coming and for your wonderful questions. thank you to the kennedy library for inviting us both to appear. >> thank you to all. thank you everybody. ♪♪ ♪♪ book tv continues now on c-span2. television for serious readers.

>> my name is rachel, and the managing librarian at the brooklyn heights branch of the brooklyn public library. temporary hopping offering services as we eagerly anticipate the opening of our brand-new branch this fall. it is my pleasure to introduce jennifer on our economy whole, the hidden history of a free black brotherhood. i'm so excited to be given this honor in part due to the connection between friends of the brooklyn heights library friend group and it's a robust group supporting the brooklyn heights library in so many ways. they had a connection and i was asked by a president, deborah about the branch we'd be interested in supporting this in a virtual book watch for economy call. after discovering the story behind the book seeing the purpose and reading glowing reviews in the new york times, i

jumped at the opportunity to be able to host a program sharing this monumental book but as the accolades and publicity grew, started the importance of this program and then she drew her friend, jennifer on board, the brilliant author of manhattan beach and the squad. it's become an event and we know it. they share with the world free black brotherhood founded 1836 supporting its community through the civil war, reconstruction, white terrorism and the birth of jazz. nonfiction narrative is american history that needs to be shared highlighting voices that need to be heard and it's a deeply personal story for herself, as a new orleans native and descendent of the very community the brotherhood starves service. i am deeply excited about this conversation we are about to enjoy between fatima jake and

jennifer either. the hidden history of a free black brotherhood. take it away. >> hello five thomas. i get for being with us, i am incredibly excited to have the chance to spread the word about this remarkable book which i have been talking with fatima about for some year now which has surpassed my every expectation being a work of history that has an enormous sweep, it covers a lot of ground, tremendous importance and yet is so readable and fun so i thought it was a very complex work and i thought maybe the best place to begin would be where you began fatima in york introduction. how has the book comes to be? it begins with your father

really. >> thank you, jennifer and thank you for being here. my father found some journals into trash, you put them in the closet. in the 1950s and they sat there about 50 years. when i was looking for something to write about, i saw all of these journals and realize this is a really important part of history. >> can you describe, what are the journals and what is the organization that produced them? >> the journals of the associate economies, this started in 1836 probably when i realized in reading journals, i realized after reading the journal, this

is probably the most influential prosperous organization before or after this. >> what years do the journals cover? >> the journals cover 1836 -- 1935. the organization lasted at least until the 1950s because that's when the journals were getting posted though they covered that more than 100 years but missing from around the civil war is missing from the journal from 1842 -- 1857, so there are a few gaps that i was able to fill in with some research. >> your father always pronounced it in the french way, i have a horrible accident but could you explain what the organization did and what it role was in the community it served? >> it was basically a mutual aid

society so they take care of their members, their health if somebody sick, they help pay for doctor bills and they also bury people if somebody dies, they would take care of burial expenses and give the widow expenses but it grew over the century as politics became more important so they became more politically active and around the civil war for became very involved in what was going on in the area in the united states and the world. >> you describe growing up in the 1950s in new orleans amidst a kind of erasure of your communities history in which you were told stories by people with various members of the past or stories they heard about the past yet somehow did not quite connect with the official history, there's a beautiful

quote from your book i want to read. he said of the people telling these stories, each spoke of the past with the passion of a man wrongfully accused of a crime who repeats over and over his accounts of the moment that proved his innocence. i love that and i thought, could you explain to us what were the stories trying to prove to use the analogy you give us, what was missing from the official histories? >> the history itself basically was missing. the history of black community except basically white supremacists narrative plus. you have to understand i went to segregated goals in those schools, we knew what was going on but our elders sit us down for longer times than we wanted and tell us about the friend you brought home is this person's

grandchild and you do know his grandfather did in his great grandfather did back? we learned it like that. when i went to high school to integrate at the high school, i remember asking distinctly a nun who was getting this, i remember asking her what about the black people? what did the black people do in new orleans but she said nothing. but i had to write this. >> i wonder if this connects with something interesting to me, a distinction you explain, two different definitions of creole that existed in new orleans as you were growing up, can you talk about that? >> yes, i can. there's probably hundreds of definitions but in my time,

