part, which is very interesting. this is someone who was willing to turn his back on his own state for the union. for my money washington is a founding father that whose example is important and well worthy of continued study. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much everyone for coming out. if you have not purchased the book yet they are available at the register and he will be right over here at this table happy design. the line will go back to the register. >> you are watching booktv, did you know that you can also listen on the go? download the c-span radio app from your device app store on

the weekends click on the c-span2 button to hear everything every on booktv com live. >> good evening everyone. thanks for joining us tonight. my name is mattie walters and behalf of ãbi'm very pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with professor carter resenting his new book "invisible", the cosponsor for the evening is mass humanities, organization which supports program that use history, literature, philosophy and other disciplines to enhance and improve civic life for the people of massachusetts. you can learn more at mass communities.org. we are pleased to have c-span booktv here taping at today's

event. when asking questions in the q&a please know you will be recorded and wait a moment for the big mike overhead to come over you. tonight's talk will conclude with some time for questions after which we will have a book signing right here at this table. the siding line will form domicile to my left and we have copies of invisibles for sale at the registers in the next room. tonight's future title is 20% off this evening. the book discount is part of how we say thanks for buying books here at harvard bookstore. the purchases support this office is areas and ensure the future of an independent bookstore. thank you. finally, a quick reminder to silence your cell phones for the talk. now i'm very pleased to introduce tonight's speaker stephen oh carter william nelson carver professor of law at yale university where he taught for over 30 years. he served as a law click for justice marshall and received eight honorary degrees and recently delivered the w eb the

boys lectures at harvard. he is the author of 15 books of nonfiction and fiction. which include the violence of peace, the confirmation mass, new england weight and the emperor of ocean park. a novel that spent 11 weeks on the new york times bestseller list. tonight he is here to present his new book "invisibles" the forgotten story of the black woman lawyer who took down america's most powerful mobster. it is brimming with intellect and grits. and new york times best-selling author walter isaac says raises it as a riveting and moving story, one with enormous revenues for our own times. we are so pleased to have its author here with us tonight please join me in welcoming stephen carter. [applause] >> thank you for that kind introduction and thank you all

for coming out and i want to thank the harvard bookstore for inviting you back. the last time i was supposed to be here i canceled at the last minute there was an illness in the family and i couldn't make it. in the harvard bookstore said don't worry we will reschedule and now three years later we are here. it's a real pleasure to be here, most of you who know my work you know me much better for my fiction. but this is a book that had been rolling around inside my head for a long time and i want to get into the book in a sense talking backward. before i talk about the book i want to talk about the historical moment that gave rise to it. you have to take yourself back to new york of the 1930s. they had just been a big gang war in which the black gangs of harlem had been wiped out or subjugated to a coalition of various white ethnic gangs. harlem was the most lucrative

territory in the country. for organized crime. largely because of numbers game. the numbers game was played by more people in harlem and also employed between 10 and 20,000 harlem nights who was working in numbers. the mob had taken over the numbers again with a violent war for that. the mob was in other ways dominant in new york and now cry from civic reformers and newspapers that was time to get serious about the mob and try to investigate.the problem was, that the district attorney in new york at the time a man named dodge was in the pocket of the mob and had no intention of doing any kind of investigation. so there came the runaway grand jury, they said we don't want anyone to indulge his office one special prosecutor to investigate organized crime and

dodge eventually gave in and special prosecutor was finally appointed was thomas dewey, who later ran for president that's how do we originally came to public attention when he took over he had some conditions among the conditions were that he would hire his own staff because no one within connection to the government in new york will work for him. he hired 20 young lawyers and 20 young lawyers the newspapers labeled the 20 against the underworld and the 20 lawyers were 19 white males and one black woman. black woman is the subject of the book. invisible. the black woman's name was eunice carter and some of you know, i sometimes hide the ending but she was my grandmother. so you have to imagine being a black lawyer, being a woman lawyer in 1930s of new york, this is at a time when the bar was deeply serve segregated by race, the american bar

