair we are enjoying today. i want to extend my gratitude and appreciation to him. [applause] >> we can go on with the questions but if we get cut off, you know why. does anybody have a question? >> thank you for this panel on the very important legacy of the work of ama ata aidoo. i came across her work with her play the dilemma of the ghost. i appreciate dr. davies's remark

of a literary response to raising the sun. the most movement--most moving part of that is the cultural dissonance is windy african-american woman and african-american man, particularly when the african american woman is arguably angry when a female family of the african man talks bad about slaves, she is a slave? and they think very pejorative lee of her, when it is much deeper than that. it is an issue that was mentioned by dr. warren, not that they think she is a bad person, does that there is a huge cultural gap. ama ata aidoo opened those silents, but for me as a writer, you talked about this in your own way as, she emphasized

truffe especially through that column that was read, thank you, the fact that as a writer, you ultimately get to a truth you are exposing the tween cultures. it is completely irrelevant, the ways in which post colonial leaders, they are the same ethnic group, people who were colonized are believed to be easier or better when africa has shown us the west. legacy is to demand nothing but unadulterated truth and excellence from the leaders who, like obama, a man of color but still held to the same high standards that we hold in our community. >> thank you so much.

[applause] >> another question from the audience? >> i wanted to respond to what you just said, very briefly. i can tell you that i and others have had these conversations, that somehow there is always a qualifier when we are articulate, when we are creative, when we are scholarly, when we are inventive, all of the things that are not necessarily ascribe to us, but they are ascribed to us by people who themselves were not necessarily the primary inventors. so when we xl and do these things, this is our legacy, this is our legacy.

we gave the world the technical beginnings. we gave the world the very script we still use. we gave the world language, we gave the world culture. and now, when we xl, we are only doing what we should be doing. this is the larger picture of what i perceive as mothering, and this is -- ama ata aidoo is the mothering figure we say she is, and many fit this. what we do is not just abstract, but in fact, we can learn excellence because we have excellent, because we come from excellence. [applause] >> tuzyline jita allan, we use up some of your time so i want

you to respond. >> i just want to thank the panel for a wonderful talk that very much touched me deeply. 2 -- two quick questions, the second one lists a couple books of hers that the audience would purchase because i am interested in that. the two i'm interested in, the way in which i find as a black woman, when we are talking in black communities in various panels and a lot of other situations, the strength of black women is not often mentioned when talking about a mothering and marriage, it sound like the author you are discussing is offering a paradigm, a way in which we should think about black women and black woman who did that i don't often hear discussed in these various state of the unions and various things about

black people. it sounds like you guys, this woman's work is so instructive of the way in which, apart again of the black people in this country need to think about her. i wonder if you could expand more in talking about her work, motherhood and marriage and how we may be able to use that in the community. >> i am going to throw that question to tuzyline jita allan. we have 1-1/2 minutes. >> you have already spoken so eloquently on this topic. a statement i could create that could carry with you on that subject, it has to be with the

whole idea of individual autonomy, especially female autonomy, and we see women have to have room to discover who they are outside of the inherited parameters of biology, and all these other factors, that are both in the traditional societies, but heavily with the regime of colonialism, that made matters even worse. she pried open a lot of family secrets. women featured largely, that particular project, the woman coming into her own space, ama

ata aidoo opted for legal means, it is actually happening on the ground. it is not like she got it. but she was testing this theoretically in writing to see how to react to it, how to respond to people who were actually living it. but also to say that for all of her feminism, she is very much steeped in ways of doing and ways of being that have begun and she writes about that sometimes to test the waters but for the most part to expos the gaps so that people can come to a sense of putting things, the

loose ends together on their own. how can i ask that question, given what her husband has just done to her? >> i am afraid we are coming to the end. i want to thank you for being here, and to thank our scholar writers, the harlem book fair for sponsoring this panel, thank you. >> the name of the book? >> the landmark of the goat. changes -- i am doing it in

chronological order -- and go on the internet. go on the internet and you will get the book. thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> wrapping up a panel discussion on ama ata aidoo, this concludes our live coverage from the 2009 harlem book fair. you can watch a real air of so.