white supremacy started rearing its ugly head, 1890s and my time, what we hear was creole meant white where the daily newspaper wrote about, you hear about creole food natives but creoles are white. this went against our understanding because my mother spoke french around me and one thing i'd like to make clear when creole not the color, sometimes people think if you are light skin, it means you are quail but it doesn't, it means the old world and new world meant louisiana and they mean different things so you can have that like my people who can be any range of colors if they are

creole, rarely are they white but there are white people with europeans down the line. we didn't make that distinction in my neighborhood because we just felt it was old world and new world, it didn't really matter and we weren't really into race and color anyway. >> you talked about your own history and how you came to new orleans, which you told about it with some fun stories. >> it's really complicated, my grandfather came from the probably one of the first indians to come to the united states in 1890, he came to norm it's intermarried black creole woman, she was a black woman who was born in new orleans. she was the granddaughter i

believe avenue enslaved person in louisiana who was purchased by her husband, i don't think you heard this part. he was purchased by her husband and before she had children, all of her children were born. >> that different than the other side of my family, the great-grandmother of whom my great-grandfather had children by her owner, they were born enslaved and they were enslaved until they were at least 20 years old and i remember asking my grandfather, whose your family? they said who wants to know? [laughter] he wasn't going to tell anybody about his family because of that history of enslavement he wasn't proud of. they all met down in new orleans.

>> what you say perfectly mirrors what you describe about the community that the economy was serving which was in the 19th century, multi ethnic incredibly inclusive. i was struck by the fact that the economy welcomed jews, it put out an offer to chinese who might want to join and i love if you could explain to those of us who don't know that much about the south, what did multiethnic mean in new orleans in the 19th century? >> i don't know if they really used that terminology, multiethnic but it was nonwhite because the people who had privileges living in a segregated system so there were places that were white only and everyone who was white or nonwhite are colored but you are

nonwhite essentially so the people who came to tell you the truth, if you look at many communities, black communities in the united states, he will see nonwhite people come into the black community, thought his first business, where the black community tends to be inclusive so in the south especially was very inclusive because people hated each other, they worked together and as i said, they didn't believe in racism, we just didn't believe it, the premise. it didn't make any logical sense to us. >> economy halt, your title comes from an actual place and i wonder if you could talk about that place and it's history and also you are very eloquent in your book about the importance of actually having a place to hold meetings. let's talk a little bit about the actual place of economy

hall. >> economy hall in 1836, the economy a piece of property small house in in 185720 years later, they decided to build a grand home. they hurt other organizations had a call, it's going to be across the street from our original building so they built the home in 1857 i became the center of the community. there were balls, performances, theaters, opera and as the civil war approached, it became increasingly political they came down having the boat in there, they did butter registrations, it was very important to the community. that community basically survived. my father on the back of the

dump truck, he discovered them because of the friends of the economy society. he said they were exposed in getting rid of everything in there and nobody wanted these books so they took them to the top so it storytelling and connecting this idea, no more than 100 years. >> yet now let's talk about the physical document, your father took them and you described beautifully is building cover to put them in and staining it and luckily having a house that was elevated enough that katrina for example, did not damage these documents which were already water damage to because you mentioned your father had to put them out in the sun and let them dry because they had gotten rained on in the dump truck which i have to say is painful to think about but many years

passed and you became a journalist and fiction writer and writer of children's books. talk about your return to these books that you had not had a law of deep contacts with children. >> i knew the books were there the whole time because when i was a child everybody everybody got into the house, they said to important, don't touch the stuff you are a child. i had in the back of my mind, sometimes when i would come home overlooking the cabinets and see, it just seemed like too much trouble. after i had been away for a long time, seeing the way history was interpreted in a new this was there, i wanted to read see what was in them and when i saw the handwriting, the handwriting alone we saw in the video, i think that tells you that these

people are very educated so i was drawn to that, the person you saw his signature, i grew up around them at my cousin's cousin so i knew the name enfin to find out he had been a schoolteacher and involved in the preprint bureau in all sorts of things, it was fun to find out. >> one think that was surprising to me to see the beauty of some of the excerpts from these documents, these are minutes of meetings and i'm going to read one short excerpt. love is a beautiful dream. the aspiration of the known to the unknown, the diving ray ravished by prometheus, god created the world only because he needed to love.

