>> hear those during the presidential regardings. the nixon tapes, part private conversations, part deliberations, and 100% unfiltered. >> yeah, let me say that we have the main thing is that it will pass and my heart goes out to those people who with the best of intentions are overzealous but as i'm sure you know, i'll tell you if i could have only -- if i could have spent a bit more time being politician and not being president, i would have kicked their butts out but i didn't know what they were doing. >> find presidential recordings season 2 on the cpan app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> my name is rachel and i'm the

managing librarian of the brooklyn heights branch of thehe brooklyn public library temporarily offering lobby service out of the newra center for brooklyn history as we eagerly anticipate the opening of our brand new branch this fall. it is my pleasure to introduce the bpl presents events tonight. fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall," the history of a free black brotherhood. i'm excited to be given this honor in part due to the connection with the friends of the brooklyn heights library friends group and it's a robust group that supports the brooklya heights library in so many ways. they had a connection with fatima and i was asked by the friends group president if as a branch we'd be interested in supporting fatima in a virtualpp book launch nor "economy hall". after discovering the story behind the book and seeing the star review and reading the glowing review 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 the publicity grew, so did the importance of this program. then fatima drew her friend jenniferrd egan on board, the brilliant author of manhattan beach and it became a bpl events and we knew it. fatima shaik shares with the world the free black brotherhood in new orleans that supported it -z community through the civil war, reconstruction, white terrorism, and the birth of jazz. this now fiction narrative is american history that needs to be shared and highlights voices that need to be heard and it is the deeply personal story for fatima herself as a new orleans native and a descendent of the very community the brotherhood served. this book is a treasure and i'm deeply excited about this conversation we're about to enjoy between fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall,"

the hidden history of a free black brotherhood. fatima, jennifer, please take it away. jennifer: hello, everyone, and thank you for being with us. i'm so excited to spread the word about this remarkable book that i've been talking with fatima about for years now and it's surpassed my every expectation in being a work of history that has an enormous sweep, coversep a lot of ground and has tremendous importance and is so readable and fun. i thought that -- it's a very complex work, and i thought maybe the best place to begin would be t really where you beg, fat marx in your introduction. tell us how this book came to be and it's a story that t begins with your father.

fatima: sure. thank you, jennifer, and for everybody being here. my father found some journals in the trash in the back of the dump truck and brought them home and he put them in the closet. he found them in 1950s and they sat there for like about 50 years. so i was already a writer but that time and i was looking for something worthwhile to write haabout. i looked in the close and the et and -- closet and saw all these journals and realized it's a important part of history. jennifer: can you describe what are the journals and what is the organization that produced them. fatima: sure. the journals are the mince of the meetings of the associated economy, the economy society, and it's an organization of black men that started in 1836 and when i realized after reading the journals, about 3,000 dais. after reading the journals was that this was probablyy the most

influential and prosperous organization of black men in the south either before or after the civil war. jennifer: what years do the journals cover? fatima: they cover from 1836 to 1935. the organization lasted till at least the 1950s because that's when the journals were getting disposed after. it was more than a 100 year period and there's some placese missing, around the civil war it's missing, the journal from 1842 to 1857 are missing so there's a few gaps i was able to feel that out by doing some research. jennifer: you talked about it in the fact that your father pronounced it in the french way. i have a horrible french accent, but can you explain what this organization did and what its role was in the community that it served. fatima: at that time it was basically a mutual aid society

so a mutual aid society takes care of its members, their health if somebody gets sick, they help pay for the doctor bills. they also buried people if somebody died, they'd take care of the burial expenses and give the widow some must be. however, it grew over the century as politics became more important so that they became much more politically active and around the civil war they became very involved ine what was going on in louisiana. and actually the united states and the world. jennifer: you describe growing up in the 1950s in new orleans amies a kind of change of your community's history and told stories of people with various memories of the past and stories of the past that somehow did not quite connect with the official histories and there's a beautiful quote from your book that i want to read. you said of the people that were

