new york city. to find out about any of the barnes and noble stores around the country visit bn.com at the top of the page. >> why this subject? why rightabout jews and money? why rightabout an age-old stereotypes? because it persists. because it is there. ..

>> the first being the charge of deicide, the charge that the jews and not the romans killed jesus. that became a major legitimize their that enabled the teaching of contempt that was the basic foundation for so much of western anti-semitism. it was the foundation of the inquisition. it was the foundation of expulsion, and it made it reasonable and rational. well, the other pillar at that time was the pillar relating sold jesus out and why. and so the second pillar dealt with the issue of money, jews

and money. jesus was not sold out by judas for theology, philosophy, ideology. we are told and talked he seldom out for 30 pieces of silver. and so throughout western civilization the elements of anti-semitism were routed in both elements and in groups and it grew and became more and more legitimate. >> for the next three hours finalists for the 2010 national book critics' award. first two books in the nonfiction category. from the atlanta history center isabel wilkerson, author of "the warmth of other suns" talks about the great migration from 1915-1970. about 6 million african-americans migrated out of the south to settle in the

north and west. from the texas book festival in austin sc when discusses empire of the summer moon about the comanche indians. at 2:00 p.m. a finalist from the biography category, into one describing the life of a lie-detector who died in 1933 and the cultural impact of charlie chan, the fictional character who was based fund is live. >> coming up isabel wilkerson presents the history of the great migration when approximately 6 million african-americans migrated to northern and western states from the south from 1915-1970. recounts the many reasons people have for leaving the south, the difficult journey that many in toward, and the two graphical shifts in population due to the migration. to discuss her book at the atlanta history center. this is an hour and ten minutes.

[applauding] >> thank you so much. i am just giddy with all of the wonderful reviews and reception that the book has received. i have waited 15 years for this moment. that is a very long time. i am so honored and humbled to be here. i have spent so long steeped in the history of the great migration. for a while i was stuck in 1947 and thought i would never get out. [laughter] for the record, just to be able to clarify what it is that the book is about, the great migration was the biggest under reported story of the 20th century. it started in 1915 and did not end until the 1970's. all along the way people were thinking it must be over, and in the world or one, and of world

war ii. no one told the people that. they kept coming. it carried away some 6 million african americans to all points north and west to escape the seven caste system known as jim-crow in search of the want of other signs. it was an un recognized immigration within their own country. it was fast, leaderless, the first step to the nation's seventh class ever taking without asking. i spent so many years ever -- studying this that it is so fitting that i am here in georgia in atlanta of all places giving our first public talk but the book that is taken so much adult life. i came because of reasons unrelated to the book and they realized i needed to be here. that did not know i needed to be here, but i did. i needed to be able to see chameleons, which i thought were

roses blooming in january. and needed to see crape myrtles and blends that lasted forever, the designees would smell the indescribably beautiful in january. i needed tests understand what the people left to understand the great sacrifice that they made by moving to the north and west. this book was meant to be, and i could not rest until it was completed. there are many, many people who thought it would never be done. in fact, ever since this war led has begun there have been so many people who said, you know, i wondered if you ever would finish this. i hope that you would and believed he might, but i'd just was not certain. and so i am so delighted and maybe more relieved than anything else to be able to stand here and say that it is done. the reviews have been astounding, and i am so grateful for them. i am grateful for the response, but i am grateful that my mother

is here to see this day. [applauding] it is so emotional for me to be here because my roots run deep in georgia, very deep, deeper than most people who even live here because you hardly ever find anybody who is actually from atlanta. my great grandmother, whom we believe to have been born a slave grew up in murietta in cobb county. my grandmother grew up also in murietta, and she was a master gardener. when i got here to georgia something took over me. i could never grow anything anywhere before i got here to georgia. i could not grow wheat. i got here and something inside of me just took over. she used to grow american beauty

roses that were the size of saucers that people wanted to buy for a dollar apiece back in the 30's and '40's, which is astounding. a beautiful gardner. and i got here i have this inexplicable urge to start digging in the soil. i have planted almost every quarter inch of my house in the highlands as a result of this. i even can grow the most difficult things, daphne's, which apparently people say you have to plan five in order to get one. one is not even planted, it is in the pot and it is still living, which is astounding to me. my grandmother has come through to me here. this is a special and spiritual place to me, and it was the only place i could have written this book. i started the book in the north by talking to over 1200 people. i stopped counting after 1200 people who had migrated from the south to the north, new york, chicago, and los angeles. i met them there.