it's not what you would expect to find in meeting minutes but we did find such so it's striking in a sense that these are literary documents. were you surprised by that, by what you found in them and the old they ended up taking over you and your own literary life? >> i was definitely surprised how literary they work. in a way it makes sense because as i knew my father and my father's friends, they were always encouraging each other, always telling each other can do this, you should do this, i write the book a bit about you couldn't get a phd in the united states so we had to drive new orleans to canada every summer and slip in a place without segregation, it was one of his friends who told him you don't

need to stick around here, get out of the country for a little while so when i saw these guys writing encouraging words, inspirational words to each other, it was surprising it was written but it wasn't surprising they did that because i heard not that language exactly but i heard that in my community and in my life. >> what about the language of these documents? you mentioned a friend described it as french american. what is the language like and how is it different from just french or american english? >> it's not english until about 1926, they are writing entirely in french a little broken english. 1926 the girl all the way. the french, the way the french

preston, the way the french read the sentences, the sentence construction was sort of like an english construction. for example, when they started to get around americans, around the time of the civil war, when they got around americans, they used words -- [inaudible] about was beautiful because she would say i love you. [inaudible] >> i am curious about the process, the enormous undertaking sympathizing 100 years of documentation into a

historical work and i went back to share the timeline how that occurred. simply reading these journals must have taken you quite a while. where were you in your life at the time? how did you put this in? when did it become a full-time project? take us through your interaction. >> are making me laugh because only now is it a full-time project. he was about 20 years ago i started with the journal and i basically was going through the journals and would try to summarize what i thought was going on. when i came to something i couldn't understand because the french were to interpret and involved with something, at the university something like 16 or 18 language and i would go ask

whether it was this, some of them that i had to understand the genealogy so he could read french so that took about five years. after i did that, i started -- sort of as i was going along with it, with my neighbor and the people in the neighborhood so that made me a little grocer to it sometimes -- spiritual things what happened. for example there was a fellow who committed suicide and he wrote a suicide note that i was in the library and i didn't know who this guy was nice a person i knew 30 years, i saw her sitting

at a microphone machine and i said do you know who these people are? she said that's my ancestor. [laughter] she didn't know he had committed suicide about was the first time she had seen a letter in his words so it's like make be okay, it took me about 20 years. had i known i would work on one book 20 years, i would have picked somebody like you. [laughter] i would not have worked that long because i was trying to do, i was trying to be a published writer, i have a full-time job as a teacher, i did some short stories in short periods of time. that is the timeline. >> of course you had a tremendous resource, your own community had been given you in a sense oral history components

of this story even as you said as a kid who didn't always want to listen to them so what degree did you reengage with that community in the role of historian to fill out this picture? what were those expenses like? >> that was probably some of the most prevailing expenses because some of these people were old, a friend of mine, we are all present down here. she had an aunt about 100 years old and her daughter was about eight years old and her mother had also, her mother's and had met her so when i spoke to them it was the years there and their parents didn't want them to go sometimes so there were really

rich stories. >> do you feel it further enriched your own relationship to your community? >> sure, yes. if you know anybody from new orleans, we don't ever leave, we can live somewhere else but we are always there in spirit. more people, i was connected but my friend and i were connected for generations and she found when her parents, they were both ancestors and members of the economy call in 1850 so that became much more fun, that was fun to know that i always carry norman's around with me as you

probably have seen. >> it is lucky he began the project when you did in the sense that you caught a moment for more of this existed in loving memory i'm guessing than now. a lot of these stories are fading at it's crucial to get to people and record them while they are still here and can remember. >> the four people i was talking about, my mother passed, the 100 year old woman and her daughter have passed so none of these people are still around so i was very lucky to talk to them and i spoke to them when i started seeing the names of people that knew and i reached out to them to see whether i could talk to their older families. this whole process was love.