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 account of the moment that proves his innocence. i love that, and i thought could you explain to us what were these stories trying to assert or prove to use the analogy that you give us. what was missing from the official histories? fatima. the history itself was missing. the history of a black community and any community except basically what the white supremacist narrative was down south. you have to understand i went through segregated schools and in the serves we sort of knew what was going on because our elders would sit us down learn times than what we really wanted to listen, and they would tell us about, you know, that friend that you just brought home is this person's grandchild.

did you know his grandfather did such and such and his great grandfather did this. we learned like that. when i went to high school and we were about the fourth class to integrate in catholic high school. i remember asking distinctly a none giving us a white issupremacist narrative asking r what about the black people? what did the black people do in new orleans and she said well, nothing. i mean, i had to write this basically. jennifer: i wonder if this connects with something that was interesting to w me, a distinctn that you explained, two different definitions of creole that existed in new orleans as you were growing up. can you talk about that? fatima: yes, i can. there's probably hundreds of definitions of creole depending on who you're talking to. in my time -- well, you figure

that white supremacy started rearing its ugly head post-reconstruction. it got virulent in the 1950s. what we hear is creole meant life. there's a quote in the book itself with the daily newspaper wrote about you hear about creole food and hear about creole tomatoes but creoles are white. creoles are not negros. this sort of went against our understanding and my mother spoke french around me and one thing is creole is not a color. sometimes i people think that if you're light skinned that means you're creole. well, it really doesn't. what it means is that the old world and new world met in louisiana, and they blended into different things. youia can have people of african dissent like me people that can be any range of color and

they're creole. rarely are they white but there's white people that just married europeans down the line and called right creole and we didn't make that distinction in my neighborhood because we felt it was the mixing of the old world and new world and didn't really matter to us. we weren't really into race and color anyway. jennifer: you talk a little bit about your own history and how you came to be born in new orleanss and you've told me about it in some fun stories. fatima: some of those get really complicated and my grand father, i have the name fatima shaik because my grandfather came from india and he was probably one of the first indians to come to the united states in the 1890s and came to new orleans and married a black creole come. she was -- woman. she was a black woman who spoke french and born in new orleans. she was the granddaughter, i

believe, of an enslaved person. an enslaved person in louisiana who was purchased by her .h i don't think you heard this part, jennifer, she was purchased by her husband and freed before she had children so all of her children were born feoffment that is different from the other side of my family who's -- the great grandmother of whom -- my great grandmother had children by her owner also who did not free his children. they were born enslaved and they were enslaved until they were at least 20 years old. i remember asking my grandfather like, well, who's your family and he asked me and said, well, who wants to know. he really wasn't going to tell anything about his past. of that history of enslavement he wasn't really proud of it but his father was a slave. they all melt down in new orleans.et jennifer: what you say perfectly

mirrors what you describe about the community that the economy was serving, which was in the 19 century to multiethnic and incredibly inclusive and 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 it if you could explain to those of us who don't know necessarily that much about the south. what did multiethnic mean in new orleans in the 19 century? fatima: i don't know if i use that terminology multiethnic but the people who had privileged because we're living in a segregated system so there were places that were whites only and everyone who was not white or was nonwhite; right, or colored, they might call them colored.

they were nonwhite essentially and the people coming to the community and to tell you the truth, if you look at many communities, black communities in the united states, you will see that nonwhite people go right into the black community also. that's where they make their first businesses and where the black community tends to be quitefi inclusive. in the south especially, it was very inclusive because people needed each other. they worked together and as i were not -- they didn't believe racism. we just didn't believe it. it's a premise. didn't make any logical sense to us. jennifer: common hall, your title -- "economy hall," your title, comes from an actual place. can you talk a bit about that place and its history and also just about you're very eloquent in your book about the importance of actually having a place to hold meetings.