and here's just a little bit of the book festival as you can see here right there on the campus. well, our next call-in guest is going to be larry willmore. he's the senior black correspondent on the daily show. and we wanted to show you a little clip from the daily show and we'll be back to take your calls. >> how much of a game changer is this barack obama? i'm joined by larry our senior

black correspondent. [applause] [applause] >> it's unbelievable. obama is not only popular here at home but around the world. and it's not his rhetoric. it's not even his smile. it's something a little more basic. >> in that regard my younger son is 8. and he now says that he would like to be black. [laughter] >> black is in. [laughter] >> two things, john. larry king has an 8-year-old son that is [beep] up. [applause] >> also, but secondly, black is in. that hasn't happened in a long time. >> i didn't know that you kept track of that. >> oh, yeah. >> whether blacks or in or out. >> look, we had our moments.

during the '60s we had the civil rights. gave us a lot of buzz, '30s joe lewis he gave a lot of heat. the last time we were in was way back when we built the pyramids. [applause] >> i don't want to rain on that parade but i believe you made us build the pyramids. >> like i said, we were in. [laughter] >> and the book is i'd rather we got casinos. the author is larry willmore. mr. willmore, how long will this black is in period last? >> probably about 42 years is my guess. well, it's in that seven-year cycle. so six, seven-year cycle black will be in and we'll move on i don't know, mexican, chinese. >> where did you get the title of your book. >> the title of the book is a piece i did talking about black history month. jon couldn't understand why i

wasn't crazy about it. john, 28 days of tribute to make up of 400 years of oppressions i'd rather we got casinos and i thought it would make an interesting title for a book. >> you spend a lot of time writing to the naacp. why is that? the book is a fake collection of op-eds and fake radio interviews and that sort of thing and the first op-ed i suggest changing the name of african-american to chocolate. and there are a number of letters to the naacp where i'm trying to convince them and get it to the chocolate train and i wore chocolate today in honor of that. >> what's the impetus behind that campaign? well, you know, my feeling was that african-american was just finished. it was done, you know, and black people we change our name more than porn stars. we really do.

it's been colored, negro, black of a ro-american. it was afro-american. we were named after a hairstyle. and americans of african descent and african-american. and when i think african, it's hot. hot, i might get malaria and something might eat me. that's what i think of. and brothers who speak french and i feel like if i want to be around brothers i can't understand in an unbearably hot area where my ancestors roamed, i'll go to the check cashing place. let's move on to the 21st century and that's why i came up with chocolate. 'cause who doesn't like chocolate? >> how did you come up with your title on the daily show, senior black correspondent? >> senior black correspondent was d.j. jabberbone who was head writer and time you're on the

daily show the first thing you think of steve cobert who was the best ever. and you're trying to find what your own thing is. i was going to do a bit that finally you had a black correspondent and d.j. thought it would be funny to be the senior black correspondent, you know, we really own that title and it just kind of took off from there. >> what were you doing prior "the daily show"? >> guest: it marked a turn before performing. i was known mainly as a writer and producer for a number of years. the thing that probablyxs( was most well-known was the bernie mac show which i created and executive produced and i come three years from "the office" and i came off of being a stand-up comic and i stumbled into "the daily show" i guess you could say. >> how often do you appear?

>> guest: it's one or twice a month and because of reruns and cable and the internet it seems like i'm on a lot more than i am. i give the allusion that i'm on the show more. >> host: we're going to put the numbers up on the screen if you would like to chat withw)ry wilmore. here's your chance. you're watching book tv live from the "los angeles times" festival of books. from african-americans, what kind of reaction do you get from your book? >> guest: well, the thing about -- well, i've gotten great reaction from people who have read it and know it. most people who know me know my work from "the daily show." only three black people total watch "the daily show" so there's a small audience but i think -- in all seriousness there hasn't been much what you call black satire out there, you

know, and this is kind of -- a lot of blacks come me this is a refreshing take on a lot of issues that we don't always see so that makes me feel about. >> host: refreshing take, text messages from a birmingham jail. >> guest: yes that's correct. >> host: are you walking on sacred ground here? >> guest: i don't think so. that was one of the first titles that came to my head when i was thinking about doing a piece. it was the hardest ones to heat but it hit right in the middle of the target zone in terms of the satirical title. >> host: larry wilmore is our guest and we're on the c-span bus. first call comes from buffalo, new york. go ahead, buffalo. >> caller: hello, larry. how are you? >> guest: good. >> caller: when i see barack obama was probably going to become president i got pretty