association had a rule against ãbthere are very few women lawyers in the country, certainly very few black women lawyers in the country. for a black woman to become a prosecutor specially on a staff of process special prosecutor was a big deal. it was news from coast-to-coast. do we hire is negro. he would see this in newspapers she was in most of the stories and there were a lot of them about dewie's hiring of staff, hers was the only photograph because it was a man bites dog so it was this black woman doing in dewie's employ? so he hired 20 lawyers, whose jobs were to investigate unbreakable organized crime anti-gay press conferences and he said that he wasn't interested in a conviction for tax evasion or something like that or prostitution, he wanted

to convict for what he called a real crime. like loansharking or murder. municipal corruption, drug running, various things stuff that was always going to investigate because through political ambitions he had to make clear he was on a vice crusader. they were all independent. little cubicles dewie had a big office and then a long row of offices and 19 white men and also the furthest from dewie was a black woman in her office and this one was working loansharking this one corruption in the union. this is drug smuggling. ... ...

mainly new yorkers were concern but broths broth tells, street walkers and dewie had a problem. he had to take these concerns seriously but lad no intention of trying a prostitution case he gave it to the black woman in the office, making it clear he would never try these because he didn't think that was how to take down organized crime in new york. now, one of the thing hat happened historically was that the few female prosecutors who existed in the united states at the time were not very many -- almost all of them were aced so what were called the women's courts courts courts and tried prostitution

cases, child abandonment, and the women's cowards-were seen as a graveyards from which female prosecutors never got out. eunice was not a women's court prosecutor but was assigned to the same work. assigned to the work of prostitution and i think another -- a different person might have complained about thing in that work. might have figured that her career was over. but eunice took it seriously because alone among the investigators in dewie's office, she believed that the mob actually had a hand in prostitution. widely believed that's prostitution was not a mob activity. i was a bunch of individual entrepreneur, basically. she believed otherwise. he theory was the mob takes a cult of every other illegal activity in the city. it would be absurd if this activity pays nothing to the mob. long story short, she pent a lot of time alone in the offers and you can fine in the record, big heaps of files that were sent to

her about prostitution that no one else would touch. she finally put together what she thought was a pretty good case that the mob controlled prostitution in new york. around this time, the man who was thought to be the head of the mob in much, dutch schultz was hurded and luck lucky luciano, one of the most fame money mob in history. >> and luciano became the target, and the problem that dewie had was he koontz connect luciano with crimes bothy is in, who pent time only the records, time talking to the women who were involved, believed she could connect luciano to prostitution. so, finally, he allow edler to organize a raid.

february 1, 1936. 160 new york police officers, none of them vice officers, no woman to who ever work together because of fears of drugs, were sent to raid 80 brothels, smily. and they were to arrest women and a fixer, when a person is arrested a fixer gets out our of jail so she won't turn states evidence so, they arrest the fixers the night before and then arrest 160 women -- actually fewer than that but 100 odd women -- and they brought a judge in who came to the building where dewie's offices were to set high bail the women couldn't make in order to hold them as we used to say material witnesses and then waited for them to turn on higher ups and what you should know as a

footnote, nowdays that's a staple of prostitution, arrest the people lower down but that was controversial practice at the time. a lot of serious lawyers, high up in the bar, thought it was unethical to offer a reduced sentence in return for testifying. you did the crime, you did the time. you shouldn't have some special way of getting out of that, and besides that was viewed by a lot of people as unharenly unreliable. the governor of new york thought it was terrible that dewie was hi guy, the guy he fixed be the specialty prosecutor and was thoughts was terrible that dewie was trading lower sentences for inflammation. but eunice did most of the work with the women and in the end, luciano was indicted for prostitution, he fled to hot springs, arkansas, where eventually he was tracked down

