even point to a certain instability in american political rhetoric and american civil religion. >> we are at hillsdale college in michigan and we are talking with the professor of history and political science and is the author of this book, in search of the city on the hill, the making and hoping to generate

some story, i wrote a story about her restaurant, the place where the story never changes, you're just post you know. we could already recite the daily specials that i would eventually commit to memory.y. tuesday spaghetti or lasagna, except every other tuesday which is pork chop. wednesday is fish and thursday country fried steak. friday's ribs but you better come early because the ribsout a always sell out quickly. the line out front starts forming at noon. the lunch doesn't officially begin until 1215 and not a moment before, and later, usually of nancy has to run home on uncle willie and founds finds him having a bad day, the special was tuesday spaghetti.a nancy also kept a painted rock on top of her cash register with a gift from her preschooler nephew whom she helped raise peerage she was not about picking it up, should a custome offend her.

when i return from lunch two days after my story ran, because friday's were my favorite, nancy shook her finger at me and it was clear i would not getting anything close to a pat on the back. her mother.sat next by peeling potatoes, watching young and the restless and cringing about what her daughter was about to say. nancy was ready to send me packing the first time i came into the restaurant and inquired about heard uncle. but her daughter persuaded to let me stay and do the restaurant feature. i actually saw the very first episode, i bonded quickly with.over the characters and was hoping peel potatoes in her kitchen before the episode was over, much to over, much to nancy's shirt and. we both agreed that it was a scoundrel. you know what your story did nancy said, it brought out a bunch of crazy white people. that's all.

paying customers, i might've added, but she was in no mood for backtalk. she walked past me without further comment. she was leaving to feed uncle willie and turn him in his bed as she often did throughout the day leaving the beauty shop as many as five or six times. if nancy saunders had her way, her great great-uncle story would have stayed. h where she thought it belonged. the first time she heard it she was just a child and she found the whole tale embarrassing and painfully wrong.as 196 the year was 1961 in one in black and white people alike wanted to know, where the light-skinned others black or white. have a really been trapped in the cage and forced to eat raw meat? these men deserved respect. they did not deserve the gawkers that came by their house at all hours banging on the front door. that was some of her first the f memory of people banging on her door and the middle of the night. by the time i came on the scene, no one talked about savages, a woman with a no-frills afro whose skin was nearly white as the chef's coat she wore to work. she baked bread every bit as good as her great-grandmother harriet ash cake but she was

every bit as fierce. even those who knew the family well and grew up in the socienorhood around the corner and is now a social sciences professor, he had never come contemplated bringing the subject up. that is one garnet family. you have to take baby steps. you have to think of them as a tribe. they fall out with each other sometimes, but if you fall out with one of them, they, they a will come roaring back at you like an army. it was ten more years before nancy warmed up enough to let me and a cowriter author and newspaper about her uncles and only after the death in 2001, he was 108.th she didn't reveal much though. she invited my fellow reporter, photographer inside the house exactly one time. she made reference to a family bible that we were not permittet to view and for years after the series ran, whenever i visited the restaurant sheshe hintedto there was more to the story than

we had found. when she would say things like that, she would call me scoop. off. the city officials decimated two black neighborhoods or as the black community called it. [inaudible] it refused to print wedding announcements because the wealthy white publisher had noda black middle class. i myself have used a pair of pregnant black teens to illustrate a story about the high pregnancy rate in 1993, a story that went viral before the internet term existed and made the girls the object of ridicule. even rush limbaugh joined in with a rant.

when the girls dropped out of school shortly after my story ran, it was devastating. words linger and words matterret and it's not possible to predict the fallout they can have on subjects. it would be 25 years to earn something nearing nancy's trust, to convince her i wasn't one more candy had intent on exploiting relatives for the color of their skin or for my own financial benefit. in 2013, when i hit a snag updating, i actually wrote a story, an updated story on the pregnant teens more than 20 years after the original explosive first story. it seemed to fate that one of them, now a 37 your old mother of four lived around the corny from nancy's ranch house. after some angry relatives bullied me into not running the story and physically threatened me and demanded a meeting, nancy reassured me, you don't need their permission to do the story just like you don't need mine to write your book.

