today book the about her book, "to serve the living," this interview was tape inside fairfax, virginia. >> dr. suzanne smith is an associate professor of history here at george mason university, and she has a new book out published by harvard, "to serve the living: funeral directors and the african-american way of death." dr. smith, what is the african-american way of death? >> guest: the african-american way of death is a way of thinking about death as not just death, but connected to freedom and connect today the struggle for civil rights. and in the book i tell a story about how the connection between death and freedom is so central to african-americans' understanding of funerals and deaths that it is, it hasn't been really considered in if quite the way i do in the book before, but it's essential to

our understanding of the civil rights movement and also the history of african-american entrepreneurship. >> host: what is that story? >> guest: ing the story goes back to slavery, and in african-american culture they call a funeral a homegoing. and in the book i trace the story beginning there. and in the west african and transatlantic slave trade, african slaves often jumped ship on the middle passage, and they called a homegoing because they believed at the point of death their spirits would go back to africa, their spirits wouldlily go home -- literally go home. so it begins in the slave trade. in my book i begin there, and then trace it through slavery and through the modern history. the slave funeral becomes the central feature of the community, the one place where african-americans are allowed to have some autonomy briefly where

they would have funerals late at night this what was called the hush harbors which was a group of trees, usually, in the back of the slave quarters. and i argue the slave funeral was the beginning of the african-american church, that this was the only place that african-americans were allowed to preach to themselves and have sacred space, and it becomes very, very important in that regard. and then eventually it becomes controversial. white slave masters start to monitor these funerals because it's also a place when they can gather and plan slave rebellions. the most notable would be gabriel's rebellion, and there was also some concern that nat turner's rebellion in 1831 was plan at a funeral. even in the common wealth of virginia in 1831 there's a lot of slave laws that are passed saying slaves can no longer have funerals by themselves, they must be monitored. so, to me, that was also evidence as a historian that the

slaves' funeral was seen as threatening to the slave system. and then i trace throughout, like you said, the rest of the book the civil war period, when the modern funeral industry forms mainly out of the civil war period, um, in the general history of the book i talk a lot about the formation of the modern funeral industry which comes out of the civil war and the idea of embalming. >> host: well, how did it come out of the civil war, and embalming, how did that begin? >> guest: yeah. before the civil war embalming in the united states is primarily done in medical schools for the purpose of medical education, and it's not until the civil war when you have 600,000 soldiers who perish during the war that you have the embalm anything the death process. and this is primarily because union soldiers, their families wanted their bodies transported for a proper funeral. it was in this process that people realized that you could

preserve the body, and then you could have a more proper funeral. and also i would note here that abraham lincoln was also embalmed, and his body was literally transported for, i believe, it was almost two weeks across the country from the point of death in washington to springfield, illinois, and all americans got to come to the train and mourn him. and it's, i argue in the book that was a key moment where americans realized that embalming was important to the grief process. and like i said, in this period african-americans are also serving on the battlefield helping some of these embalm withers, and they start to become invested in this process of embalming. now, after this war, like i said, the modern funeral industry formed in the 1880s, and african-americans are early on adapters of the embalming and the modern funeral process. so that's part of the story. but what's fascinating to me is, actually, it's at the point of the civil war that the modern funeral industry is born, and it's also after the civil war

that jim crow segregation is born in its most vivid forms. so this is an example in terms of the history of black entrepreneurship where you can trace the rise of the capitalist industry along with the social and racial segregation and how that played out in the funeral industry. >> host: and, essentially, today there are still white funeral homes and black funeral homes, aren't there? >> guest: yes, the tradition continues. even after the civil rights movement in the '60s and the passage of the civil rights acts, primarily barber shops, beauty shops and funeral homes have remained largely segregated for the most part. there's a loyalty to a black funeral director, which is one of the reasons i was interested in studying that. >> host: dr. smith, if you could expand on the entrepreneurship aspect of black funeral homes. >> guest: in terms of? >> host: in terms of what you write about. >> guest: perhaps what was most fascinating to me, as i'm saying, jim crow segregation is formed, and ideally the african-american funeral