serious about calling c-span requesting that he address the issue of reparations for the slave sentence. how do you feel about that personally? >> guest: in the book i have a chapter called give us the superdome where i insist that, you know, a lot of people that reparations and the argument is that slavery happened so long ago, you know, and i understand that argument, you know. many people today have nothing to do with slavery and we were supposed to get 40 acres and a mule. we didn't get it. the statute of limitations, i get that. in the book i argue well, there have been more recent transgressions that maybe you could get reparations like hurricane katrina. give us the superdome so you connect things so you feel can get reparations and go for it. >> caller: larry, i like to see you on the "jon stewart show"

you're a real kick. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: it's been estimated that when michael jordan throughout his career -- at the end of his career every time his ball went through the basket he made $360,000. >> guest: really. >> caller: and a teacher makes about $40,000 a year. i think our priorities are screwed up. you take a look at the mexicans they're very family-oriented. they get together and they buy a business or they share -- the people they thrive because they are so family-oriented. it seems the black people -- you know, because of the black male has been leaving the children, having the black woman be the mother and i just think stars like you or other famous black people should be helping out the

black community by loaning people money for businesses and such. i think that would be an excellent way for the blacks returning things to their community. thank you. >> host: larry wilmore. >> guest: apparently, you want me to be fannie mae and freddie mac. i'm not sure it's the right business. it sounds like you're making the point what a lot of socialists kind of the destruction through the black male ego through slavery and jim crow and some of the reasons why the black female had to kind of be dominant in the household and some of that is still in the household and some are the things that pop up especially in impoverished areas. i think the best thing is to be a role model to my own kids. if everybody was that then we'd be a lot better off. >> host: what do you think when a white caller from jackson, wyoming, says the black people?

>> guest: the black people? that's okay. i'm not mad at wyoming. i think dick cheney is from wyoming if i'm not mistaken. i have nothing but love for jackson, wyoming. >> host: the caller called the black community. is there such a thing? >> guest: there is a black community. it is a planned community kind of like irvine, california. and there's a waiting list to get in the black community nowadays that obama is president. but it's very nice. it's very nice. >> host: stanleytown, virginia. go ahead. >> caller: yes. i'd like to ask you about your previous career "in living colors" and the concepts you all came up with. it was still revolutionary. if i could get the show now i'd still watch it. thank you. >> guest: i really appreciate it. thank you for that call.

all credit goes to keean ivory wayans he did a film i'm going to get ya suca. he brought the hip hop culture in the living room. before you had black humor and that sort of thing but you didn't have the satirical edge that it had with the hip hop culture, the dancing and the fly girls and all that stuff. there's an excitement about the show that i felt at the time and i love watching the reruns and that kind of thing but i do miss "in living color." >> host: are you married? >> guest: yes, i am. and i have two children john and lauren. >> host: how old are they? >> guest: 12 and 10. >> host: are you based here in l.a.? >> guest: yes, i live in the pasadena area and i fly to new york when i do "the daily show." >> host: next call, utah. >> caller: yeah, i'm just enjoying so much all of this conversation and all people's

perceptions. as a transplanted philadelphian there are two or three chocolate people in the wholetown. i think a lot of the white people really >> guest: vanilla, vanilla. >> caller: vanilla, thank you. they're jealous of the chocolate people because you all have it together and we're sort of disconnected from each other. but i wanted to thank you for your body of work, for your humor, for the way you approach things. you are a beautiful human being. thank you very much. >> guest: i want to be on c-span every day of the week from now on. and i'd like vanilla is a very underrated flavor. it goes with chocolate very well, in fact. >> host: you've been behind the scenes a lot in your work and all of a sudden you're not behind the scenes anymore and you've got a book out there. >> guest: right. >> host: you come across as rather shy. >> guest: yes. >> host: are you? >> guest: i was very, very shy growing up, extremely shy. so i still have some of that in me.

when i did stand-up comedy i started as a performer. after the show i'd usually be in the back of the room and that sort of thing. so i still, you know, have -- i'm sure there's still some of that in there but i love performing a lot. >> host: what is a shetland negro. >> guest: a shetland negro. that's a very important issue. this is a person who like a gary coleman or webster. they don't grow much past a point. and in the book i say that is the way to save the sitcom because american loved the shetland negro like gary coleman and webster. bring back the shetland negro. that is probably the most inappropriate title. >> host: philadelphia, you're on with larry wilmore. please go ahead. >> caller: larry, i'm a big fan. i have a couple of questions.