and arrest after he offered -- first offered $50,000 bribe to the attorney general of arkansas heir would let him stay but was brought back for try and convicted and the only crime he was convict of, all because of the work done by this black woman alone in her cubicle at the end of the hall. now, this being the period that it was, dewie hires this black woman, she develops the case against lucky luciano, gets the women to turn against him. he develops almost all the maximum idea to convict him but when it came to try the case, dewie and other male prosecutors tried the case. she had some responsibilities at trial but that one. when dewie became the district attorney of new york he went after jimmy hines, the tamny hall leader and the most

powerful politician in the state of new york. and it was the same thing. eunice largely developed a case against him. she did the research, got people turn, and when its became time to try the case it was dewey and a group of white male assistants who did the actual trial work. i'm not saying that dewey wasn't grateful to her. when he became darn he appointed her to head the special sessions bureau, which was the largest bureau in the darn's offers where the black press of the time gleefully. >> reporter: she was supervises 71 might male slurs the had a career as a prosecutor and a very successful one. now, let's put eunice a side for a minutes. one other related story and then a couple of conclusions conclust you ask¢. eunice had a brother number named alphaeus, and their parents believed in education and both of them were

well-educated but eunice became a very prominent republicanment this at the time when most black people voted republican and the fact that the republican party was the party of civil rightness the 10930s and '40s and the democratic party wasn't. you have to get the players straight. and she was heavily involved with political campaigns and so on, and dewey ran for president, he cited eunice has evidence that he was not prejudiced because the -- he worked with this woman, she had done all these great things, worked on prosecutions and was the head of the biggest bureau and so on and so on. but eunice was a conservative, traditionalist, and she had a younger brother name alfie who had degrees from harvard where he was badly treat. we can go into that in q & ar. and nyu, tennyson scholar,

protect a -- rote it ten anyson's lit area circle, and multilining wall and he was a communist. not accused of bag communist. he was member of the communist party, high ranking member. did favors for soviet intelligence, serious, committed, communist. his fbi file was run to 700 pages, which to give you a comparesons twice as long as martin luther king's fbi file. and so the two of them took these divergent past. one traditional republican and a communist, who has no faith in american institutions and wants to burn the whole thing down. i mention that for the following reason. once their mother died in the 1940s they grew apart and eunice, not only did she think ore brother was wrong and he thought she was wrong but she

thought her brother was hurting her career because she wanted to be a judge and people from that office went on to all sorts sorf distinguished careers so, for example, william rogers, who was both secretary of state and attorney general, was one of the 20 against the underworld. murray griffin, a very distinguished federal judge, was one of the 20 against the underworld. charles brightle who went to the highest court in new york was against the -- there were six or seven of them became judges and that's what she want most of all and never got it. never got to be a judge. she he quit the prosecutor's office and told these various hosts but enough achieved that and always believed it was because of her brother. her brother in 1951 went to prison for refusing to name names and those who know my work, know i'm very big on the

tolerance of dissent on not shutting people down and shutting people out of various jobs because of their views and that comes from my great uncle's experience because after he got out of prison, he had been an academic before,, he couldn't gt work at the time. he was with all of this qualifications -- worked in a factory, little bit of writing he can't publish. he finally left the country in 1950s and never returned. went to ghana and then zambia. he spent a lot of time traveling as you won't be surprised to learn in the soviet union, and in china, but never came back. i tell you that because as i said my grandmother blamed him for a lot, and in 1951, when he began to face legal troubles, here was his sister, who had been this prosecutor, who was now at a law practice in new york was a trial lawyer, he never went to her for advice. never asked her to help him in

any way. he went his way areason and my father said after he got out of prison, they never spoke again, and it was 20 years later they died, ten days apart from each other, and all that period, toward the end of their lives, they began to correspond a little bit. she was in new york and he was in africa. but they never really -- never actually reconciled. so that tragic side but i want to focus on the things she accomplished because i want you to think but, again, the barriers of the time. i think that stories that -- about people breaking through barriers, when these barriers were very, very high, are stories we need to be telling and need to talk about and think about. when i was growing up, my grandmother was, for me, just this very scary woman, a woman who would quickly direct you're