director's going to have a secure market of black consumers because saying that black people should go to the black funeral home, white people should go to the white funeral home. what happens, actually, is the modern funeral industry takes off more in the 1920s because of the funeral home. before that embalmers would just come to your house and you would embalm somebody in your home, and you would lay them out in the parlor which is why we ultimately changed the name of the parlor to the living room. many listeners don't know that, but architects finally decided the parlor was so associated with death that when the funeral homes started to separate death from the home, architects said we're going to call the living room the living koma so people -- room, so people will never associate it with death anymore. so in the 1920s funeral homes take off, but the other thing that happens is hospitals come, the modern hospital comes into play, and most people in america start to die in hospitals rather

than in their home. and you have, also, the decline of the death rate. so my point here as a historian is that you see the rise of the modern hospital, the decline of the death rate and the rise of the modern funeral industry, and that leads in the business and entrepreneurship to competition. there's more funeral homes than can bury -- there's more funeral homes and less people who are dying at a faster rate. so back to the race question, there's a lot of competition that people don't realize that a lot of black people actually wanted to go to white funeral homes, they felt it was more prestigious, and the black funeral directors are fighting to get customers. and they actually are kicked out eventually of the national funeral directors' association on racist grounds, and they have to form their own associations, and they form their first business, the first black trade publication was the colored embalmer which is what i talk about in the book, and they have their own association. but in the journal which i read

carefully, they're always saying we need to find a way to secure the black body for the black funeral director. it's a battle. they don't feel they have a handle on the segregated market, and they want it for their business sense. by the same token, to your question about entrepreneurs, they're also the most economically-independent african-americans in their community, and they see the price of jim crow segregation on their communities, and they fight against jim crow even though on a strict economic basis it's kind of hurting them to do that. they want to have a separate economic black market of customers. so one of the, i think, interesting arguments and discussions i have in the book is how these black funeral directors become both leaders fighting against jim crow and also at the same time arguing often in their own publications that they need to make sure that the black market of customers is always based for them, and there's a contradiction there. and i talk a lot about that. there's one funeral director from nashville, preston taylor,

he actually starts his own streetcar line in nashville. he's economically able to not only have a funeral home, but when the nashville city council and the state of tennessee starts segregating streetcars, he says, okay, i'll have my own streetcar. and he creates a whole separate world for the black community, and he's ultimately quite successful at this. my point in the book is funeral directors are always in the lead of fighting against jim crow and fighting for civil rights. >> host: suzanne smith, where'd you come up with the title, "to serve the living"? >> guest: that's a great story. it comes from an advertisement, and i wrote my first book on motown music and its role in detroit, and i saw this ad in a detroit newspaper that said nobody serves the living like diggs. and not only is the house of diggs my favorite title for a funeral home, but this ad caught

my eye. and i thought, to serve the living, and that was the whole argument of the book ultimately. the main argument i'm trying to make is the ways in which these funeral directors serve the living was far important than the ways they bury the dead. and you can watch throughout time that line of why it was so significant. so that's the title of the book, yeah. >> host: and the painting on the front of your book? >> guest: um, the painting on the front of the book, a lesser-known jacob lawrence painting, and it's a cityscape from harlem. and what most people don't notice, actually, a prominent couple there on the front, and if you can see, there's like three little dots next to them, the ghost of the dead person. people don't actually notice that, but it's a scene of a funeral in harlem, and what was striking to me was the spirit of the dead person is present in the painting, and that also kind of captured what i say about african-american cosmology about death and the belief in

african-american culture that the spirit of the dead and the ancestors are always with us. >> host: dr. smith, when you went to sell this book to a publisher and you said i want to write about african-american funeral homes and their way of death, what was the response you got? >> guest: um, the response at first was skeptical, but when i made the argument and made the connections to my previous work on motown and some of the things we've already mentioned, they were quite intrigued. as i said, i primarily see myself as a historian of african-american entrepreneurship, and as we've already been talking about, i think the story of this industry which was and still is largely segregated is such an important one. >> host: what was the mooresford lynching? >> guest: it happens in 1946 in monroe, georgia. it was, as historians talk about, the last mass lynching in america. four people were shot -- >> host: what year?