i have gotten this exile perspective. i had done in this perspective of the hurt, aggrieved, embittered, turning once back on the south perspective. i needed to be here in order to see what they left. by living year it gave me a sense of the enormity of the sacrifice that they made by leaving all that they knew and the people and the family, the soil, the land, the plants, the things that made them. to leave all of that for a place they've never seen in hopes for something better. it was also here in georgia decades before i was done -- board that the seeds about this book were sound. i want to tell you a little bit about that. the south was a very different place from the time when michael, my mother's big brother left georgia, the first and my immediate family, our lineage to do so, in the middle of a bleak

era in american history. it was a depression, and jim crow was the law of the land in the south. let me share with you exactly what that felt like and why it was a tragedy for everyone black and white to live under it. these are the facts of life. from the 1890's to the 1960's in the american south it is hard to believe now, but these of the facts of their lives. we are talking about a caste system that was in force during a lifetime of many americans still alive today, a lifetime of many people in the room with us tonight. there were days when whites could go to amusement parks and a day when blacks could go. if they were permitted at all. like elevators and colored elevators committing the freight elevators in the back right here in atlanta. there were white ambulances and

black ambulances to ferry the sick. white hearses and black hearse is for those who did not survive whatever was wrong with them. there were white breaking runs and colored waiting rooms and any conceivable place that a person might have to wait for something from the bus depot to the doctor's office. an interesting story ran in the wall street journal in 1958, and it describes a new segregated bus station that had just gone up in jacksonville, florida. it had two of everything, including to segregated cocktail lounges. less the races brush elbows over a martini. there was a colored window at the post office in pensacola, florida. white and colored telephone booths and oklahoma, a state we don't even consider to be the south, but in many respects it

is. white and colored people went to separate windows to get the license plates in indiana -- mississippi. separate tellers to make their deposits at the first national bank here in atlanta. taxicab's with colored people and taxi cabs with white people in jacksonville, birmingham, atlanta, and the entire state of mississippi. kelli people had to be off the streets and out of the city limits by 8:00 p.m. in palm beach and in miami beach. it was against the law for a colored person in a white person to play checkers together in birmingham. at saloon's here in atlanta the bars were segregated. whites drag on stools at one end of the bar and blacks on stools at the other end. the city of la even that. resulting in white only and colored only silence. there were white parking spaces

and colored parking spaces in calhoun, mississippi. when north carolina court house, even though white bible and a black bible. what this meant was that people who might have gotten along famously had it not been for the color of their skin never got the chance to know one another, to truly know one another. one of the south's greatest resources, its people and particularly the black people whose forebears had helped build the south without pay did not get to be their fullest cells. my mother grew up in round georgia once said that there was a really nice white lady who brought laundry to my grandmother. they used to have -- she used to have a wonderful time talking with my grandmother. they got along so well that they might have been the best of friends in another time and place.

the caste system of jim crow meant that they both knew that they could only take it so far. they are both dead, it is too late. what a shame and what a loss to both of them. you think of it. millions of other people who lost out on getting to know when it's other. it is a lesson to all of us to not let that be a barrier. what propelled my uncle who i mentioned earlier to leave georgia in the 1930's and plant a seed for this book long before i was. >> reporter: he was a teenager working for the head of an insurance company in rome, georgia. he drove the man around in his big car and ran errands for amps. it was a good job, believed to be a good job for a black teenager in a jim crow south. he spent many hours with the man driving him to miami for business trips and felt comfortable and at ease within. one day he was cleaning up the man's office.

he opened the door. in it he saw some fabric, and he unfurl that. it was a white robe and head. he went home that night and told his parents and bill sister that he was leaving georgia. he will go to detroit and work for chrysler like a cousin of their stead. years later my mother just out of college would board the silver comet to washington d.c. where she would get a job and the government and later become a teacher. she would meet and marry it to spearman from petersburg, virginia who had migrated to washington, too. that is where i come and. i would not be standing here today if it not war for the great migration because i would not exist, which is a classic american story because all of us in some way or another are descended from people, someone in our past who took a great leap of faith to leave a place,