talk a a bit about the place in "economy hall". fatima: in 1886 they bought a piece of property and built a small hall and in 1897, they built a grand hall. they were going to build a huge hall and across the street from our original building and built the hall in 1857 and became the center of the community. there were halls filled with fill monic performances and -- philharmonic performances and as the civil war approached, people came down and talked about suffrage in the 1860s and met about having the vote -- having the vote in there and did voter registration drives and they became very important to the community. that community basically survived until my generation, my father when he discovered the journals on the back, he

discovered them because his friend was a member of the economy society and he was one of the last members of the economy society, and he said that the hall had been sold and they were getting rid of everything that was in there. nobody wanted these books so he sent them to the dump. this sort of story telling and connection that came down for me, we know more than 100 years. jennifer: and yet, now let's talk about the physical documents. so your father took them and you described beautifully his building a cupboard to put them in and staining it and very luckily having a house that was elevated enough that katrina for example did not damage these documents, which already were water damaged because you mentioned that you had to put -- 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. you became a journalist and writer and writer of fiction books and talk about your return to these books that you really had not had a lot of very deep contact with until then it seems. fatima: well, i knew the books were there the whole time because when i wase a child, everybody said once the books got in the house, everybody said, don't touch them. they're too important, you're a child. don't touch that stuff. i hadn it in the back of my mid and come home and look in the cabinet and see them but i couldn't make anything out. it seemed like a lot of trouble. after being away for a long time aand seen the way history was interpreted and knew that this was there, i wanted to read and see what was in them. when i saw the handwriting, just the handwriting alone, i think when you saw in the video, just the handwriting alone tells you

thesee are very educated people and i was drawn to the person who you saw his signature, i grew up around the bogills and my cousin's cousin and i knew the name and to find out that luther had been a schoolteacher and had been involved in the friedmann bureau and all sorts of things, it was really, really fun to find out. jennifer: it was surprising to me to see the beauty of the exempts of the documents and they with -- excerpts of the documents because they're meeting of minutes. i'll read one, love is a beautiful dream and the aspiration of the known to unknown, the diving ray ravished by promethius.

god created the world because he needed to love. not what you expect to find in meeting minutes. would that we did find such things so it's striking that in a sense these are literary documents. were you surprised by that and what you found in them and by the hold that they ended uptaking over you and your own literary life? >> yeah, yeah. iit was definitely surprised by how literary they were. in a way though, it made sense because you know as i knew my father and i knew my father's friends, they were always encouraging each other so they were always telling each other, you can do this or you should do this. i write in the book how he couldn't easily get a phd in the united states and he drove from new orleans to canada every summer so live in a p place without segregation for a little while. it was one of his friends that told him, you don't need to

stick around here. get out of the country for a little while. when i saw these guys writing these encouraging words and inspirational words toro each other, it was surprising that i saw it written but it wasn't o surprising that they did that because i had almost heard that same sort of -- not that language exactly, but i'd heard that spirit in my community and in my life. jennifer: what about the language of these documents and you mentioned that a friend of yours described it as french american. fatima: what is the language like and how is it different from just french or american english. fatima: they're writing in entirely french till about 1912 and it's a little broken phrenoand have broken english and in 1926, they go always to english and the french, the latest french is here and the

way the french read was the sentence construction was likese an english construction or for example when they started to get around americans around the time of the civil war and we callede them americans because they were angle americans and they started using certain words. c-a-t-r-m-a-n. cher means dear. jennifer: i'm curious about the process of the enormous undertaking of synthesizing 100 years of documentation into a historical work.

and i guess i would love to hear the time line of how that occurred and simply reading these journals must have taken you quite awhile. where were you at that time in your life and when did it become a full-time project? take us through your interaction interactions with them. fatima: you're making me laugh because only now is a full-time project. it's a full-time job. it was about 20 years ago that started reading the journals and i would go through the journals and put down the dates and summarize what i thought was going on. when i came to something that i really couldn't understand because the french was too difficult and involved, i would ask somebody, there was a priest, i don't want to shout out to them at st. peter's university who speaks something like 16 to 18 languages and i

would go there and ask him like whether this needs it because these journals were in french and some of the journals that i had to do to understand the genealogy were in spanish. he could read french and spanish and he was great. back about five years, after i did that, i started seeing and as i was going along with it, i saw names of my neighbors and i saw family names and the people that lived in neighborhood so that made me a little bit closer to it. then sometimes some really spiritual thing would happen. for example, there was a fellow who committed suicide and he wrote a suicide note and i was in the library and i didn't know who the guy was and saw the person from gammar school i saw

in gush grammar school i hadn't seen in 30 years. i saw her at the microphone machine and she said that's my ancestor. that's my ancestor and she didn't know he committed suicide. that's the first time she had seen a letter in his words. so, that's why it took me about 20 years and had i known i'd work on one book for 20 years or was it not maybe given to somebody like you. i wouldn't have work that had long on it. a published writer and doing children's work and a full-time job as a teacher and get a couple of books of short stories which are possible in short periods of time. that is the time line.