>> guest: 1946. so it's a post-war situation. and these four individuals were shot by a firing squad in monroe, georgia, soon after a governor's election, a gubernatorial election in bah s. and dan young, the funeral director in monroe, was the most prominent man in the town, and he opens the book for me primarily because he shows the example of the model of the book, "to serve the living," that in the weeks before the lynching he was actually trying to register black voters in monroe because it was the first election when blacks were going to be allowed to vote for a number of years. and he gets involved in the lynching case after the fact and has the community come to his funeral home. and for the rest of his life, he was pursuing the people in the community that he believed had committed the crime even though no one was ever convicted. and so i tell the story of him because he also showed, like i said, in terms of the story of

the civil rights movement that funeral directors, like i said, were often registering voters. and in the case of a lynching, would often protect the family after the fact of a crime. and this became in african-american communities, um, one of the reasons that we would talk about the loyalty that develops around these homes because the funeral director often played so many roles in the community that the people, and played roles in the face of a violent crime that the community always rewarded with loyalty. >> host: you also write about martin luther king's funeral. >> guest: yes. >> host: why? >> guest: well -- [laughter] because it was martin luther king's funeral and also because right again it solidified both his assassination, right? one of the things to me that's most fascinating about martin luther king's funeral, when he's assassinated on the balcony of the hotel, who's the last person who speaks to him? the chauffer from a funeral home. when he would come to southern towns, it's the funeral homes that have the limousines that

would protect civil rights activists, that would take them to these speaking events. so there's this, you know, scene in the book where, you know, he's getting ready to go to his speech before he gets shot, and it's the funeral home that's sitting there, and the chauffer from the funeral home who witnesses the crime. his actual funeral is important, of course, because it, begin, evokes all these traditions i've been talking about of the homegoing and that i make an argument in the book about these funerals, civil rights funerals being political theater, whether you're talking about malcolm x's funeral which is even more fascinating, i think, civil rights activists learn that the funeral itself can be political theater, can be the place where, um, we can fight the battle against racism and segregation. and they turn, um, a lot of these funerals into dramas about that. and king's funeral was another example of that. >> host: what about cemeteries? are they sill segregated? --

still segregated? >> guest: that is debated. for the most part, they are not. although i must say at the end of my research it must have been, you know, three or four years ago now there was an article in "the new york times" about a texas cemetery that was battling out whether a white person could be bury inside what had traditionally been a black cemetery. the history of black cemeteries goes back to the 19th century where blacks were often segregated at least to the worst part of a white cemetery. and then you have, again, funeral directors like charles diggs, preston taylor who finance cemeteries for black people that are elegant and in the garden variety that people want, the high-class cemetery. now, the one other interesting story about cemeteries that i can say is charles diggs found the detroit memorial park in detroit along with a group of other funeral directors, and it becomes so financially, um, profitable that they are able to give home mortgages, loans to

blacks in detroit. blacks who had been denied these mortgages from regular white-own od banks at that time. so, again, in terms of the theme of the book, "to serve the living," these funeral directors are able to give home ownership to their communities through the profitability of their cemeteries that they themselves founded. and i think that's incredibly powerful in the story of how the back middle class tries to get a foothold in american society when the fha, the federal housing administration, is often shutting blacks out of regular home loans. >> host: where'd you grow up, where'd you go to school? >> guest: i grew up partly in detroit. where i went to school for college or -- >> host: for college. >> guest: yeah, ucla. my family moved all over the country, ultimately, and i went to ucla as an undergrad. i went to carnegie mellon for a master's degree and yale for my ph.d.. >> host: and what do you teach

here? >> guest: i teach african-american history, and because of my research on motown, i teach a lot of courses on the history of american popular music. and from this book, of course, i can now teach about the history of death in america as well as the history of the civil rights movement. >> host: when people walk into your class, do they often expect an african-american professor? >> guest: yes, they do. and it's one of the most, one of the things i love about my job. i love surprising students, i love helping them to learn that the color of one's body does not define the body of knowledge that someone has. and i often tell students if i walked into the classroom and, um, i taught chinese history, you wouldn't ask the question as much, you know, why isn't this person chinese necessarily. or nobody says do you think of a problem you didn't live in the middle ages. but i love, like, i've had students, african-american students tell me at the end of my semester, one student came up to me, and she said, dr. smith,