the only place they had never known whether it was coming across the atlantic or across the pacific ocean with the rio grande in hopes for something better, maybe not for themselves, but for their children. it is that amalgamation of coming together of multiple people who might have never met otherwise that created america as we know it because many of our forebears would never have met if they had not made that leap of faith. in some ways that is what this book is about. my parents would not have met had it not been for this great migration. in fact the majority of african-americans that you might be in the north or west are actually descended from people who did this very thing, migrated from the north -- from the south to the north. in fact, many of the people you might need in the south have relatives in a very particular place that can be very, very much predicted to reach relatives in the north or west

because of the migration being so beautifully predictable and organized around the train lines and bus lines and roads that took him there. we all have so much more in common than we have been led to believe. the great migration ultimately became a redistribution of a good portion of an end tire people inside the borders of our own country. at the beginning of the twentieth century 90% of all african-americans living in the south, by the end of the great migration in 1970 nearly half were living outside the south. that means the north and west. there are now, for example, more black people living in the city of chicago than in the entire state of mississippi from which is where most of them came from to begin with. that is astounding. as for the books, which took me 15 years, i was really greatly

informed by the grapes of wrath. the grapes of wrath was written by john steinbeck and published in 1939. that was really right in the middle of the great migration. the grapes of wrath was, of course, about the dust bowl migration of people from oklahoma and arkansas to california. there were 300,000 people who participated in the migration, and it was a massive and important watershed event in american history. however, the great migration involve 6 million people and was occurring at the exact same time. yet there was no grapes of wrath for this great migration. i often wondered why that was the case. i also knew very little about my own family's migration. i grew up in washington surrounded by people who were from north carolina, south carolina, georgia, virginia who had migrated to washington.

all of my parents' friends or from those places. they all ate the same seven feared, grits, scrabble, whatever it might have been. they broke into southern accents when they get together. they were extremely ambitious and competitive about what their children were doing. this parent might have been sending their child to catholic school. my mother sent me across town to an integrated school. make sure you do not stop for anyone else to pick anyone else up. but could not see me. it looked like an empty cab. she made sure to get the number to it make sure i was brought home safely. i befriended other immigrant children, classmates from chile, ecuador, finland, nepal, and salvador. an integrated school that my mother sent me too.

the poet from emory looking for a way to describe me or people like me called me as sevener once removed. i really liked that. though i was surrounded by the markers of the great migration nobody ever talked about it, called it that. nobody ever said, i came up in the great migration. remember when the great migration started? these are individual decisions made by individual people for a particular reason that was special to them, but all driven in some ways by the essential caste system that they were all seeking to escape. there might have been a particular thing that was sitting one individual of that was different from another person. people didn't view themselves as part of some large event. but that is what is so inspiring to me. this is about the power of the individual to change so much, change it so much in their own

individual life and to change so much in the aggregate in the country as a whole. you don't necessarily need to be looking to a leader or a savior or hero. we all have that within ourselves, which is the beauty of this entire movement. they don't see themselves as part of any great movement. they make a decision that was best with themselves and their family, and that is the power of the individual. now, when i began writing this book i decided that i was not going to write about my own family or any one particular family. the reason for that was a wanted to show the breadth and scope of this migration. it was not one person or one stream. it was multiple streams, three strains of this great migration. people who went up the east coast from georgia, florida, the carolinas, and virginia up to washington, philadelphia, new york, and boston. that was the east coast. there was the millstream along

the country's wine, the mississippi which to people from mississippi and arkansas and also parts of alabama to the midwest, chicago, detroit, cleveland. then there was the west coast migration which is probably the least known of them all which is one of the great delights of not being -- might be able to work on this book. that was a migration from louisiana and texas to california and the entire west coast. and so does migration was not a haphazard unfurling of people searching for better they might land. it was as organized and predictable as the fact that if you go to minnesota you run into a lot of people from scandinavia. now, to find these people i went everywhere i could, everywhere that i could think of where senior citizens who might have

left the south would be. i went everywhere i could think of, new york, chicago, los angeles, high-school reunions, quilting clubs, catholic churches, means a retired postal workers, bus charters, transit workers. i went to various estate clubs for all of the seven states. georgia was represented in detroit and cleveland. our individual clubs for of a tiny towns in mississippi represented in chicago. and in los angeles there is a lake charles louisiana club, the monroe, louisiana club.