jennifer: you mentioned someone was giving you the oral components of this story and as a a kid you didn't always want to listen to them. what made you reengage in that community in the role of historian and what was that like? >> that was some of the most fulfilling this is.s. essome of the people were old ad a friend of mine and sort of narrative for my family and we're all cousins down here. she had an iq of about 100 and someone knells her that was 80 years old and they danced at "economy hall" and her mother danced at "economy hall" and her mother's friend met her husband at "economy hall". when i spoke to them, they told me about the music that was played there and their parents didn't want them to go sometime.

that was part of it. >> do you feel like it further enriched your own relationship to your community? >> oh, sure. if you know anybody from new orleans, we're always -- look at jon betsy and we can live elsewhere but our spirit is always in new orleans. with that, it gave me more people to know how i was connected like i found out my friend was connected for at least three generations and s found out about her parents who had met -- her parents were bots were members of "economy hall" in 1850s. i mean jennifer: you caught a

moment where more lives in existing memory than it does now. a lot of stories are told and people get to r remember them ad tell them. fatima: my friend's mother passed and her mother passed and the 100-year-old woman and her daughter passed so none of these people are around and i was lucky to talk to them and i talked to them when i started like the second step when i started seeing the names of people they knew. i started reaching out to some of them because i was seeing if i could talk to their older families. this whole process was sort of

luck. it was luck i found the books and became a writer and found these people. there's seances in the book. jennifer: i love that. there are seances that are recorded in the minutes. how many meeting minutes include the presence of ghosts? i wonder. fatima: what was fun wases to fd out someic of thes his torr y events and then look in the seance journal and this ghost talking about a real thing that happened so i could quote the ghost. jennifer: oh, boy. now i'm curious about how you the fiction writer and journalist undertook the mammoth job of trying to synthesize and

crystallize the enormous amount of history and material into a story and you make some bold choices and one you eluded to earlier and you choose to focus your gaze on one particular person. is that how you'd say it. the french pronunciation and we can say it in english. fatima: we didn't see it they way. he's a fast named figure with amazing history and i would love to hear about it if it's him and what about him that would be the gaze to lock in on for this story. fatima: at first the story was -- there were so many o this going on. i had to find a person to hang the story on in order for it to move and not be just the

historical accountant and i wanted tomo move like a novel. luckily he lived from 1812-1892 so i had a very long life to work w. he was against the loss of enslaved to read, he had a school and he had in fact taught some enslaved on the side and wasn't supposed to. he game part of the reconstruction and the celebration and this was covered in the role and covered in the economy and they mentioned the celebration that i was able to get a lot of color from that and then he was the minutes would

say gogeil and minutes giving us spontaneous poets. somebody that stands up at a men's meeting and giving us spontaneous form. it's wonderful. he was politically active and named his children after writers and another was named homer, i think. but all of his kids were named -- all of his boys were writers so it was really fun following him. jennifer: so the combination of his literary and historical events and the economy made him

the guy that couldn't do all th. rest. fatima: he also -- when he took them in, he was very precise about the way he took the minutes. every time they brought something new, then he gave us a contents page. that was really clear and anything important happen, he would make underlying and make exclamation point or he would have people telling us he was a really a line and not a president or congressman and he was just a person that lived in community and people knew that he lived here more than 100 years.

you know what mattered to him. jennifer: he was like a house michigan fatima: he was a lot of fun. at one point because these are guys so they get in arguments with each other and at certain points then he wrote, there was one point with one fellow who didn't agree with another one, he saw him on the street and hit him with his cane and hurt his face and came to the meeting and talked about it i was hit in the face because of your cane. the other said it's not my apology that iot want to give y. it's my arms.