grammor -- correct your grammor and which fork you used at the table. she felt her grandchildren had bad manners he. she scared us, working on this book, i've learned but her life and have come to understand that the things i saw as being intimidating intimidating and scary were part of the fortitude and determination that had carried her through to succeed in the way she did, so that she actually became by the 1940s, one of most famous black women in america. now, there weren't a lot of famous black women in america in the '40s. nevertheless she was profiled in life magazine, featured in something called liberty magazine that doesn't exist but ways the second largest magna the country at the time. she was on radio shows and television, even then when television was young; she was very well-known in part because of the luciano trial, that's her -- she became very prominent as a republican politico.

an activist in the party you would say nowdays. i want to say the work i inside the book i didn't do alone, my daughter leah left law practice to be the principle researcher on the book and dug through archives, did a lot of interviews and other things as well, and the book reflects her work really as much as mine. i hope she would be able to be here tonight but she one able to. -- she wasn't able. to so two last points to make and then i'll be happy to take questions bowled any aspect of it you'd like to talk about. there's somethingles but eunice. in addition to the work she did as a lawyer, there's something else. she was talking back in the 1930s about the issue what we now call sexual harassment, talk can publicly, a time when nobody thought women in the workplace was important. talked but a lot. in one peach

in 1937, for example, she talked about men who as she put it used their positions of power to force women into -- she said -- intimate relationships, and she said in the speech that burning in oil is a little too good for men of that sort. this is at a time when you didn't see -- this was not a salient issue. civil rights -- it's not that none of them were supporters but they saw this as also a distraction, that if they tried to free women, in effect, at the same time, they'd never get to the heart of their cause. eunice didn't believe that. toward the owned of her career sher gave a speech in greece -- did a lot of international

traveling in later in her life -- and talked about countries where women are not allowed to be full citizens, including the united states, and she talked about it as a kind of dictatorship, and she talked but about the way that after a while, if you treated a certain way, there's a voice that begins to whisper in under mind, called it the dictator within, warning you not to do certain kinds of thing. no country can succeed when it plants these seeds in people's head. she was way ahead of her time on that issue as well. we can talk about that if you like. the last thing want to mention about eunice is that she also came from an extraordinary family. her parents -- i -- her immediate parents were big and important activist us. already father's name was william, worked for the ymca. the ymca is a big vital organization with chapters all over the world, and the traveled all around the world for the

ymca. he had lunch as buckingham palace and gave speeches all over the world. he was very conservative man, but a big activist as well. those things went very closely hand in hand in the rhetoric of racial justice in the late 19th century when he came along. her mother,ed a linea, when at adi, did among other things -- one of only three black women who went to europe during world war i with the black troops. there were all these hundreds and hundreds of white women who went to work in basically we think as the uso type jobs but run by the ymca so troops were placed to unwinds and so on, before for the black troops, only three black women and she wrote a best-selling book about

the treatment of black soldiers during world war i, a book that is still referenced when historians write about the subject today. her mother was ang activist. went for the naacp as a field secretary and her particular job was to go to town, especially in the south and midwest, where the klan was dominant that the black community had become subdued and frightened and she, this little black woman, traveled to found by herself, and give these rousing speeches to get people feeling they could do something, n the face of klu klux klan intimidation. and she was well aware of the dangers of what she was doing, adie was, but believed in the work and traveled from what we know quite unafraid. i should add that in the end, she left the naacp. there will complicate reasons but one of them was she whereas the only female field secretary

and addi began to feel mistreat as the only woman who did this field work at the time. so concern about gender as well as race ran deeply in eunice's blood. so, a great and accomplished woman and the book its called "invisible" in part because at the time she started out she was being hunted aside but she had a great peered of being well-known and is now largely forgotten and you can occasionally finder in compilation of african-american history but a lot of the history is not right and try correct that in the book as well. her story is -- in 2008 i published a novel that only years later did i realize had been meant to celebrate in a sense her generation of haremmites, a novel called "palace council." i wanted to tell her story and in the process, i've come to

