>> that journey has had such a beating, has had such a significance that it's been kind of a major breakthrough. so as i was trying to get all of this and starting to try to

figure out, so what's the context, what i found was there was a lack of comprehensive work that could kind of capture all of that. and there are probably more books out on obama than any other president probably then lincoln. he's only two years in office and there's hundreds of books out on obama, wright? none of them framed this history, particularly the white house as the icon. for me that was sort of a way to say some things. and a way to try to get into the issue that i didn't see out there. yes, ma'am. >> in addition to reading your book, where did you get the resources to find out the information that you are talking about? >> great question. a lot of it was just kind of

digging into the archives and into the file, reading presidential biographies, for example. and i read just dozens of biographies of almost all of the presidents. i would say probably at least 30 biographies of presidents, and then that lead you down to other roads roads, you know, reading traditional black history to just kind of -- but a lot of it was just sort of what i got from people. so for example, i was at a party with, you all know clayton, the actor that was on the wire and the baltimore series? anyway, i was talking to clayton and i was telling them i'm doing this research. and he says make sure you write about playing time. and i'm like blind to? he said blind time.

he's really like an important guy in this. he's the first black person to it being invited to entertain at the white house. i was like okay, so when inside and did research on blind tom. it turns out that there's not a lot, but one woman has spent her entire academic career writing about blind tom. she wrote three books about blind tom. really important books, really good stuff. i track those down. two of them are out of print but i found that eventually. there's another book that has come out on blind tom. blind tom was born blind and his mother and father were both slaves. and when they were both sold to this one family called the greens, or the weekends, i hear all these different names. they sold into one family and they basically threw time and for a long the way because the

family said well, we don't see how we can really use him but bring him along. so while tom's mother and father were working, tom would be in the house kind of crawling around on the floor. and they treated him like the pet dog. they put food out and we just leave a. it turned out the family had a piano, and the children in the family took classical piano lessons. so one day the family is having dinner and hear the piano. and they go in there and it is tom who is like four years old jamming to the classics. and it turns out he's a musical prodigy who basically anything he hears he can reproduce musically. vocally as well. and so what does the family to? they exploit him. so they say well, blind tom, a great a whole career for him. and at the age of six, seven, eight, he is traveling around the country doing performances. and he's brilliant.

ultimately, he's considered one of the most brilliant composers of the 19th century. so this is an 1850s. 1859 he ends up in washington for some reason and he ends up getting invited to the white house to buchanan's white house, president began its white house and he doesn't propose. he's the first african-american of the people who are slaves, but the first invited african-american to perform at the white house. now, again, this is information that i was given just by having this discussion at a party. there's another example. i was like at the grocery store, and i talk to somebody, and they asked me if i ever heard of abrahamic bolton it and i'm like no. they said he's a crazy guy budget to talk to. it turns out bold and was the first african-american to be on the presidents secret service

detail. now, this is like a totally crazy story, because trained to was in chicago and ended up, when kennedy was elected, kennedy wanted to expand the service. he ended up entire to the secret service. so he was attached to the secret service office in chicago. so he's working one day and then kennedy comes to chicago. so they're going to provide security. and so as a place where they provide security, they put bolden in the basement next to the toilet. this is his assignment, to basically guard the oil while kennedy is doing whatever, right. so he's down there. as it turns at kennedy has to use the restroom. so he's standing there. he hears all this noise and he looks up at it comes comes kennedy of poker. so candy season at this, are you

chicago police? no, no. i'm secret service. would you want to work on secret service. this is kennedy. all of us. so bolden goes yeah, sounds like a good do. sigh couple months later bolden is sent to washington, d.c.. it turns out he secret service is racist to the core. the first day there someone leaves a noose on his desperate they call him the and word routinely. when they travel yesterday in segregated housing. this is secret service. so often point a kind of gets tired of it and says this is not going to work for me. i'm going back to chicago. so it goes back to chicago. now, 1963 comes around. kennedy gets assassinated. bolden stake on this this is that, one, those race is secret service people in washington had told him that they would not give their life for kennedy