it was luck that my dad found the book, it was luck that i was a writer and found something the book, it was luck into these people so there are séances in the book affect. >> i look back, there are stances recorded in the minute. how many minutes? it is nice, it was fun to find out some of this and then i would look into the journal and there would be this real thing that happened so i could quote it, it was great. >> a boy so now i'm curious how you, the fiction writer and journalist undertook a mammoth job of trying to sympathize and crystallize this enormous amount

of history and material into a story and you make some bold choices and one of them you alluded to earlier but you choose to focus your gaze on one particular person, who car -- >> the french pronunciation, we can say it in english -- >> tell us a little bit, he is a fascinating figure with an amazing history. i'd love to hear about if you could tell us about him and what it was about him that made you feel like you would be the gaze to walk in on in this story. >> i first the story, there were so many things going on. i had to find a person to hang the story on for it to move and not just be a historical account.

i'm a fiction writer so i wanted it to move like a novel and luckily from 1812 -- 1892, he had a very long life to work with so was also good at so many things at a time the enslaved to read, talk someone enslaved on the side. then he became part of the reconstruction element, with the grand marshall of the celebration in new orleans and also by the new york times so they didn't mention him but they mentioned the celebration so i was able to get a lot of color from that then is started out like a poet he had this beautiful handwriting and everyone, the units would say he

gave spontaneous. how can you resist if you are a writer? somebody who stands up at a meeting like that? it was wonderful. he was politically active and named his children after writers. her child was named homer, i think it was homer but they were named after writers. it was really fun to follow him. >> the accompanying his own literary awareness about the fact that he was present for so many historical events and so deeply involved in the economy that made him think i could

bring you all the rest. >> he was the go to guy. also when he them, his precise about the way he would take the minute. he would number them and then he would get a conference speech and you could see what would come up in the minutes but it was very clear to read and also anything important he would underline and make exclamation points. he was a really easy person to follow and he's one of these people who is not a senator or president or congressman, he's just a person in the community, i knew he had lived here more than 100 years. >> it must feel as if you know

him. it feels like you know his personality and what matter to him. he was sort of like a helpmate for you. >> yes, he was a lot of fun. in fact at one time, they get in arguments with each other at certain points and there was one time one fellow didn't agree with another and he was on the street and hit him with his cane bruised him in the face so the two men came to the meeting and talked about this in one set i'm still bruised in the face because of your cane and bruised because of your insult and came. then he wrote word for word and he said the other one says it is not my apology, it is my arms and he says -- it was beautiful

writing. >> i want to take this moment to say in the chat i believe my links are appearing for the book. these are amazing anecdotes and remarkable tidbits and it is a very fun book to read and i urge all of you to buy it for yourself and your loved ones. >> thank you. >> another thing so for sure, he is a great part of what makes this book so readable but the other part is you because you bring us into these moments with a full array of scene setting tools i think probably honed in your time is a fiction writer and writer, you really put us in the moment and it is tremendously compelling and i'm

wondering, you also have a gigantic amount of footnotes and i know you relied heavily on sources but also on your own imagination and i wonder if you could talk to us about the craft challenge of deciding where to draw the line about what you were willing to imagine and how you negotiated those questions. >> okay, the imagination in the setting of a scene, the scene itself is proof so let me put it this way. one night they have a meeting at the hall, they were talking about, both were black men. it was november, i looked at the weather digit on that day. i looked up time of the sunset in some days so i was able to say i know for example, he

walked into the room and gave the speech. i knew he had to walk into the room because he didn't get the speech from outside so i could say the array and i knew the meaning time and the sunset was at 6:00, now i knew were 6:00 was selfie walked into the fourth was about the time the sun was setting room for warmth because they have their "barn it was crowded, 600 people or something, i don't remember how many, hundreds of people so you figure hundreds of men packed into a room steady and moist and in the walls you know so i can do that but not imagination from in any of the words in there from the words of the people in

the newspaper reports in the journal for cap basically, i have a fabulous editor who would not let me get away with anything. he asked me, there is a street, we called it ursuline street. when was it an avenue? was it an avenue in 1862 or 1867? i found like five references, three have different ones so we checked out everything. >> it sounds like it's not so much imagination as using your tools as a writer to connect the factual thoughts in ways that bring the sensory quality of life in the moment.