realize that this woman who once terrified me was healy become someone i really, really love, and i'm very proud. we thank you very much. i'll be lane to take your questions. [applause] >> there's a microphone over there. >> the material in this story, for example, many stories believe that dewey, late are on, became quite comfy cozy with the cosa nostra and then lucky luciano was let go from jail, and exiled to italy. did you come across any new information but that? >> so, lucky lieu schapp know and dewey. don't think dewey became

comfortable with the cosa nostra but his papers say he was snookered into letting luciano go. the united states intelligence pressured him to -- when he became governor of new york to parole luciano because luciano allegedly arranged protection using his mob connections for the docks in new york and sabotaged and supposedly made contacts with the sicilian mafia to make the landing safer. history says this was largely invented but dewey's paper tell us he was very resistant to letting luciano go. but luciano was ultimately released after the war on condition he accept extra extradition, which he did. luciano unfortunately has become a romantic figure to a lot of writers. there's a whole chorus of

writers that luciano was framed, banding end and lay have not looked at the record and he the evidence that the grandmother put together. it's pretty clear that there wasn't any framing going on. we can differ over the wisdom of criminalizing prostitution when you deliver whether it's appropriate that was luciano was convict of but that's the only crime he was convicted of. wait for the microphone. >> you alluded to your grandmother's brother's treatment at harvard. cue comment further on that. >> yes, i did open my for that. so, her brother, alfieus, came to harvard in 1921 to get amassers anything literature him had gone to howard as an undergraduate, and upon arriving at harvard, he was informed by the legendary dean of harvard's

graduate school, dean robinson, that because he went to howard university, although it was one-year masters program, enrolled in, he had to spend two years. now, when i first came across this i thought this must be something that happened to all the black student us but didn't, it only happened to the howard students. but black students between am hurst or harvard, told to get your masters degree in one year. he was quite upset about this and he resisted and fought it and frankly the reason he was resisting it, he couldn't afford it. didn't have the money. relatively low compared to -- relatively high compared to people's income at the time, and he had trouble putting together the money for another year and tried self ways to get around the two-year and requirement but never able to get around it.

the other thing what interesting, arrived at harvard right after the episode that involved the fabled president lowell that many of you may know about. when they developed the house system at harvard, president lowell, who did a lot of greating theres for harvard no question, but he decided that the negro students, as they were called at the time, really should not live in the houses because they wouldn't be comfortable there. they should board elsewhere in the city. this is a huge battle. it was in all the newspapers and he was finally overruled by the harvard corporation on that, but that -- the scars net battle ling erred as civil right activists looked toward harvard in the 1920s. that didn't involve him because he was graduate student but that was part of the harvard history that was current. this gentleman right here. >> a couple of things.

one is what effect did eunice carried's work with franklin frasier have on dewey's decision to hire her as an investigator? >> the same question. i want to hear them both. >> the second question is, the prosecution of jimmy hines began before the prosecution of luciano, and i'm wondering whether eunice carter had a role in the trials of pompez and the other -- pompez is any great uncle. those mr. my questions. >> let's deal with the first win, franklin frasier in 1945 there was a riot in harlem, and after the riot, the mayor, mayor

la guardia, appointed a commission to look into the cause of the riot. it is said to be insure no idea its atrue -- the first -- the majority of members were black. that's what is often written. about it. so eunice was part of the commission, and she was actually the secretary. there some accounts that say that the great sociologist and frasier herb was the research director and was prominent because our his work there interesting story. you've like at the files of the commission, which never had much money because the city wouldn't give it the amount of money bud jet for it -- that frasier often didn't get paid until eunice was the secretary would go and beg city hall for a check, for money to pay him with. they became very close, although i quote in the book some private