not really, you don't. and yet, months earlier, nancy's permission is exactly what i sought. on.y on the eve of publishing myy first book, about a third-generation factory worker who had saved his company, i had given her an advance copy of factory man. it detailed decades of mistreatment of black furniture workers in the harassment of weg women that resorted to wearing two girls at one time to prevenh unwanted advances from their boss and rape. hus the husband would be feeling her up from behind my mom had to fill in for her one time in my mom told her don't make me opend up your chest, by which they met with the tip of my knife. nancy and i had come a long way from the days of sit down and

shut up. still, it was no means a gimme when i called her in november asking for her blessing to pursue her uncles story for a book. she was in in her mid- 60s and recently retired after closing the beauty shop and i wanted he help delving into the family story as well as connecting with different relatives including one albino still living in true fine. i will think about it she said.a the message was clear, i was not to call back. she would call me. this was actually november 11. i wrote it on my calendar. thanksgiving came, came, december came, it was almost christmas.gase i called -- center a christmas card with little notes that saie ps, this is my number. mak more than six months later, oh she enjoyed making me wait, she finally called. i waited, she said, she said, so i could give it to you as a christmas present. it was christmas morning and nancy had decided to let me

write her uncles story with her help and blessing on one condition. she said no matter what you finh out or what your research turns up, you have to remember, in the end, they came out on top.rses a i knew the stories ending already. i had already interviewed several people, nurses nurses and doctors, neighbors and lawyers, all of whom describe the late life care she had given them has impeccable, extraordinary. i was less certain about who had forced them into servitude in the first place, about the t struggle to have their humanity acknowledged in their work compensated. how exactly, during the harsh years of jim crow, had george and lily managed to escape?rkabe >> how frustrating was it, all those years, knowing that this remarkable story was so close and yet so far away as mark did you ever feel like giving up? >> i did give up because she said no. she actually said, i asked her, i said you didn't even let me interview him and say i would hold the interview until after

he passed away because that was a rule, she didn't want anything written about him until he passed away. she said you're too curious. she didn't think i could hold the interview. i said if i would hold the interview, i would, but she didn't believe me. now she says, oh, when you when you walked into that shop the first time, and you just thought i would give you the story, i said to my self, scratch has met her match. i was scratch and she was the match. >> you call yourself a unicorn in the ranks of journalism because in this globetrotting world, you stayed in one place, in roanoke for decades. how has your staying power allows you to write both of your books? both require deep reporting. >> right, not a lot of books get written from rule america. i live in a valley of about aio quarter million and most reporters move on after a few

years. some of our best reporters are now the new york times. they have done great stuff. : e times for 25 years, i'm no longer there, but you see, i'm still writing stories, this began with my time at the roanoke times and so, i'm able to write these stories because i have time on my side. >> robert caroll says time equals truth. maybe she didn't want to talk in 1991, and let me do a restaurant feature. i thought sometime maybe she would let me do the story and it became how the places in town or people in town i call my story beacons. they're people who can lead me to other people in the community and at the time in and at the time in the early '90s newspapers across the country diversity was a big push. newspapers were better staffed and i had a fantastic first editor who was tough as nails

and the paper was sending a lot of emphasis on having more black editors and giving more storiess that accurately reflected the diversity in our community so if i were writing a general story about something and there was a 23% black population if one of my sources was african-american she would send it back so that was great training. i'm not sure if papers have the resources to do that now but that was wonderful training that d led me to the paper but really what i have done is i have been trained to work outside my zip code to stories that nobody else had the entrées into because ii had spent the time with caregivers for the elderly, veterans with ptsd and i had

really kind of made that might beat so one of my favorite characters passed away recently but he was a relative and a civil rights leader and an 11-year-old boy in 1927. his job after school he would help sell brooms on the city market that he made so he had a wonderful view to the story and he was there when they came home that night and so he's 98 when i interviewed him for this book but i knew him because i had an numerous articles before. i think because i made those connections in the community i was able to get people to trust me that it was the fact that i was still there these are people, i know them and they