>> right. this is the kind of leader i am, i have to feel something that's going on in the way i take in information and fiction, i have my census and that is how i get my information so for me to feel anything for census so for my reader to feel anything, they have to know what it smells like tastes and what the sound is that they are hearing and then they are in the room. select one from fiction journalism. did a lot of pieces that are centralist that way it felt like

i mentioned katrina and i went to jump on and ask you, i was surprised hear you right in your book in a sense the biggest disruption of this community you are tracking the link was katrina, that has really fractured the community in certain ways that was shocking to me and all those years and events of this century is the one so disruptive, can you talk about that? >> most of these generations talking about lived in the downtown areas of new orleans and that's where the levees broke so the flood came into our neighborhood and a lot of these people without homes, figured

elders were in their 70s to 90s at that time so we launched that connection, a lot of them, there was one problem closely connected to this hall. most of our elders we evacuated, my cousin evacuated and retook the out of town for they were getting heart attacks and strokes and they were out of their environment so more than 80 people in new orleans at the time of katrina were born here so it's a city where people just stay. the fact disruption of having all of us downtown neighborhoods what about, losing those elders, affected us in. >> you also mentioned a diaspora effect resulted with a number of

people leaving the city who have not returned. i believe it was almost 100,000. >> yes, almost 100,000 not returned. you could read some posts on the website about this because there was back diaspora, the house was were flooded, it was difficult so to follow this whole white supremacy for they were in neighborhoods so how do we get enough to pay for the house and rebuild our house? all kinds of problems like that. get the most from a lot of people would need money so a lot of things we could not redo but it was built back up by corporations, housing or people

thought a lot of money who could get $20,300,000 for a house, people who bought the house for $5000 now worth 300,000 can't get a loan because they retired and the integration of the community. so they will go to atlanta and see it better. >> it feels like it is exactly what economy was there to do, hold the community together to find tangible ways for people to help each other and it feels like that's what we don't seem to have any more. >> there having a very hard time but we lost a lot because the

economy was, education as part of the goal to help one another so that is what they did lovely educated each other and get house and their friends. in fact the house i'm sitting in, the new part of our house, a member back in the house, food bank. i don't know if my book gave much of anything but for the house to be built, everybody went on saturday to their house and that's how the community was built. >> i'm wondering how your community has react to this

contribution you've made with so much history. >> they like me a little bit more what can i say? i think. [laughter] >> that is so funny, it is that personal. [laughter] >> if they are not in the book -- >> that is so funny. it is a measure, i diffracted my own, i can't even imagine being part of think like that but that is so telling so human nature. we all want to be included in my

truck our ancestors were giving their proper due exactly. and i have to remind everybody when you look at history, something i learned from were not responsible for your ancestors and you cannot think anything of your ancestors so they were terrible and you don't want to claim them so you have to make a choice on your own. >> you are in new orleans right now. >> i am. >> yes, the house where i grew up behind me, the porch where my dad looks out the house i come from, were able to get the house

after katrina self my debt a heart attack but we were able to keep the house so this is a special for many different reasons. >> it is special to be in the house with you which is want for virtual nature of our meeting silver lining to be in the house from this place. i think i'm seeing from questions coming so i'm going to look at those and we will hear from some thing i'd like to. >> ), and you want a connection between the church.

>> the they were attached catholic religion because not. for example didn't recognize marriage cap get married recognize marriage after civil war when white supremacy -- after the civil war the end of reconstruction and white supremacy and the guys from many of them broke away from the church and you would see them, talking about having séances going toward spiritualism the protestant religion because the catholic church was sacred and.