correspondence of her that was critical of the commission's report but all they became very close and stayed in touch for some while. i didn't know in her later years because i don't have the records hipt and pompez. the raids that led to the arrest of himes can do place in 1937, and the raids were initially directed against pompez and several other harlem members runners. now -- he was very -- pompez was arrested. and people turned against eunice. she was a great and colorful and wonderful man, opener of the new york -- she went to new york cuban's games, and he ended up taking a deal where he testified

against hines. now, the reason i mention is, the reason himes is in the book and pompez and others are, is that -- what i said before, when eunice was simply involved in prosecuting white gangsters, harlem loved her. when dewey turned his attention -- this is after he was darn -- -- was da to numbers game/was doing something wrong and that was partly because pompez was been lawyer and said that 10,000 or 20,000 harlemites were employed there. he was colorful and the only numbers runner, pompez, in the -- baseball hall of fame. back over here.

just wait one minute for the boom. >> i'm interested in more about your grandmother, how old you were when you knew her or how close you were to her or how often you saw her. your grandfather. a little more family stuff here. >> let me do more family stuff. that's fine. so, my grandmother died when i was in high school, and i really didn't know any of these stories at the time. my grandfather died sometime earlier help was a dentist in hard. he. and they met in the 1920s when she was involved -- here's a social worker before she went to law school and she was involved in designing and creating a free dental clinic in harlem, and that appears to be when they met because he was the fir dentist to volunteer to work with the clinic. they had a troubled marriage.

they had a troubled marriage. i make no bone necessary book or make no bones of it here. he was quite the philanderer, and i he told you but eunice's mother. her mother, addie, first came to prominence in the late 19th 19th century as a public speaker on the duties of black motherhood, and she preached that the future of the race was dependent upon black women basically staying home and raising children to be future leaders of the race. adie never stayed home. always off giving speech but she preached about marital civility. this is what eunice grew up on 0 even when eunice's marriage went bad, she tried everything to keep it together she had his sense of her mother to have a duty not to leave her husband and find a way to patch things

up. it appears they did live apart briefly in the mid-and late 1930s but can't pin down exactly win, assuming even that actually occurred. had a very rocky major but patched things up toward the end and when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, in the late '50s and had to sell his dental practice, she suspended her other activities in order to care for him. as to my memories of her i'll share a couple. just family stories. she used to come visit is every year at christmas. come on the training. she had a fear of flying. she would come on the train and i remember meeting her at union station in washington and she would always spend two days cooking the virginia ham with all the more salt than you can picture, but smelled very good and tasted very good. she other memory i have is

constantly either waving her off or meeting her at dockside. she was always get on what we called ocean liners in those days. and goings to europe. she went to europe all the time. she had very expensive tastes. had to go first class, you know. and she was always wearing expensive furs and so on and so forth. she was always even back when her husband was alive, always fancier apartment and wanted a mansion instead of an apartment so they did that. and her expensive tastes became, for even we as children, realized this woman actually either had money or wanted the world to think she had money because she was always wearing all this stuff, and she was of a generation in harlem where people who could afford to were determined to be turned out a certain way to prove in a segregated society they could do the same things other people

could do. you can decide whether or not to admire that but i feel there's something admirallable it. but there's somethings a michelle about the notion that they tried. they tried bailed society in harlem, a society that was deeply stratified. you were either in it or you weren't and that was said but they tried do something any midst of segregation to build displays where they could have a sense of accomplishment. i admire even though i don't quite agree how they went about doing it. one over here. >> what were her experiences taking the bar and being admitted? i assume in new york. >> oh, yes. i haven't been told much but her education. went to something i college, graduated in a class of 1921. her education at smith was probably paid for, we think, by

a very prominent smith graduate is quite wealthy, wealthy activist and socialist and we believe paid for eunice's education at smith. when she left, she tried being a teacher in the south. she didn't like that very much. she rounder to new york and became part of the harlem renaissance, actually inducted into the harlem writer's guild which at the time was the top of what later became the renaissance, only had between ten or a dozen members at i any one time and all the people you can imagine were members. she and antonio hurst were inducted at the same time which led gwendolyn bennett to write to jackson, who great black writers of the '20s, hough did these people get in? meaning eunice and hurst. i didn't vote for him,