and bogeil writes they embrace so close, they were like one. it was beautiful. jennifer: i want toak take the moment to say the by lynns are appearing for -- links are appearing for this chat and it's a very, very fun book to read and i urge all of you to buy for yourself and your loved ones. fatima: thank you. jennifer: so for sure, he is a big part of what makes this book so readable but the other part is you, fatima, because you bring us into these moments with a full array of scene-setting tools that i think probably were honed in your time as a fiction writer and a journalist, you bring us senses, clothing, smell, and you put us in the moment and it's tremendously

compelling and i'm wondering because you have a gigantic quantity of footnotes and i know you were relying heavily on sources but also on your own imagination. deciding where to draw the line and how to imagine and how you negotiated those questions. fatima: okay. there is imagination in the setting of a scene in two things. the scene itself is true. let me put this this way. but someone, they had a meeting oturu "economy hall" and it was talking about the vote for black men and it was november, november 1863 and look at weather in 1883 and looked at time of sunset on some days. i was able to say that this pare

bogeil walked into the room and gave the speech. he had to walk in the room because he didn't give the speech from outside so i can say and the meeting begins around 7:00 and if it was around 6:00, now i know what it looks like. i can say water rigs walked into the "economy hall" just about the time the sun was setting and everyone had overcoats on and figure hundreds of men pass in the room and it'll be steady and moist and plaster walls and white plaster walls wet a little bit. i can do that because this is fast. it's not imagination. it's not imagination in any of the words that are in there or the words people use.

they're in the newspaper are the quotes in the journals or -- yeah, basically. everything. the fact that i had a fabulous editor, cathy nelson who would not let me get away with anything. the resident avenue in 1852 and avenue in 1857. so now i found like five references, three of them had different things. so we have the work cut out for the day. jennifer: it's not as much imagination using tools and writers to connect the festival dots in the way that bring the sensory quality of it to life and put us in the moment.

fatima: right. fiction itself is -- i have to feel victim is the kind of reader i am. iad have to feel something in te way it's going on. it's more my senses and the five senses is how i get my information. to feel anything affects how anything feels. for me and my h reader to feel anything, they have to know what it smells like. fiction and brought them from journalism and study the narrative journalism and did a holt ofls pieces if y'all want o read things. in a way talking about what it felt like after katrina.

jennifer: you mentioned katrina and i want to jump on and ask you a question because i was write in to hear you your book that in a sense, the biggest structure, the biggest disruption of this community that you are tracking back to the early 19th century really was katrina and that was sort of shocking to me and it was an event for centuries and can you talk a little bit about that? fatima: yes, most of these people and generations i'm talking about lived in downtown area of new orleans and downtown areas of new orleans and they weren't the folk and the flood came into the area.

it was in the 1890s at that time and it was one couplet that you're reading the book that drowned in their house who were very closely connected to the "economy hall". most of our elders, we evacuated them and my cousin evacuated my dad and we took them out of town but theyac were getting heart attacks and strokes and they were out of their environment. i think the statistic was more than 80 peopleic in new orleanst the time of katrina were born here. it's a city where people stay and they don't really leave. they don't really leave. so that disruption of having all of those neighborhoods, those downtown neighborhoods flooded out, losing elders and that really did us in. that did us in quite a bit. jennifer: you also mention add diaspera that resulted with a number of people leaving the

city who have not returned and it was almost 100,000. fatima: yes, almost 100,000. 100,000 have returned and read on the website about this because there were houses that were flooded and it was very difficult to know. here, follow this whole white supremacy thing down the road and we're in other neighborhoods and how do we get enough insurance to pay for the houses and people were having all kinds of problems like that. couldn't get back into the neighborhood and who could get the most in the naked, a lot of people with money usually from out of town. a lot of neighborhoods we could not rebuild or being built back up by corporate agents that are building standard-type housing or people with a lot of money

who can come in and $200 or $300,000 for a house doesn't mean anything to them. it's a bargain. for people who bought the house for $5,000 and the house now is worth $300,000 and can't get a loan because they're retired, it's the reintegration of the community. they'll go to f houston or at atlantaand say listen, i guess l stay here. jennifer: it feels like it's exactly what the economy would dare to do to try and hold the community back together to find tangible ways for people to help each other and it feels like that is what we don't seem to have anymore. that community does not seem to have anymore. fatima: that community is having a very hard time and some people are holding it together a bit and i have friends that live here and they're still holding it f together, but we lost a lot because the economy was -- they