because of what kerry was doing for the colored people. and he thought this was something the warren commission need to know. and that he also thought that there were two plots to kill kennedy. one in florida and one in chicago in october and novembe november 1963, but also the warren commission was not being told about. and so bolden start complaining to his superiors that we need to get this information. they are like stay out of this. and so bolden decides he's going to secretly give information to the warren commission. so it comes to washington, d.c.. his superiors find out about it. they ended up arresting bolden, charging him with taking bribes from some of the case. he goes to jail. first black secret service agent on a presidential veto goes to jail for three years. part of which is in a mental institution. right. i never knew this story.

most of us never knew this story. this is tied into bigger issues because part of the reason they went after bolden was because bolden would have exposed something called operation and world. this was a plot by john and robert kennedy to assassinate castro. in december 1963. and this information has come out because under the presidential document assassination papers released act a few years ago, a pfizer releasing papers on the kennedy assassination. and in those papers were detailed descriptions of operation -- operation am world. [inaudible] >> no, this happened after the bay of pigs. but it was a clerk plan by

kennedy's with individuals in cuba. in fact, individuals high up in the cuban government to carry out this assassination. and bolden would have exposed that if he had started talking about these other plots and move to the investigation in that direction. [inaudible] >> bolden wrote a book. it has a long title. he's been trying to basically get vindication. and again, with these news -- these new papers have come out a basically support his story now. he's not going to get the three years that he would to jail, and he was literally railroaded. we went to trial, the judges instruction to the jury was that basically this guy is guilty. you guys go deliberate. in the first father came back and said no. they had a second trial, the same judge, and they found him

guilty. didn't have a single blemish on his record at all to that point. and the people who testified against him recanted their stories, the whole thing, completely railroaded him into prison. [inaudible] >> how long did it take you to get your information? >> well, i usually say 57 years, because in many ways these are stories we had all our life that we had to kind of step back and the program from. but actually about two-and-a-half, three years of just kind of digging, digging, digging. and again, you know, the book started to grow and started to drive its own narrative. and so it was cut out of my control at a certain point. but it took about that long.

>> what is the book being sold? >> you can get online, of course. you can get it at city lights as well as amazon. and it's in the bookstores. we are on a second printing because we sold out in -- and so it will be available. and, unfortunately, i left my copy, i would bring with me in the car come rushing to get on the train. but you can see from the picture there what the book looks like. and the cover is from, it's from a very famous photographer named johnston who took pictures of many actually famous african-americans, booker t. washington, people like that. and this is from 1898. the easter egg hunt started under president hayes, and

initially it was on -- it was at the capitol, but then congressman started complaining about the kids tearing at the grass and wood so they moved into the white house. and it became one of the few venues by 1898 where you had integrated public events. and so that's what we have a black child and a white shell together, because outside of this easter egg hunt on the grass, in that period segregation was like pretty rigid. this was two years after the plessy v. ferguson decision, which basically said segregation is legal across the country. what anybody wants to implement it. and two years before the last black member of congress was going out of office and would not be another one for another three decades.

so are there any other questions or comments? yes. >> this is a personal question to you. i notice that you are wearing your wedding band. how did your family deal with you through the process of you gathering all your information? i assume and lot of time was taken up? >> yes and no. i tried very much to have balanced, right? and i have a 22 month old son, right? wrote during the time i was writing this he was really young. and so, you know, i had to make sure i took time within. it wasn't as much as -- he was demanding my time as much as i was demanding his time because it's like my gate, right? i thought i should be playing him when i was writing. unit, help them try to walk where i should be editing.