when i first met you, i was so angry that you were white, and i wanted to stump you, and after two weeks in your class i learned that i could learn something from you. and be she said it changed my whole way of seeing the world and race. and she thanked me. and i felt like, wow, you know, that's why i do this work. this is a way to have students completely rethink how they define knowledge and identity. and i've often also said to my students you should go into a physics class and say why isn't a black person teaching. and when we get to that point many this country, then it'll with a great place. then you should say, okay, this is where we should be. don't just ask in an african-american history why the teacher isn't black. >> host: what's the racial makeup of your classes? >> guest: here at mason we're very diverse. i would say at least half the students are students of color, and usually at least a third of the students are international students. i often have students who are from africa or have come from africa. so that's another thing, a joy about teaching here at mason is

that we have a very diverse student body, and a lot of students bring, you know, a lot of perspectives into the class room, so it's great. it's great. >> host: suzanne smith a professor here at george mason university and author of this book, "to serve the living: funeral directors and the african-american way of death." it's published by harvard. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us you your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> since i am a psychoanalyst and not a political analyst,ly not predict who's going to win in 2012. but i will say that what makes bipartisan, obsessive bipartisan disorder a disorder is preempting of the discussion of the book in a way, but what makes it a disorder is that it becomes the driving factor in everything he thinks and does. o he ends up, obama ends up

negotiating with himself before he even negotiates with republicans. that's one reason it's a problem. and the second reason is that he thinks -- and we'll get into this a little bit later today -- he thinks that he can reason with people who actually are not interested in reasoning with him. they're actually with only interested in defeating him and making him a one term president. so he has this fantasy that he can reason with them and that if he just says it the right way or gives them what they want, they'll be able to get along. and i don't think that's -- and that's what makes it a neurosis. the thing about eisenhower, um, reminds me of something that mort saul said -- i wasn't prepared to talk about eisenhower particularly, but in 1956 during the second election, um, they were talking a lot about segregation and integration. i don't know if you remember all that or if you've read about all of that.

and stevenson said that he thought that integration in the south should take place gradually. and a southern democrat said he thought it should take place moderately. and eisenhower proposed a compromise between those two extremes. [laughter] so that's my view on eisenhower. >> very good. >> i wrote this book really because, um, obama was man who blazed across the national scene in the 2004. um, i had heard of him before 2004 because my son, abe, was a student at the university of chicago, and he called me up once a night after a speech in 2002 when obama was still a state senator, and he said there

was this guy who sounds just like a psychoanalyst, dad, and he talks about putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing things from their point of view. and he says i don't remember his name, but he was pretty cool. well, in 2004 he gave a speech which everybody knows which is when he talked about that this is -- he doesn't see red states and blue states, he sees the united states, he sees one country. and it really struck a chord with a lot of people who had been feeling one way or another about george bush, feeling very bad about the elections and the supreme court, and there was a lot of division in this country. and, um, so people really rallied to him as everybody knows. but it turned out in retrospect that there were two obamas, not two americas and that, um, after he became president he was very different from candidate obama. now, everybody who's elected is going to be different from how they are when they run for

office. but, um, and you can't keep all your promises. but in his case it seemed like he was even more different than that, especially when it came to issues about negotiations, issues about appointments, issues about backing down on guantanamo closing, etc. also on the people that he hired to work for him in the beginning which were all a lot of wall street experts who had worked in the clinton administration and who were really part of the economic disaster that had been happening. so i decided i would try to figure out what that's about and where that came from and, um, so i started reading. and one of the things that happened, um, actually during the primary when i was not thinking about a book at all, a colleague of mine suggested i read "dreams from my father." and i have to say it's one of the great books. i just adored it. and it was as good a book about

the coming of age of an adolescent as i had read ever really. i mean, certainly, as a nonfiction book. although some people might think it's fiction. and so i decided that not only would i work by studying obama as a president, his behavior and looking into his past, i would also try to do a more intensive textual analysis of the book. and i spent a lot of time reading the book, rereading the book, going over different segways from one scene to another, things that i thought were blind spots in the book that were left out. a lot of times i thought something was left out and then three pages later there it was, and it wasn't left out. and what i decided to do, really, was really look very closely at who he is and who he thinks he is and what his efforts are to understand himself. >> you can watch this and other