exclamation points. i guess she missed -- she did that for a while and she was on a path that might have made her one of what adam clayton powell used to call the zarinas who ran harlem society. always in the newspaper and at this party or that gala and that was the path she was on. and earlier on it scared her. that wasn't the life she wanted and would have again on writing and state on the path and i have no idea how successful she was, published a lot of short stores and essays and reviews but who knows houston how that would 0, but decided to go to law school she went to fordham law school and if you look at law schools at the time, most of the big law schools only admitted men at the time and quite few of them had

color bar but by no means all of them. and the catholic law schools, called the women's law schools, that were created for a while at the time, tried to take up the slack. and the -- harvard tried to shut down the women's law schools in this area to give you one example. the catholic law schools generally were coeducational they had a particular mission to immigrants, to people of color, and to jewish students, most of whom couldn't get into the big law schools or not without very tight restrictions so you look at the history of the catholic law schools in the urban areas you'll find them replete with lawyers who couldn't good elsewhere. i have no idea if she could have gone elsewhere but fordham where is she went. she entered in 1927; then she

got sick and left for a while, and then she got involved in politics and did some other things and finally went back to -- the graduated in the early 1930s, and she hung out a shingle in harlem and immediately couldn't get any work. of course moe most people wanted white lawyers and some people who would hire black women or white women, but black woman was something people took awhile to get used to. she had a couple of prominent cases, defended a man names maurice dancer, black columnist of the 1920s and' '30s and she defend hem when he was being extradited for failure to pay child support and trying to stay in new york and not good back to michigan where he had a jail cell. she lost but he hadn't paid child support in i can't remember how many years. she also ran for office.

before she swept to law school -- i'm sour -- after she went to law school, she ran for the state legislature and lost. whiling the was running for state legislature, she took a case involving two voters whose registration was denied because of some mixup about the addresses and so on and took the case on the eve ethe election and won the case and got free publicity from her friends at the amsterdam news and they wrote how she is protecting you right to vote and didn't work. she lost anyway, and in spite of that. what else do we have? over here. >> i'm curious -- well, first i have a little side thing but your great uncle. you said he was a member of the communist party in the '30s. i wanted to note the communist party was very active in fighting the case of the

scottboro boys. one of the prominent voices working on that weapon we think of the party we might attach it to other ideas but it's important to remember that history also. i cass curious how your father talked about your mother. >> let me say something but the communist party. a lot of black intellectuals were attracted to the communist party in the 20s and 30s. the communist party, came out for equal rights for black americans at least back in i think around the time -- not long after the russian revolution. i don't remember when it was, 1920 or so. and a lot of black intellectuals at the time looked at the soviet union, newly established, and saw hope. saw the future. a lot that went and traveled there and studied for a while, tried to learn. not at all unusual to have that

attraction. what was unusual to stick with it. most of these people, after a few years, decided that wasn't the way where, as alfieus would double down, and the most -- and he would follow the party line. so look at, example, entry into world war ii, when germany and soviet union were allies, she was adamantly opposed to the u.s. entry into world war ii. and as soon as germany turned on and invaded russian tedder he immediately said it's crucial that the u.s. get involved and so on. at the time my father talked about -- things are awkward because my father was eunice's only child, and when he was young, she sent him to barbados where her husband was from to study, where he spent five or six years, and there's a story

around the d. average's office that was because they had been warned to take care with their families because of the luciano case. the problem is she send him to barbados six months before she was hired for luciano. she always said it was for his health but my father thought she just wanted to get him out from underfoot. when he came back from barbados she sent them to prep school. nevertheless, he used to talk but her -- she was enormous influence in his life and used to talk about her mainly with enormous respect. not with affection. but with respect. he learned a lot from her. but one little story that he used to say that his happiest moment was the moment in the mid-late 1920s, when he was a little kid, and early 30s, and it's going to sound odd. his mother got very sick and she had some surgery and so she went