first of all, in europe, jews are often referred to as french jews or german jews, do you feel like african-americans in the united states should be referred to as american africans instead of this subcategory of african-american? >> guest: or you could have georgia blacks or florida african-americans. regionalize it. >> caller: you could do that. >> guest: california chocolate. >> caller: my question is, clearly your involvement with "the daily show" you're a politically interested person. are you worried about barack obama's presidency? i mean, it has brought us together to a coherent american identity of multiculturalism but if his presidency fails and if he's forced into capitulation to

special interests and the financial mess, you know, what happens then? and what are your feelings about that? >> guest: well, on the comedy side, i would say -- i wouldn't worry too much about change for barack. just keep giving me the hope. and don't reduce it to glimmer of hope. i don't want glimmer of hope. i want hope. and on the serious side, i think the impact of barack obama will be felt more in the younger generation. where there won't be a question that a black man can lead he something, can be in charge of a country. when i was a kid, a black couldn't even be a quarterback in the nfl. i mean, you talk about image issues that america had with blacks as leaders. but it'll be just a given for the younger generation. it won't even be a question that a black can lead at that high of >> host: have you met president obama? >> guest: no, i never have. although, i was on a show -- i was on a "the daily show" that he was appearing on and i heard he was on satellite watching the show and was laughing at the bit

that i did and then i think i did a joke may have been a little too close -- >> host: what was the joke. >> guest: god, i can't remember what it was. but i read a blog where someone was watching the feed, someone with obama and said that he was really laughing at the bit and then got kind of a little quiet. i think i talked about his reverend or something. but i heard he enjoyed it for the most part. >> host: well, it's coming up on 100 days, a lot of media coverage of the first 100 days. what's your impression of t> guest: so far so good. you know, he had that kind of scary amazon book moment with hugo chavez. didn't want to be in his book club, it looked like. but it's a bit overwhelming. there's so much going on. i can't remember any first 100 days when there was such a big agenda of things to do. you know, so, you know, i don't know how he's handling it. i think michelle is a little upset that she has to take care of that dog.

i don't think she's too happy about that. i want to see what's going to happen with the mother-in-law that's living with them. you get to be president and the most important man in the world and you have your mother-in-law living with you.[s good move, barack. >> host: boca raton, florida. hi. >> caller: i just want to say you're a very funny man. as a vanilla man talking to a chocolate man i enjoy watching you. >> guest: thank you. i appreciate it. >> caller: on a serious note, what do you think the position or the status of a jesse jackson right now compared to what we of the election of mr. obama's president? do you think jesse jackson is envious of him, angry about him or happy about him, his election, because does he -- is jesse considered an -- and i'm respectful, still a chocolate leader? >> guest: right. i understand. it could be a combination of all three. you never know.

i mean, he was certainly that shot of him crying, you know, on election night was pretty powerful. but jesse, you know, he's not so much your lead-off batter. he's more like a third coach, probably giving signals and that kind of thing. probably wanting to be in the gang but jesse's legacy really will be solid. he was the first viable candidate. he really opened the door and paved the way, i think, for obama. so i think his legacy is pretty solid in that regard. but it's got to be someone who's at the front of the movement or the spotlight. keep in mind, jesse had martin luther king's blood on him in that balcony. he's seen a lot in his lifetime. let alone being -- feeling like he's very close to the white house. so i think there's a myriad of emotions that probably go through his body but to give him credit, i think he's mostly proud of the fact that there is, you know, an african-american in the white house.

>> host: where did you grow up? >> guest: i grew up in los angeles. well, in pomona. my family is from chicago. >> host: and what did your folks do? >> guest: my father was a probation officer growing up. my mom was an educator and my father went back to school and became a doctor. >> host: what do you remember most about your child? >> guest: oh, god where do we start? boy, the thing i remember most is my brother and i just kind of making each other laugh all the time. you know, my parents divorced when i was pretty young. and they kind of fought a lot, too, and i think my brother and i probably softened the blow by making each other laugh and making fun of everybody. and it seemed like we had so many characters in our lives growing up that everybody was a character. and we had so much fun making fun of all that stuff. that's what i remember the most is spending time with my brother and laughing about a lot of things. >> host: and on a more serious note, do you remember racism in