>> one comment if you would stay close to your computer when you lean back, i think some people have trouble hearing i love based on what you said about family connections to your book, you know the family -- you. [laughter] >> was almost killed by a mob? >> yes, thank you for mentioning that. remember i said suffrage for black men, the constitution at the time when they first came back into the united states

lincoln wanted to so the state back, he wanted the southern states back into the united states so he did the 10% solution and louisiana came back without giving the rights to vote for blocks. somatic decided they would do that. his affect convention police came. he was there and so for several other economy numbers, i think his son was nine or ten they stabbed the boy, shut out his i and he was almost killed when he was trying to come out of the building trying to get out, almost killed but they grabbed the man in front of him and he

was able to run away. he made a statement instead the floor was slippery so for think i wanted to mention, the history we think right now everything we do is new and it. these men were fighting for broader fight registration was going on at the time people were trying to stop. there were police or shall i supremacy group and therefore malicious.and try to kill elected officials, there were mobs that went into trust so if you can learn something from the book, i don't want to be crazy

but realize that there is a playbook of white supremacy in the happened in the 1860s it if you note the playbook, you will see that you can do something about it because you will know when they start denigrating people use police to kill people, when mobs start taking elected people and threatened them, you got something going on. >> how was economy hall related to ferguson? >> the members of the economy, probably one of the first, among the first maybe one of two black mutual aid societies in the 1830s, ferguson was in the 1890s. there were many more, hundreds of associations at that time, many supported the ferguson case. the president of the economic

society and also a member of the citizens committee who were enthralled in taking the case to court so they have that the president -- i know many of you are in support of the legislation, they were very against the jim crow and for those of you who don't know, there was a case taken to the u.s. supreme court. >> okay and i wanted to ask one more question and then maybe and apparently soon but i wondered if you could talk about music

for a minute. so many of us associate new orleans with music, jazz in particular you write about music in the book. can you talk about the economy and its relationship to music over time? >> if you go to the heritage festival, you will see the economy based on this particular hall. music all the way through, all of these things in the early years and the last incarnation was jazz. the same people who used to come together and support each other and build houses, when they were driven out of legislation, their music make money. one place they played music was the economy hall, they would have parties they would pay musicians that way and they

would go to the poor people and the money would circulate in the community. you will see you played at economy hall, the people who came to economy hall the first to take them outside of new orleans. >> out of the question, did economy hall has members that were enslaved as well as people of color? >> they did not. well, they did not. these people were millionaires, one of them had homes in louisiana no more than the society and this class. the second thing and more

importantly when there was slavery, people of color and enslaved, they started appending meetings, i don't want to go to long but the fear that these people were enslaved them to revoke. his father was in the nascent revolution so there was a good reason for them to be afraid. police really did not want to see the people, and that, they would go to jail and they started sending their meetings so they didn't do it. besides the social class, they would also go to jail. >> when this is done, i urge you to look up a chat. we've got the grandfather -- other people who know other

people so it's meaning more meat that i does to you. we are pretty much out of time but i'm going to ask you one final question which is a tough one, you quoted this from the economy mission to help one another teach one another while holding out the protective hand to suffering humanity. you can't shoot much higher than that. we live in a moment of this division and racial tension and political strife and i wonder what economy hall could tell us, if anything wait but what can this story to us to improve our own situation and live better? >> may i quote to you from economy hall? i wasn't expecting that question.

in 1858 the narrative all about crime, but it repressed and justly patriots that they must follow come out of the isolation our questions but. they would like to see, tearing apart. thank you for what we can do for one another, we should join together. >> your fear. an excellent note to enter on. it's such a pleasure to talk with her. thank you all for joining us please, i urge you to buy this book.

>> thank you so much, i hope you all enjoyed conversation tonight as much as i have. if you haven't had the honor of being able to read this book, economy hall, hidden history of greek black brotherhood, i urge you too. it is a treasure. thank you so much again and i hope you all have a wonderful night. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

♪♪ >> weekend on to every saturday will find events and people may come up with tv brings the latest. television series readers. ... booktv.org. .. this exciting book the indi >> not just the start but many talks over the years a great