to florida to recuperate with one of her mother's best friends, mary mcleod bethune, and he went down with her on the train and late in his life my father would say that train ride with his mother, when he was six or seven years old, was the happiest time they ever had together because she wasn't working, wasn't do anything but paying attention to him and that was something he had not experienced. so he loved that time together but he had enorm mess respected about loved to tell the luciano story but only after she died i started hearing stories but thank you lie luciano case. knew nothing but that when i was growing up. >> one or two more questions. >> does this episode involve tom thomas dewey, propelled him to

nomination to run against fdr? really must have made him look like a big shot. >> i think that's very good point, that the luciano trial made dewey a national figure, and like most national figures he decided he ought to be president. we're talking -- so, luciano is convicted in 1936. 1938, dewey is elected district attorney. 1940, dewie thinks he should run for president. didn't get the nomination. in 1940 he ran for president on the strength of basically lucky luciano and arrived at the convention with the most delegates -- didn't get the nomination, but wendell wickie got the nomination, the last dog horse candidate, who took multiple ballots and was a compromise and wilkie was

thrashed by roosevelt. wilkie and my grandmother became very close, actually she campaigned for him also, and, yes so in '40 -- 1942, governor of new york and then in '44 and '48, dewey campaigned for president, and begin, when he returns to presidents, he runs in 1944 on at the strongest civil right plank that any major party candidate ever ron run on in the nation's history and eunice is involved with drafting the party plank and persuading delegates to support disthis is this is when political party platforms were important and given a lot of scrutiny. if you see the book, on the cover to the book there's a picture of eunice standing there, pointing in a meet, down and there's a man next to her with has hand up in the. >> that was at a meeting of the republican in 1944 and he

refusing to yield the floor in a bat over the platform. she campaigned hard for dewey in both '44 and '48. and he talked but her a lot in both '44 and '48 when he was trying brung the black vote back to the republican party. that was his plan for winning. his plan didn't work and the other thing that hurt eunice's career was that she remain its a republican forever, even though by the late '40s the black vote, which had been very heavily republican in 1920s, had switched in the wake of the depression the other way. we don't know -- the people who claim to know exactly when that's happened, we don't actually know that and we know that it was different in late '40s than $1,920 but don't have to data to say what happened when precinct level numbers. did you have a question? time for one more question. no one else,out get a second

chance. last one. >> do you have any relationship with eleanor roosevelt? >> that's a great question. she was a great friend of eleanor roosevelt and a great fan of eleanor roosevelt. how did she thread that needle? a speech shea gave -- the same theme, basically she would say, when he gave speeches to groups of black voters, she would say, eleanor roosevelt is one of the great women of our time, a towering, moral intellectual present and how wonderful she was but this election is not but eleanor root, it's about her husband and she would tell the stories, and fdr has a lot of virtues but refused to allow black reporters at his press conference until being pressed to do so. that's a matter of record. but he wouldn't desegregate the armed forces but lied to the public saying that the naacp went along with his policy,

which was not true. everyone has things they did that historically we wish we could get back in a sense, and he was very bad on a lot of race issues which is why there's that famous poem by langston hues, waiting of roosevelt. he writes owl all the black voters have got into roosevelt and gotten in his judgment, nothing in return. maybe that's true or not true. that probably wouldn't have been any grandmother's view. the important thing is about her story, isn't what happened in politics later on. it is the fortitudes and feistiness with which she almost single handedly brought an entire office of 19 white prosecutors plus dewey, around to her theory, her lonely theory that trying to be the correct one of how to convict lucky luciano. thank you all very much for your kind attention.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this past 'er, tara westover, awe the or educated, jerome coresy, with killing the deep state, and jonah goldberg who authored suicide of the west appeared on "after words" and were month the most watched become esovereign 2018. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. for a television schedule visit booktv.org and follow along behind the scenessed a book tv on twitter, i