were operating in a time of enslavement. the educated part of their goal was to educate one another and help one t another and we saw te hands of suffering they educated each over and saw the hands and if they needed to get anything. the house i'm sitting in right now, the new part of our house, i can remember the day that relatives and friends came over and framed up the back of the house. they were cooking food, they cooked and the guys came and framed up the house in half a day and the priest came and blessed the home. i don't know if we paid them much of anything. but the next person with a house to be built, everybody went on saturday over to their house. that's how this community was built.

jennifer: i'm wondering how your community reacted to this that had synthesizing of the history. fatima: i think they like it here and the work. jennifer: that's funny. it's that personal. on my end of the book. fatima: that's exactly what's going on. and then if they're not in the book, why am i not in the book? jennifer: that's so funny. i mean, it's a measure of how just de-facted my own past is that i can't even imagine being part of a community like that, but that is really so telling and it's so human nature. fat massachusetts yeah, it is.

jennifer: that we all want to be included and our ancestors are given their proper due. fatima: i have to remind everybody when you're looking at history and you're not responsible for your ancestors and can't take any benefits from your ancestors. if your ancestors were terrible and you don't want to claim them,r you can't claim them. make a choice. doing something on your own. jennifer: you're in new orleans right now? fatima: i am. i am. jennifer: is this the house where you grew up? fatima: this is the house where i grew up. behind me is the porch where my dad dried the books out and this is the house i come to. we were able because it didn't flood, we were able to keep the house after katrina.

i lost my dad though. he had a heart attack after we evacuated, but we were able to keep the house so this is very special to me too. w the book is really special to me too in many different ways. jennifer: special to be with you and in your house and this virtual nature of ourur meetingo it is a silver lining to be present in the house where so much of this took place. i've seen questions coming in here so i'm going to take a look at those and and let's hear from some of you. fatima: i have one more thing to talk about too but let's get questions first. jennifer: all right, then fold that in whenever you want. was there a connection between the economy and the church?

fatima: there was a connection and they were very attached to the catholic religion in the very beginning because the catholic religion gave them legitimacy that the government couldn't give them. the government did not recognize marriage for blacks. did not recognize marriage of enslaved or of free people of color. catholic get married in the church and the church recognized them as married people. they were attached there for awhile. after the civil war when white supremacy became -- after the civil war and near the end of reconstruction when white supremacy took hold, it took hold of the church and the guys in the economy, many broke away from the church and woe william c. rogers talking about having sea indianss and going -- seances and going towards spiritualism and protestant because the catholic church was segregated too and w they werent

going to go for that. lots of them lasted. jennifer: one comment if you stay close to your computers. when you lean back, some people areou having trouble hearing. then a question that i really love based on what you just said about the family connections to your book. do you know the crump family? fatima: yes, my aunt georgia raised frankes crump. frank crump the musician was my dad's god father or used to call him god father. jennifer: wow, okay. was the girl bogeil almost stole by a mom? fatima: yes, thank you foren mentioning that. yes, remember i said that they were trying to get suffrage for black men; right. the institution at that time, the louisiana constitution when it first came back into the united states,is lincoln wantedo

sell the southern states back and -- lincoln wanted the southerns states back into the united states as fast as possible and did the 10% solution and louisiana came back. they came back without giving the right to vote for blacks. many blacks decided they would have a convention and change that constitution. luther bogeil was at that convention and it was sat upon by police. the police came and killed everybody that they could that was in that room. luther was there and so was several other economy members. lucian was there with his sonot who was 9 or 10 years old. they stabbed the boy, they shot out his eye, they shot capla and trying to come out of the building and people trying to come out of the building because they were cornered. he was almost killed and grabbed