multiple new warrants clubs because it is so big and there are many ways that people, the catholics and baptists, multiple texas clubs, as you can imagine. even in new york there are churches where everyone is from south carolina. i interviewed more than 1200 people. i just generally stopped counting after 1200. over the 18 months that i took to begin what i call a casting call, a kind of auditioned for the people who will ultimately be the protagonists in this book. there are many interesting things that happened along the road to finding the people. i would show up at some of the senior centers and find that many people wanted to talk. lots of people wanted to talk. some people were more interested in the sirloin being served at the time. there were all kinds of things that i ran into. in one case i remember i would often be part of the program.

i would have to get on the list. a lot of organizing and planning before i could begin speaking. at one senior center in los angeles i was on the program but following someone from the l.a. county extension service. that person when he came to speak to the group, i'm anxious waiting to talk to these people. he made an announcement to of the seniors. he said i'm here passing up brochures as a warning. we are getting reports of unscrupulous people going to seniors and asking them all kinds of questions, personal questions about their lives. the asking where they came from, where they were born, what kind of work they did, if they were retired, how many children they had, did they on their home, how did they find their home. pretty much of the things i wanted to know.

and it was after he sat down that it was my turn to go up and speak. i had to save basically why i'm here writing a story -- writing a book rather about the great migration. i had to make a transition from being a newspaper reporter to an author. that is a transition that took many years. in any case i had to make the announcement that i was your writing a book about the great migration and that if he migrated from louisiana or texas between these years and were part of a major moment in history, i would like to talk to you about how you got here. we know there was not one person who seemed to listen to the man from the l.a. county extension service. i had no trouble little. i got through that one. i settled ultimately on three people. three amazing people, characters and to themselves, people who could have been books and to

themselves. they were reported as such. there are amazing characters. one november was item a -- ida mae gladney, a sharecropper's wife who was terrible at picking cotton, awful. you don't think about someone being good or bad at it, but she was batted. it she hated it. her family ended up leaving mississippi in the 1930's. a cousin was nearly beaten to death for a 50 did not comment. after that her husband said this is the last crop year making. the second person was george starling, a college boy who had touched leave school when the money ran out because the colored college said he was going to was hours away from where he lived. the state's school in central florida did not admit college students. he had to go back to picking

oranges and grapefruit like most everyone else in this small town. he grew incensed that the perils of the job and the low wages that came from those perils. in order to climb into trees they often had to espies letters together and go up 30 or 40 feet into these large trees in order to block the offer from the tree. they would be paid ten or $0.12 a box. he was smart enough to be able to read the papers. there was no hiding. one of the things about the reporting, it was actually did not as difficult to get information about the things i've described to you here. the newspapers were very open. there was not any embarrassment about the disparities in the way people were treated. there was open this. it was in the papers that these boxes of fruit that were being sold for ten or $0.12 a box or

actually going for several dollars a box in the open market. people were very aware of the disparity between what they were getting and what was going on of the open market. he began organizing to demand higher wages. well, we aren't going to pick it unless you pay us another $0.2 a box. it seems simple enough. that was not the acceptable. and so one day a friend came up to him. he said, you have been so good to me help me figure out the numbers because a lot of people could not read, and he was one of the few people going to school. i overheard them talking in the garage the other day about planning something to do to you. they were going to take you out to blackwater creek and there were going to have a lynching party for you.

he left monroe because he could practice medicine where he had been a captain but could not practice in his own home town hospital and monroe, louisiana. he said out on a treacherous journey across the desert by himself to get to california. he was not able to stop passed to the state of texas. as he had expected. he had to drive the full length of multiple states without rest because nobody told him that jim crow was not just in the south, but all through the west. it was a journey that i attempted to recreate in order to experience what he had experienced. it was all part of the research

that i did for this book. you can begin to see why it took 15 years. i wanted to know what it was like to drive to the desert without sleep along the same route that he had taken, have your fingers swell up and take, your eyelids grew heavy from exhaustion in the pits black of night. my parents road with me. it was all my father could do to take the wheel from may but, but i would not let him because i told him i must do this myself. i must experience what he did. dr. foster did not have anyone in the car. no one could have relieved some of the burden. tow was determined to try to do it. i told my parents up front that i was going to be doing all of the driving. on the hair pin curve my mother said, you know, he must've been

about ready to cry right in here probst. by the time we get to yuma, ariz., they insisted that we stopped. they couldn't take it anymore. it made me appreciate the despair in must've felt because he did not have that source says i did. i want to say a little bit about the effect of the great migration before opening up to questions that he may have. there are many ways to look at the great migration. one of them is that there is so much that they ended up leaving and there is some months that they took with them. they ended up transplanting