so, you try to balance. but, you know, it's demanding. at the end that you breathe a sigh every before you move to the next project. but, you know, that's what i do. and working closely with my editor, working with other people getting, you know, sending out to be able to really get comments and things like that, so in many ways a collective work as well. >> i have two quick things. one, on plessy v. ferguson, one of the things that surprising when i read it was that ferguson, i get mixed up, i think plessy was a fair skinned black man, and what i didn't know, looking back at that was a reason why that case is so poor because he was fair enough to

pass. >> right. >> that was when the whole thing about how much black blood, you know, the person has to be declared black and, therefore, inferior. that shocked me because in his own classrooms they talk about plessy v. ferguson but not the ugliness of the color and the controversy that still is with us. didn't last thing. what's your next project? >> well, i actually have several. i'm working on a book looking at the intersection of jazz and international politics. and it basically looks at how, over the century, of jazz how it's been appropriated and become meaningful in countries around the world. and i've been about to about 60 countries and is pretty much know what i've been where there

hasn't been a jazz culture of some sort. i was telling somebody the other day, and it's a whole other story, i was in north korea and the north korea marching band was playing some jazz that i think they're doing like the a train or something, right. and just kind of all over the world. so what does that mean? how are the processing that? do they see it as american music or do they see it as black music? do they see the roots of that? do they see it as blending in with their music, a challenge to the music, isn't hybrid, is a pure? you know, all of those kinds of questions. i tejay class on jazz in international relations so these are questions we explore in my class but there's not again a comprehensive work that allows us to see jazz, particularly using the concepts of international relations,

democratization, neoliberalism, capitalism, all those terms as ways to understand how jazz exists. and then i'm working on a book also looking at what my colleague and i called disaster capitalism, and its impact on marginalized communities in the united states. there's actually a lot of good data that has come out that really kind of draws the link that was happening locally in our communities really is embedded in these macroeconomic changes that are going on. this is one of the issues i think, for example, around egypt is mubarak needs to go and mubarak is needs to go. the political corruption of that system needs to change. but short of all of that, its ties to the global economic structure really are the restrictions that kind of at this point doesn't matter who is

in there. and unless those get addressed, then the reasons that many people are rebelling that they don't have opportunities, they are getting educated but there are no jobs available. those are really tied into a great degree to this global structure. and so, working on a book on that. and then i'm also looking at postracial blackness in asia come and look at kind of the experiences of people of african descent in a number of different asian countries in japan, n. korea and in china in particular. and i'm going to china later in your and i'm going to do research there. okay. no, no, no. , some of the stuff i'm working on. >> on your research concerning jazz i hope you take the time to read a periodical that was called freedom. >> yes. >> there's an article in by one of my favorite writers, written

in 1980 called will just survive. i think it is a must we'd. -- must read. in terms of postracial blackness, you may want to check out a site, there's a historian who specializes in the african presence in asia. i had the pleasure of meeting him when i was a young student at city college. you go to his website so i don't know what is going to be because he's always traveling. throughout the orient. rashid. and that is pretty much his research, the african presence in japan, china, et cetera. and hopefully maybe he will be done in the d.c. area because he's done a pretty often, too. >> thank you so much.

i wrote it down. i will actually follow up. >> hi. >> hi. >> my question is in what ways do you think you can project of this pieces of information to the younger african-american community? being that we are the up and coming and you have to pass it on so through a medium you think you can projected to? >> well, apparently i have to do facebook and -- [laughter] and the internet. and it's a different way of publishing now. but it's become inevitable, inescapable. and so i'm working with my publishers. they have put up a facebook internet pages, but i'm also thinking about this as well, in terms of this exact question you're asking, how do you begin

to reach through the mediums that are available now, the kind of audience that none of the show will pick up and it's not that bad a deal that people -- people are going to get information in different ways. how do you access that and break for us older guys kind of the most we have been countable in, but really become more modernized. and so i think, you know, i'm exploring that as much as i can. and i've been writing articles that have gone up on the internet. i don't really have a blog. i have things that have been blogged, but i don't really have a blog site itself. so i need to probably kind of work on that. but i'm counting on my 22 month old to deal with this. i have an ipad which he uses more than i do, right?