your youth? >> guest: oh, absolutely, very much so. you know, it's just so -- it was so different back then. i was born in 1961, you know, so the watts riot happened and i remember martin luther king being shot as the very first thing that said. i could remember being, you know, treated a certain way and not understanding why and that sort of thing. i remember my mother writing a check at a department store and they put an n on it, things like that. at the same time, i feel very, very fortunate very good friends white, black -- i grew up in a big mexican -- a big -- i guess we should say heavy latino area and i had a lot of different friends, you know? and i felt that always kind of helped me. i didn't grow up in one culture, i guess, you could say. so i always treated racism as

kind of angst of individuals as being a big institutional personal level. >> host: do we in your view in the united states subgroup ourselves too much? >> guest: i think so. personal i think so. some of it really makes me laugh. i love the fact that we spend all these years trying to desegregate and you go to your college dorms and you have your white dorms and black dorms people go where they understand it. it's funny you fight for all those things and we like it that. >> host: don't tas me bro if it i'm a cop and i'm a brother and they let me have a taser, sorry, bro i'm tasing you. >> guest: i love the way you had brother. that's very authentic. very good. >> host: laguna beach, you're on the phone with larry willmore.

>> caller: it's a beautiful day killing time waiting for the dodger game. first off let me say i'm an absolute addict of book tv. and it kind of goes to my original point for calling asking larry who -- you got good stuff out there. good shtick. i've within watching it on "the daily show." do you think there's a saturation point -- like you can't sprint forever, right? when it comes to the other media outlets like msnbc or fox on the dark side or whatever, it's so darn predictable what you're going to get. i find myself after the campaign of going through the two years, you know, and the build up to it and finally the victory, you know, what? i just get tired of -- i get tired of the -- of the extreme right or the extreme left. i'm tired of fighting. now i just kind of want to let it ride.

have a margarita and sit by the beach here, you know? >> guest: sounds good to me. i don't have an issue with that. you know, it's funny that there is that -- it feels very polarized today, politics, in a way that it hasn't probably felt since the '60s. i was too young to feel it like that. but i think if there's going to be a viable third-party, i think it will be right down the middle. i don't think it will be a fringe party. it will be a party right down the middle that's going to have a lot of people who have issues on both sides, but are passionate about being in the middle. >> host: what are your politics? >> guest: i'm very politics about being on the fence. that's where the truth is to me in the middle. look, when you play darts who do you aim for in the right or the left, i don't think so. you aim for the middle. >> host: washington, d.c., please go ahead. >> caller: hisokdmnyy -- hi, you? x fan of your program,

"the daily show." i wondered the original name of egypt was kemmit and they never enslaved anybody. they were the most advanced people on the planet. check your history, bro. thank you. >> guest: okay. great. thank you. i love history. that's fantastic. >> host: angry black church guy. >> guest: yes, the angry black church guy was written because i felt obama -- you know the whole reverend wright thing i think people were upset because obama didn't seem as angry of his church. it didn't match of the to the anger of the children and it's like newton law, huey p. not isaac. so i give kind of a guide to angry black churches so you can choose the right church that has the correct level of anger to miss you. >> host: do you miss bernie mac? >> guest: very much so.

doing the bernie mac show. i never imagined he would be the amazing actor it was. doing stand-up it gave me the idea to do the show and spending time with him and getting to know him and the kind of character he was very devilish sense of humor, you know, but very human, you know, and that's the stuff we really wanted to dramatize were human stories. you know when i pitched a show to bernie, bernie this is children and terrorists. i don't negotiate with terrorists. and he got it immediately. and he said, absolutely. >> host: and that was based a lot on his own life? >> guest: yeah, it was based on the joke from his act where he talked about taking care of the kids. and i believe you should be able to hit them in the stomach or the throat. hitting a kid in the throat. and it was one of the funniest things i saw. and i thought, boy, that would make the good basis for a television show to dramatize, you know, these feelings and that's basically what i pitched

to bernie. >> host: that's probably a good segue into political correctness. >> guest: yes. >> host: what are your thoughts on that? >> guest: hopefully, it's on its way out. i don't understand it to be honest with you. i think it's a movement that started on the left, actually, where i think -- i think a lot of political correctness was just the way society was until the '60s and then a lot of barriers went down. and then it felt like it came back because people needed some barriers or something, you know, you had to be afraid of offending people. i want to bring offending people back. that's all i'm saying. >> host: here's the book, i'd rather we'd got casinos. do you got another one ready? >> guest: no, but i may do a black thoughts calendar. something like that have a random thought for a day. that might be a