seven culture when they left. they took the blues and gospel and spiritual music with them to the north and created a whole new art forms which we now know as rhythm and blues, jazz, even hip-hop. there are so many people descended from the great migration. the list goes on and on. we will talk about a few things that absolutely would not exist without the great migration. motown would not exist without the great migration and all. i can't imagine. barry gordy, the founder of motown, his parents were born and raised in georgia. they decided to become a part of the great migration and chose to go to detroit with the train from their part of georgia went. there berry gordy was raised, and he decided as a young man he wanted to go into the music

industry. where did he get the talent for his new budding business? he chose his talent from the young people as renton who were also children of the great migration. many of the names we recognize, diana ross, aretha franklin, the jackson five, the jackson family as a whole, all of them were children who were born in the north to parents who had migrated from the south. therefore they created the opportunity for a whole new art form and company which has become almost the soundtrack of the toward his century motown. jazz, as we know it, is almost unfathomable what might have happened had there not been the great migration. miles davis was the child of parents who had come from arkansas, migrated to illinois, and that is where he was raised and became exposed to the music, the metabolism of the north and

began practicing and becoming a musician. felonious monk, his parents migrated from north carolina to new york when he was five years old. he get opportunities that he would not have gotten in tobacco country of north carolina. john coltrane left north carolina as well when he was 17, went to philadelphia where he got his first alto sax. what would have happened if he had never got mine? hard to imagine. and the three of them often got together. these other great legends of jazz. what would have happened without that? it's hard to fathom. they carried with them the migrant, the folkways, language, music, food of their seven birds and recreated these enclaves i have described to you. i interview people with collard greens growing in their backyards and oakland, oakland,

california. this is how far the transplantation occurs. i want to, i think, closed with two things. one is, what is it that they left? the enormity of the departure is hard to fathom on so many levels. spiritual, emotional, familial, geographical. in every way it was a departure that took great bravery. it is not simply moving to a new job or your job has relocated you. there were leaving a place to maybe never see it again, maybe never said that the kitchen table and have a cup of coffee with your mother as you might have before because it was so much more difficult to even get back in force. i am haunted by a story that my mother has told me about one of the things that she never saw or experience again after she left.

that was about my grandmother. my grandmother, as i said, was a master gardener, although she was not called fat. she lived for her garden and a crew everything. things that were so difficult to grow. but i agree things that would grow in georgia soil and are very happy. and never tried what she tried. one of the things that she grew was this plant called the night blooming cereus. how many of you prove that? is it not just the most gangly, fastest wharf and of a plan to? have seen pictures. what is the point? well, the point is that on a single night usually in the summer as kingly as it was, it had snake-like branches. is coils. so, on a particular night and then middle of the night when no

one would see it it unfroze its paddles and is a beautiful lily like plant. you must be awake at two in the morning on the day it decides to bloom in order to see it. apparently my grandmother lived for that moment. she watched this night blaming plant closely. when she knew it was time for it to blend she would tell everyone up and down the street by nine plummy series is about to bloom, you should come over tonight. so missed a man that poindexter and of these other women came to the house on a given street. they came at the appointed hour about midnight in order to watch this thing or wait for this thing to unopened, to open up. my mother said that she would have -- that was a day she could stay up late. they stood out on the porch with sweet tea and homemade ice cream and sat and waited for this to

blow. hours go by. finally it would begin to unfurl. it was said that if you look closy enough you could see t sus i re one ofioaphy, of bri riht, o hun i is whatnsfmatio. it turns out that when they left the south the south never really truly loved. they created communities of people from the old country. they made the same kind -- kind of grains and sweet potato pie. kansa the conclusion that there really are no other sons. the sun is within you. you are the sun. you find or make your happiness wherever you decide to plant yourself. sig you for listening, and i hope you enjoy the book.