trust me. and maybe you wouldn't have bee ready to write this book like joanne poindexter. >> don neighborhood in roanoke and a little micro- village that only the older people still refer to as jordans alley and joann was able to -- she doesn't live in the neighborhood anymore but she was able to put me in touch with 80, 90, 100-year-old people who could help me bring m that neighborhood a live so one of the questions of the story is what happened, how did she get them back and also were theiriv lives better in the circus than they would have been at home which begs the question how was jim crow and was it better than life on the road so i was able

to drive around with these older people. it reminds me of like when your kids are teenagers and don't want to talk to you except for when you're in the car. noit not only what they were seeing that they were more comfortable and that was a technique i used, not a technique that something ii did didn't want. i would drive different people around the same places but then the next time i could say so and so said at thi of this and a sty would come out. i drive around with my phone on record with their permission..a >> you also said kitchens are a great place.rybody l >> that's where everybody lands in a party.

people are more comfortable in the kitchen. i always ask if we can do the interview in the kitchen. wrusually have questions written out and buy recorder and i also take notes because i don't trust the recorder and it's easier if i have all my stuff on the table but it's because i want people to be in the kitchen because that's where they live. >> and by staying in one place, you have implemented your self on material because just a few blocks away from this, another person for another bestseller. >> about a block away from where the family lived, so it was just remarkable. i think probably every place has

these remarkable stories thatto piece came from one tiny place and they are very different. >> the facts in the story you wrote are so few and far between that photographic evidence and research that played an important role. a at what point did you realize they would be so vital and how did you use them? >> there was a source i was interviewing and he reminded me the circus managers often change their name. they were darwin's missing links, the ambassadors from mars, the shee sheep headed mene ecuadorian savages. if i got into a database it wouldn't necessarily bring up all those other names and so i

had to be caught in a sense of that and it became a greatt reporting tool because the newsr clippings never recorded with the brothers actually saw even the stories about the reunion they even went to the trouble of quoting the dialect but it was clear from the quote that they didn't actually talk to her. the photograph is incontrovertible evidence comes of this is the earliest known photograph as child exhibits and when i saw it to me they looked like scared brothers taken from their mother they were told she was dead and they should stop writing. i studied it and then someone said there is a person in charleston who studies historical costuming so ihi e-mailed him the picture and he

saw so much more than my eyesous wered see. he noticed the seams were stretching, the suits were two sizes too small and they were nice so there was some care given to these boys being the monkey man at the time but you've got that evidence you can try to find what's going on in the picture then you've got family stories telling everyone when he was little george would look after him and there was a popular song in the world war i anthem about missing home so you can sort of layered effects with interviews and stories andtures, pictures and the documentation.

the pictures were great though.a mr. barnes writes a memoir which he brags about buying them so that's more proof. he was proud of it and why wouldn't he be he was giving something over on them so this picture i showed up when i found it and it's the first picture with instruments. we were not driving around but p that prompted a memory the first time they were handed pictures it was just to be a photo prop. one of the ways they would makek extra money is have pictures and

keep that money. they were called pitch cards so that was supposed to be a photo prop. it turned out they were kind of geniuses.ur they could hear a song and play it on many accounts. i have a recording unfortunately i can't share but we have a a recording and there's a picture in the book of him playing his guitar and billboards are totally worn down tha but he waa wonderful musician and when she saw the photo she was able to add a layer of it being a joke but they were wonderful musicians. here's the only known picture from 1922 and once they got back and they had a protracted legall battle to get them paid, you

could see they were happier so this was a casual backyard picture. they have friends, they played music, i interviewed people tha remembered them playing music and it gave them this power like music does with any skill thathv we have. music made them feel good and gave them something to do. can you describe what their lifh was like and explain how many years went by?