so i suspect a couple of years that i can just ask them, yeah, how do i get this to work. so that's the deal. but that's a question. and i think it needs to be avenues as well as for young people to have these kind of interchanges and interactions, kind of generationally. and we haven't been -- when i say we, particularly think of people my age, we haven't been all that conscious of creating these mechanisms and vehicles through which we can have these kind of interchanges, as institutions, not just sort of a one shot deal but as ways that are kind of ongoing, multi-crossgenerational dialogue and discussion and debate. >> i'd like to know a little bit about your journey as a writer. the seat of it, when it began, when did you find out that you were a writer and how did that

all come about? >> okay, i actually i don't think of myself as a writer. i write books but it don't think i'm a writer. i think toni morrison is a writer. you know, there are writers who the rest of us kind of bow down to. well, actually it started for me in the 1960s. i grew up in detroit, and in 1967 we had the race riot in detroit in july. and it actually started a few blocks from my house. and it was a really, really hot, like 95, 97 degrees, like midnight. really, really hot. and so everyone was out industry. so my mother, my sister and i, some neighbors and i walked a block or so down to the main avenue were basically all of the action was going on. we had been there for a very short while, and then this car

drives up. these two white guys get out, take out a shotgun and start firing. everybody gets shot except for me. my mother gets shot, my sister gets shot. fortunately, they both survive. unit, the injuries turned out not to be really, really serious. but this was like, i was like 12. now, in reaction to that, the city started building community centers and they really were trying to figure out how do we, like, not have this repeat itself again. now actually it happened the next year when martin luther king was killed and detroit was one of the cities that exploded. but what happened in the interim was that people who were my age were taken off the streets or put in these community centers, and we were learning to do all kinds of community services. one of which was putting out our community newsletter.

so this is were i returned to right, because the people were saying, your subject and verb should agree. you should make some sense in this newsletter. and so this is were i really began to say, oh, yeah, that stuff i was learning in school may be does have some utility. so that's were i really began to like to write. and i never thought of it as a profession, as a career at all. and when i was in undergrad, i majored in communications but not in journalism. but my children's teachers kept asking me to go into journalism and i kept refusing. so i've never in essence so myself a as a right of but i sem riding as my means to have an impact. if i could sing, i could go, oh, man, i wouldn't be standing here. but given, you know, my talent

is literacy so that's what i do. but that's my dream. and then there's basically not anytime when i haven't been writing, even though i've had many, many other kind of professions. yeah? >> how about barack obama wife, she -- [inaudible] >> i think the image of michelle obama and barack obama and the two girls is as powerful image anywhere in the world. because everyone knows they're basically -- that their integrity, their love of the

family, they're kind of body, just kind of jumps off the screen at you. right, and that i think is an embedded image that this country is needed for decades. that's the way in which the black family has been demonized throughout american history, the way black women have been demonized through black history, the way black children have been demonized through black history, this all kind of counters that there is not the kind of cosby romanticism, right? it really is this is a real family that had to go through a whole lot. and what they are going through, the kind of death threats and the things that they get that we are even privy to at their living with every single day, and will be living with basically the rest of their days, right? but their commitment, they are like we want to change this country, move in another

direction, that's the way it is. you know, i thought the best thing was little slush of speaking chinese you know, to the premier. that is just an amazing image. but it also is reflective of their parenting and their sense of education in the 21st century really is more than just what we thought it has been. it really is about thinking internationally and globally and preparing yourself. >> do you intend to do a documentary, or it is that -- >> it's not within my realm of expertise. i don't know. i mean, the subjects in the book really do warrant in many ways

visual expression. so i don't know, but, you know, the stories and answers i was telling, they really are just vastly. it would be something i would love to see kind of up on the screen. >> now that you britain a book and get your startup before the current -- [inaudible] >> my idea started before. because again, in 2007 went barack obama started to explore being president, it already became a really kind of electric idea. and once he announced at the beginning of 2008, or i guess it was 2007, then it was a story to follow even if he didn't win. i thought because