[applauding] [applauding] >> was there any point when you said, i'm giving up? >> i have to say there were many difficult moments, particularly

when the people that i was writing about got sick. when i would arrive to los angeles and instead of going to the home of dr. foster, which us so love that had to go to the hospital. those are the difficult moments because i had grown to have such affection for them and they for may. you know, i am one of these people who never gives up. once i was into it was not going to let it go. if someone had told me it would take 15 years this would not exist. really i would never -- i'm glad i did not know. but. >> thank you so much for persevering. >> thank you. >> thanked. i have a quick question. i just started reading your book today. it is an amazing thing. i already love it and then looking for to using it in my hourglasses. i have a question about the people who remain behind. do you have any insight into what motivated people who

decided to stay in the south while so many people were leaving to go to other places? >> well, i think that there is a spirit of the venture and something about the immigrant spirit of the migrant heartburn. a lot of people, one of the things that runs true for a lot of the people that i interviewed for this book you did leave was that they felt for whatever reason that they would die if a state. i would not have lived if i stayed. you could say it in a spiritual way or in a factual way where someone is actually leaving on the heels of a threat of death. there was something that was happening to their spirit that would not allow them to stay. there is someone in the book, of course, one of the most well-known people that was actually the president, the longtime president of atlanta university. he decided to stay because he

actually believed, there was a belief, and an important one that there needed to be people here to stay to retain the culture that had been built over the decades by the five over centuries by the people who had been year. someone needs to stay here so that you have a place to come back to when you need to. that is a beautiful thought. >> hello. >> your book, i heard your interview with valerie jackson. while you were speaking thoughts just rang through my head. imi music educator and working on some projects, american history through the eyes of creative arts. that idea came from research that i did for my doctoral work on robert allen's expatriate composer from texas. when i saw i began to study at migration from taxes, his parents to come to berkeley,

california. a totally different mindset. he was a child prodigy is composer and pianist. the opportunities that were afforded to him in california were interesting, but that is another story. both of my parents are from mississippi. my dad is from jackson and mother from holly springs. they met in chicago. >> where would you be? >> yes. yes. and i always wondered. my mother, where she lived after -- well, she would always ask the owners of the building in her apartment if she could have a plot of land to plant her college greens, turn the greens, and onions until the day she died. she always had a plot of land to carry mississippi. and the third thing is, thank

you, for your document. >> thank you. >> it is a brilliant book. i finished it. i could not put it down. >> it has only been out three days. >> i could not stop reading it. some of the first part of it has some of the most gut-wrenching unbelievable episodes. frankly if he did not have the credentials that you have i would find them really hard to believe. how much of that were you aware of given you're protected opinion before you started the book connected that have any influence on your riding or desire to write the book? >> i appreciate your asking that question because in order to recreate what it was like to live in that era i had to read, as i told you, book a day. some of it was hard reading. very difficult reading.

a lot of it -- there was a lynching time in which to had to read about. it may be not very popular at dinner parties. as you might imagine. how was your day? well, i'm ready to tell the the stories which are not easy to tell. i think that the answer to your question is that it is necessary to understand the context, and it is our history, american history, not just southern history, but the united states of america. this is american history, and we must all deal with it also. as you know, there were not pleasant things going on in the north as well. there were some difficult bed outbursts that occurred in the north as well. but to point fingers at the south, no part of the country can point at any other part if

that gets to answer your question. i want to make sure i am answering it. >> how much of that did you know before you started? >> none of the. this is all coming from the reading. as i was saying before, this was not hidden history. this was covered in every major -- these things were covered in every major day's paper. probably one of the worst lynchings, the worst atrocities that i had ever heard of in my entire life. it is not easy reading. it is something that every american should know about. it happened in florida. just to give people a sense of it, it was a lynching. it was the way that the lynching happened. i'm not going to go into details of the physical part, but the fact is that the posse was so determined to find this man that the authorities found it impossible to keep him

protected. they had to transport and from pensacola to all over the panhandle. every time they get into a jail the posse was right on their tail and would get them. they eventually had to take into alabama across state lines. it was there that they came again. it is a sad moment in american history. i had never heard of him before. it is my belief that all americans need to confront the good and bad of what is happening within our borders. i did not know anything about that. >> i grew up here and i did not know the lot. thank you. >> thank you. >> i remember reading some time ago that a chicago defender who was very instrumental in a lot of the migration to chicago. did you find a thing?