>> it could have been the documentation is scant on that, but he said they were guarded kind of closely in the beginning. there was a bit of stockholmof syndrome going on. late in life she taught him howi to write his name even though he was totally blind and that was a big deal for him. the sideshow managers, the main manager is the only person he ever said anything bad about and he really hated him even at age seven he remembered some prettyr foul things about him but once she got them bac back and knew y could come home after that, even though they still tried to take advantage of them and not pay them when they could get away with it they became happier and that was the only world they

knew. >> and they traveled and became famous. >> in the headlines of "the new york times" they performed before royalty in england. whenever the doorbell was wearing when he was an old man of the house in roanoke that was able to be bought and paid for that's what he did by getting the legal., he w they would see housekeeping which shsay housekeepingwhich sl in london. >> one of the real heroes of the story is. can you describe her persistence how she became what you and others called a jackass in the quest to get it back? >> so roanoke virginia is a harsh place to be. there was a city code that said

where you could live and segregation was just so ingrained in everything so at the circus, blacks reportedly hawere toldthey had to sit unde. if there was a carnival they would make one day out of the seven-day stretch the day african-americans could come but it typically only came for one days in 1927 i think it wasericn october 14, she told relatives in a dream that her sons were with the circus and this is the story of the family passed down over generations. so in 1927, the top law-enforcement official in roanoke virginia was the founder of the local kkk which was the largest in the state. there's a picture of them in the book and it was aa

semi-respectable institution.peu just to give you some context, when the circus pulls up at 6 a.m. on the train and unloads and goes over to the fairgrounds, that's where they set up, it's where they had the rallies so the sideshow was one of the places where segregation broke down because you walked her down twaterdownlike you cout of the stage to the other as each act demonstrated or asked questions. i have a picture of her from the next day and then i know how the sideshow worked and then i have the brothers remembering onstage playing one of their songs and they can't see very well because of their eyes. and i can see in a scene every

family member recounts the same way, george lbos willie and says there is our mother, she isn't m dead. so then eight police officers come according to the newspaper accounts. they want to take brothers to the next stop. stop. the mother wants them to come home, they are her sons. the manager says they are my children and there is paperwork that has their last names as his last name and somehow she talked the police into letting her bring them home and not going back and defend not only that but a couple days later, she hired a ambitious lawyer and followed a lawsuit against the greatest show on earth. that was moxie and she kept ate it because they could get away with it they wouldn't pay them

so they would switch to another show i than he would switc thenm to some other show and pocket the money and then she found another lawyer and through this very clever but kind of awful legal arrangement she had been declared incompetent so the court was in charge of theed czechs bounce they would then find them and they might be in canada were working, a lawyer and a bail bonds been let go find them, track them down and get the circus to pay up in figuring out how they did thatun is another mystery. >> she was illiterate and thereh was no internet. >> they were being written about in the headlines of the times that she didn't know where they were in we wouldn't have known where they were either unless we had a "new york times."

it's amazing she intersected with them finally. >> it is. >> above story has been largely untold largely because of the race and social status and not to mention their disability. help us understand this widespread process and why it generally not just in the south they didn't bother to interview the family at any point, during or after their ordeal. >> i interviewed one of theed oldest living reporters at the roanoke times that started in the 30s and started whenever an african-american would be in the news they would have to write colored after the name. so that sort of gave me some feedback on what it was like being a reporter then that i wrote down some of the quotes o

the way the media treated the union and the day after she found her sons, the family reunion was in the newspapers and others talked of it all the while humming happy songs and never quoted the family. they also reported they were not overdeveloped and mental capacity which i refuted over and over again in later interviews.in a new yorker piece profiles of them the following year and said their eyes didn't quite focus, they love monkeys and kangaroos. their eyes didn't focus becaused the albinism.dn another said they rejoined the circus because the fried chicken had given out in roanoke. there is no mention of the years of servitude, the lawsuits, no context about poverty in jim crow because it was just widely

believed blacks were considered subhuman. in the 1,928th season opener of madison garden in "the new york times" that headline was the her happy. at the times didn't mention the lawsuit or the servitude just they were back and they were happy because they have the permission of their parents. so it's this kind of surreal racial thinking that was the predominant way people saw it shocit's heartbreaking and shocking but that's what they lived in and the challenges they faced. >> you said this would be a book about the circus and it certainly i is and this endlessy fascinating stories but it's so much about race and here you were the roanoke times reporter and it was one of the papers that have been treated them well

how did you get people to trust you but had no reason t to hande over some of the stories they told you? >> one of my stories was joanne poindexter who's no who is now d and in her 60s. she called up all of the older ladies in her church and asked if i could interview them. she has helped me so much in my career. when i wrote that pregnant and proud story that got me into so much hot water, after that i had a hard time getting african-american people to trust the. i didn't mean to make them the subject of ridicule, i honestly didn't that this would have happened. she would actually go out to interviews. there was a church that was starving and i was trying to get the neighbors to open up to me