the man coming out and killed him. boill was able to r run away. capla said the floor was slippery with blood. the things that i wanted to mention and i'm glad she brought this up, the history, we think that like right now that history, everything we do is new. it's not. the men were fighting for voter registration was going on in "economy hall," and there were people who ryan higgins were -- were trying to stop voter registration of blacks. that ought to sound pretty familiar right now. there were police violence because a lot of police were members of white supremacist groups. there were militias that went and tried to kill elected officials, legitimately elected officials and there were mobs and militias that went in. if you can learn something from the book, i don't want to be preachy, but realize that there's a play book for white

supremacy and it happened in 1860s and if you know the play book, you will see the things that are coming down the pike reich now and you can do -- right now and you can do something about it. you will know when they start democrat grating the people and using police to kill people, when mobs start taking duly elected people and threatening them, there's something going on that will boil up. jennifer: how was "economy hall" related to plessy versus ferguson? fatima. the members of the "economy hall" were among the first two black mutual aid societies that threaded in the 1830s and plessy vs. ferguson in the 1890s and many more hundred of mutual aid associations at that time and many supported the plessy vs. ferguson case. [inaudible] was the president of the economy society, and he was

also a member of the citizens committee, the plan who were -- the clan involved in taking the plessy case to court and economy really went for it and have in the minute that the president is saying i know -- he says it in french but i know many of you are in support of the legislation against jim crow law. they were very much against the jim crow law and plessy vs.r ferguson for those of you who don't know was a case that was taken to the united states supreme court to prevent separate butat equal. they did not win. jennifer: i wanted to ask one more question that i -- and then maybe we'll end fairly soon, but i just wondered if you could talk for a minute about music. so many of us associate new

orleans with music, with jazz in particular, and you write a lot abouth music in the book. can you talk a little bit about the economy and its relationship to music over time? fatima: sure, if you go to the new orleans jazz and heritage festival, you'll see a tent called the "economy hall" tent. it is based on this particular hall because the economy had music all the way through. ...

disarm song played and he was discovered. the people who came to the home for the first people to take him outside. >> another question is, did an economy hall have members that were enslaved as well as free people of color? >> they did not, they did not. they did not. these people were millionaires, one of them had homes italy, france, and louisiana. though it did not with the enslaved no more than that new york society mixed with those in

the lower society. the second thing in the more o important thing is it was against the law. when there was slavery free people of color and the enslaved could not mix. in fact the police started attending the meeting with the fear the free people inside the enslaved to revolt. the father was in the revolution. there was a good reason for them to be afraid. did not the free people enslaved their go to jail and the police start attending their meetings besides the social class thing when this is done i urge you to look at the chat and the recording other people who know

other people that means more to you than it does to me. we are pretty much out of time. i'm going to ask you one final question which is kind of a tough one. you quoted this in part by the economy's mission to help one another and teach one another will holding out a protective hand to suffering humanity. you cannot shoot much higher than that. of racial tension and i am what economy hall can tell us, if anything. it's a lot to of weight to put on you. o what can the story tell us about how to improve our own situation and live better? >> may i quote to you from economy hall? i was not expecting that question.

members in 1858. all of our current, has been oppressed unjustly that they must follow the test come out of the isolation and our oppressors applied. they like to see us forever tearing each other apart, having only hatred in our hearts for one another. we should not have hatred in our hearts for one another and we should join together to try to fight the oppressors. >> hear! hear!. i think that is an t excellent note to end on. it has been such a pleasure. thank you all so much for joining us. and please, i urge you to buy this book.

>> thank you. thank you so much. i hope you have all enjoyed this conversation tonight as much as i have it. you haven't had the honor to read this book the history of a free i urge you too. thank you so much again and hope you have a wonderful night. if you enjoy book tv sent for a newsletter qr code on the screen book festivals and more book tv every sunday on cspan2 or any time online at booktv.org. television for serious readers. the intellectual face another story and on sundays book tv

brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for cspan2 comes from these television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard. squatting in the diner for internetwork is even harder. that is what we are providing lower income students access to affordable internet so homework and just be homework. cox connect to compete for. >> cox on these television companies support cspan2 as a public service. >> larry kudlow we be writing a book about your time the trump administration? >> i don't have anything planned at the moment. never say never not at the moment i don't. what summary jobs you have? >> there is the foxbusiness show every day. i can plug for it --