>> absolutely. one of the first to document. the first reference to the migration is in the chicago defender from 1916 in which it is referring to a small party of african americans who left saying that it is not worth staying anymore essentially. it was just a paragraph. and so that was the first documented indication that there was a migration of foot. they were instrumental in that they brought news from the north that give hope to people who were here in an untenable situation. it was almost contraband because it was not legal to have the chicago defender. very threatening to the caste system here in the south. workers, the bedrock of the economic system being lured away to the north. you should know also that there

were tremendous efforts to keep black people from leaving the south and particularly in the early decade of the migration. trains would be stopped if there were black people on board. there were pulled off the train accused of vagrancy, having some unsettled that. some trains where there were many black people waiting to board a train, the plane was waived through so that people could not kid on the train. people were prevented from being able to buy tickets in order to leave. there were great efforts in the north to recruit. as you think of it, the south in that timeframe was in some ways bike an undeveloped country from their perspective. there was all this cheap labor that could be exploited. they send recruiters down. the african-americans who went in the first wave of migration did not go to their own. they were recruited north to pennsylvania, pittsburgh, chicago. when the north get wind of that

they began exacting extreme measures. one of them was at macon georgia, charging $25,000 for a licensing fee in order to recruit black people to the north. how many people in 1918 were going to pay to five who would do it now? you can imagine how that would have been dampening on the recruitment and if people were caught there would be charged. there were facing one year of hard labor. not pleasant in many seven prisons at that time. there were many things that we keep people from leaving which were implemented by the south. on highway 61. if there is anyone road or highway associated with the migration it is our 61.

obviously the migrants to california and washington did not use that highway. i have not read your book yet. if you treated extensively, i apologize. i would like to hear your thoughts on what seems to be the most important route north, at least from mississippi and alabama. >> i actually took highway 61 on a trip back to the south, back to mississippi with one of the characters, one of the protagonists, ida mae gladney, who was from mississippi, not the delta, which is where highway 61 goes, but from the hill country which is one reason i wanted to talk about that part of the state. it does not get much attention. this actually is callable of caught in that respect. this is what i picked with her in 1998. i keep it for good luck. what happened is we were driving back to where she was from. it was during the time.

i wanted to recreate and go back at the exact time that she laughed. it was cotton picking season. the left toward the end of it after they cleared the land. we stopped. we had been driving through. she saw this cotton. she said, let's stop the car and pick some. i said, are you sure it is okay? this con blogs a somebody. we can't just go. >> no, they aren't going to care what little bit we are going to take. she jumped out of the car and started picking. she hated picking, for some reason because she did not have to, she could not stop at that point. after seven and so we picked all of this continent came back with bouquets. they're actually quite beautiful. this was a livable. obviously that is a legendary rock road that has a great

meeting. very different from what it was at the time and now has catfish farms and a lot of the gambling casinos. it has changed quite a bit. it has also become more commercial. all of blues, efforts to capitalize on the blues history. one of the goals of the book was to expand the view of the migration beyond that of the mississippi delta to south side of chicago view. it was so much bigger than that. i wanted to be able to show that is a part of it, but it was an outward movement to all over the country. it changed the entire country. i wanted the great migration to take its rightful place in history as a major watershed in american history. so that was one of the goals of the book. >> yes. thank you so much for your presentation tonight. it was just powerful. a question.

do you address in the book that class distinction kind of -- yes, it is a classism that emerges from the migrant generation. a kind of better than the ones we left behind. the country's urban. >> i could hear the barbering. that is a very good question. what is she going to say to that. you know, i start the book by saying that at the beginning of this migration every african-american had a decision to make. every african-american. they had to think about all of the factors that they were facing and what they needed to do with their particular situation where there were going to leave or stay. it is my belief that it was

imperative that there be people who stay and people who go. there are people in the sunset in the north and west per the people who stayed that i fake help give them a kind of safety valve, a kind of leverage as they went forth to fight for civil rights and face those hoses. somebody needed to be here to fight that final battle. at think no one can say who is better and who is worse. each played a role. the people in the north provided the money. there were making more money. they could send money back to help support the effort. they were praying for them. they would offer them haven if they needed to. people needed to get away, they could. there was no place to go that there was not before the migration occurred. so there was a role for both

sides in this situation north and south. i don't think there is room for anyone to say one is better than the un. >> what i am dealing with this being a product of that migrant generation that you talked about. the parents come out of the carolinas, south carolina, north carolina, meet in washington d.c. that the whole load on the train. >> i get to that, too. >> keeper getting killed. and then end of world war two he came back and started a family life. the issue is, i can remember vividly, this nasty stain that stereotyping the children. the ones you just come up from the south. they are the bamut kids, the kids who are ignorant and backwards. that was a painful to one --

existence. it might have mellowed as the generations went on, but in the earlier generations that was some vicious, nasty kind of culture that was created. a lot of people could not overcome that.