because i wanted to do a story house that is a cool story a crack house turning into a church, so she went to every neighborhood and vouched for me and did the same thing years later and again they had read my stories and have seen the workce that i have done where it wasn' just drive by anecdote reporti reporting. so i think i was able to reap the bounty of just my time. >> one low point in your research you complained about the difficulties of your task and she gave you a valuableur piece of advice saying if we only wrote the histories of people the wrote detailed records we would only get to know what the privileged people.

you have to piece together your evidence with conjecture using the material at hand. how did her words inspired you? >> i thought that's right. the way she put it like that it gave me permission that maybe my story wasn't perfect. i didn't have every single place they were but there was a reason i didn't have it and it was this institutional racism and the coverage of it. if i can write it like that i can cast it any deeper context and that helped me.ained to i also complained once to one of the younger relatives that it was hard to get some of these basic facts like the births not recorded they were listed infe numerous different views and documents. i was just complaining to a so h younger relative she told nancy

and she sent back the message if she thinks the story was hard to write she should think about how hard it was for uncle george and wealthy to live. she better pick her asset. [laughter] >> tell us about there life othy left the circus.ecause >> because of that secondary lawsuit where the mother got guardianship, she was able to. if the money was funneled into a retirement account. when this is setup, social security doesn't even exist so when they retired, a nice house was bought and paid for and grmily, nancy, her mother, her grandparents they all lived in the house together and they took

good care and sort of protectedr them. the barber would come to their house to cut their hair so they didn't have to go out because people would still say rude things and they watched over them and later when he was in his late '90s he was in the ince hospital and actually incredibly healthy on no medication but he had but they thought was an obstruction so they put him in the hospital to watch him overnight and a nurse put a heating pad on him and it was turned up too high and when she came in the next morning he had life-threatening burns that took two years to heal. her family calls her the board and by the way, so the award and wasn't happy about this. so she like her great grandmother before her found a h really scrappy boys are in town and sued the hospital which is the largest in roanoke still and

one that settlement that enable her to work and have full-time care for him and so some of the best sources are these nurses that would come to the house to attend to thtend to the burn woe for him and he you could see how above story progresses from in the beginning there is a cautionary tale parents would tell their children stay together or you might get kidnapped and then by the end of their life they are sort of wise elders of the community and he is giving his first great advice, feed them honey, be better than the person is treating you and i think that he had a wonderful late wife.

>> you describe them as being so gracious and he always said god is good to me even after all that he had been through.r that's on his tombstone? >> he said it like people say hello, god is good to me. >> and you said he had almost a magical quality click >> initially i had a provocative trouble convincinlot oftrouble r and my editor that i would be able to find enough facts to d ed this book so i was calling and she gave me permission and finally i did more research and a sort of addendum to my proposal on how i was going to find out all this stuff and when i finally called and told her that i sold a book she said i told you just remember they always come out on top in the end.le willy

so she believed uncle willie was responsible and that the book i going to do really well because uncle willy is looking out for me. and i hope she's right. [laughter] your books are about connecting with people and the past and present and this is your advice for young reporters, get away from your damn smart phones and computers. productivity six, paper, scissors, real people, the glue, as they bishop once told you, connecting stranger to stranger if only for an instant. can you elaborate on how this has been your and no? >> documents can only take you y so far. that was a great find. the paperwork can only take you so far but there is no substitute for going and meeting

people and hearing their stories. there is these kind of micro- aggressions that these men and women lived with during jim cro like the little girls walking to school past the old ladies houss and therand there's two parentse porch that have been trained to squash racial epithets and these are the memories they have come a rent collectors that collected six impartial payment. i would have never had these stories had i not gone out and spend the time to get to know people and then to have them open up two stories. >> one thing also if you can comment because they were portrayed as the circus being imbeciles can you talk about their intelligence? >> a friend of mine who was a

lawyer in the birmingham case i took him out to lunch and i was having trouble getting the fina documents. like they were misfiled and the circuit clerk had to help me with that so i took him to lunch and he was giving me advice on how i could find those and he said i'd possaid i deposed him i said what was he like? he said he was both me and gave me a little detail. i said did you think he was mentally incapacitated and hee said my heavens, no. another lawyer that deposed him said it was mid-december and he had a better handle on his christmas shopping than he did and he was blind and couldn't get out of the house that he had arranged the present and knew how much money was going to cost and guess. the doctors, the nurses, he just had this way about him.

one of the nurses remembers walking up the stairs and he heard the footsteps and says who's there and she said it's the nurse and he said that the nurse have a name you know, lik, you can tell me your name. how hard was it making the leap from writing articles to books? >> a good friend of mine that i was a longtime reporter with had written his first book and gave me this advice that sounds simple but it was so honest and gave me confidence. it's just like one very long feature article. it's all the same tools and reporting techniques and trust building, the documents, calling around to experts, taking what the experts sai said and runnint by another, showing a picture to somebody that an expert. it's all the same skills but

it's over more time and things have to kind of -- it can't be totally apart. in a factory man factory man, md the first time it's like to books, the first is like southern virginia and the second is like china a southern virginia branch maker who took on to keep the workers employed and so would his suggestion was us to build on what is going oni in china early in the book so at the same time it would've seemed to be more seamless, so i have that in my mind and i have a boring office supply plastered all over the wall like a dry heat race and you can move it and so i would keep up with like

little threads and to me that is the big difference. i write like i plot out awr chapter and then the sections and i want each chapter or two read almost like it could stand alone but then i want each section to have kickers at the end and then i want the chapter to have a kicker and all of them to feed on with the next chapter will be so you leave people wanting to turn the page. >> this is an intricate story. how did you figure out the structure? andid you start with the basic story.pt >> then it is chronological after that.

but then that adds another layei of context and newspapers are really not allowed to include ourselves in the stories and i always just went along with it but i have written some essays and i feel like it's almost more honest when we are peeking behind the curtain a little bit. some of the best and the most telling details is the constant calling me on the phone like he is just relentless. one day it o'clock in the morning he's already called me and i was downstairs and by the time i go up she says i guess you're sleeping in today. like that shows his relentlessness.any

>> do we have any audience questions and if you can come up to the microphone if anyone has any questions >> thank you for being here. i enjoyed your presentation so much. you are fine should say i don't give up and i feel like we've kind of been with you through your journey to write this book. i would like to know how you celebrated when you knew that it was going to publish, what did you do to celebrate? >> i called and had a little celebration with nancy and then my husband and i celebrated because i have an income for the next two years. [laughter] the book comes out tuesday and we will have a launch party in

roanoke. nancy and her family are coming and all of those ladies that drovdrove around i hope her arof 102-year-old from true vine who brought the sharecropping alive for me in this book i said your niece is going to come and get you because it's in our way andd he said if i feel like coming i'm going to drive myself. so i think it is going to be fun and exciting and that will be like the moment nobody celebrated them when they came home in 1927 and i feel like i hope it will be this special kind of thing for the family like a homecoming so that willla be great. >> do i need to go to the

microphone or can you hear me? >> i can hear you. >> this is such an important story and i'm so glad you neverr gave up trying to write it. i'm left wondering if you were african american would it havewo been easier for you to get thei information or what is your perspective on that? >> i don't really know because i'm not. it took me a long time to understand the mistrust of the media and of me. i would have told the story if she let me interview her but really not until i delved into h the way the family had been treated that i really understand this tough lady her that she hac and because i was there, she has read every single article and

was kind of judging me through the stories i wrote and when i would go in she would talk abou whatever i had written that had been in the paper and then she became one of the people in the community that would hopefully find other stories and i did a ten part series on caring for the elderly in 2008 or so and all the people we profiled in their.k it's r so i just think it's important we have to be inclusive. so back to the first rules my editor told me you need to write stories that reflect all of the community. there are days that i drive around and i can't believe i geo paid to do this.

it's like getting a graduate degree in whatever you've are interested in and that's why i love what i do. >> thank you so much for the wonderful conversation.>> [applause] [inaudible conversations]