think we got closer in this book than we are getting in our government reports being issued. >> if you don't mind, the knowledge about the inaccuracy of policy measures are very well accepted and there is no way left for people who use that poverty level to not sound like they are using it to advance their own agenda. there has been a great discussion, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> if you are enjoying booktv sign up for newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, book festivals and more. every sunday on c-span2 or any time online, booktv.org, television for serious readers.

>> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tvocuments america's story and on sunday booktv brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including news. ♪♪ >> these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> my name is rachel tiemann and i manage the brooklyn public library, temporarily offering lobby service after the new center for brooklyn

history as we anticipate the opening of our new branch this fall. it's my pleasure to introduce the presentation tonight. fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall," the history of a free black brotherhood. i'm happy about connection between friends of brooklyn heights library friends group and a robust group that supports the brooklyn heights library in so many ways. i was asked by deborah howell and if as a branch we would be interested in supporting fatima shaik and a book launch and i discovered the story behind the book and reading glowing review in the new york times, i jumped at the opportunity to share this monumental book but as the accolades and publicity grew so did the importance of this

program and then brought jennifer egan on board, the author of manhattan beach, this has become an event that we knew. within economy hard, fatima shaik shares the free black brotherhood of new orleans founded in 1936 that supported its community through the civil war, reconstruction, terrorism and the birth of jazz. this narrative is american history that needs to be shared, highlights voices that need to be heard and is a deeply personal story for fatima shaik is a new orleans native and descendent of the communities the brotherhood serves, this book is a treasure. i'm deeply excited about this conversation we are about to enjoy between fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall," witten history of a free black brotherhood. please take it away.

>> hello, everybody and thank you for being with us. i'm incredibly excited to have a chance to spread the word about this or markable book that i have been talking with fatima shaik about for some years now but which surpassed my every expectation of being a work of history that has enormous sweep, tremendous importance but is so readable and fun. so i thought, very complex work, that the best place to begin would be where you begin with your introduction. tell us how this book came to be. it is a story that begins with your father. >> thanks for being here. we found some journals in the

trash in the back of a dump truck and brought them home and put them in the closet. found them in the 1950s so i was already a writer, and there was something more about these journals and realized this wasn't an important part of history. >> can you describe what are the journals and what is the organization that produced them? >> the economy's ascetic organization of black men that started in 1836, when i realized -- i realized after reading the journal that this was probably the most influential and prosperous organization before or after the civil war.

>> what years to the journals cover? >> the journals themselves cover 1836 to 1935. the organization lasted until the 1950s, because that is when the journals got that, they cover that 100 year period but within them, there are places that are missing, the civil war is missing, the journal from 1840 through 1857, there are a few gaps i was able to fill out by doing some research. >> your father always pronounced the french way, economy, horrible french accent, can you explain what this organization did and what its role was in the community that it served? >> it was a mutual aid society. a mutual aid society took care of its members, their health if somebody got sick, they helped

pay, they also buried people if somebody died, take care of the burial expenses and give the widow some money but as politics became more important they became much more politically active and around the civil war they became very involved in what was going on in the united states and the world. >> you described growing up in the 1950s in new orleans amid a kind of erasure of your community's history in which you were told stories by people with various memories of the past or stories they heard about the past that somehow did not quite connect with the official history and there's a bit of a quote from your book that i want to read. of people who 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. i thought, could you explain to us, what were these stories trying to assert or prove, to use the analogy you give us, what was missing from the official history? >> the history itself was missing, the history of a black community, any sort of community except what the white supremacist narrative was. i went to segregated schools and in those schools, we knew what was going on. our elders would sit us down and they would tell us, that friend you just brought home is this person's grandchild and his grandfather or great-grandfather, we learned it like that.

when i went to high school, we were the fourth class to integrate at catholic high school i remember asking a nun who was giving the white supremacist narrative of america what about the black people? what did the black people do in new orleans and she said nothing. i had to write this history. >> host: what was interesting to me is a distention you explained. two different definitions of creel that existed in new orleans, can you talk about that? >> yes i can. there are probably hundreds of definitions of creel depending on who you talk to, in my time and you figure white supremacy sort of rearing its ugly head post reconstruction, it got verlyn 2, 1890s and to my time,

what we hear is cradle meant white. there's a quote in the book, the daily newspaper wrote about, you hear about creel food and creel tomatoes but creoles are white. this went against our understanding. my mother spoke french, people around me spoke french, it is not a color. sometimes people think if you' re white you're creel. it doesn't, it means the old n-word new world met in louisiana and blended into different things, people of african descent like my people who can be any range of color and they are creel, rarely are they white but there are white people, just married europeans who are what they call white

creel. we didn't make that distinction in my neighborhood because we felt, the mix of the old world and new world and we weren't really into race and color anyway. >> host: you talked about how you came to be born in new orleans. is a fun story. >> guest: it is really complicated. my grandfather came from india, one of the first indians to come to the united states in the 1890s, he married a black crayola woman who was a black woman born in new orleans. the granddaughter i believe of an enslaved person in louisiana purchased by her husband, don't think you heard this, purchased by her husband and freed before

she had children so all her children were born free. that is different from the other side of my family, 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 20 years old and i remember asking my grandfather, who is your family? he said who wants to know? he wasn't going to tell anything about his past. because of that history of enslavement. his father was enslaved. they all met in new orleans. >> host: what you say mirrors what you describe about the community that the economy was serving which was in the 19th

century, multiethnic. incredibly inclusive. i was struck by the fact that the economy welcomed jews, put out an offer to chinese who might want to join and i would love if you could explain to those of us who don't necessarily know that much about the self, what did multiethnic need in new orleans in the 19th century. >> guest: i don't know if i want to use the terminology multiethnic. the people who had privileges because we are living in a segregated system. there were places that were white only and anyone who was not white or was nonwhite, or color do, you might call them colored but you are nonwhite essentially so people who came to the community and if you look at many communities, black communities in the united states you will see nonwhite

people were in the black community where they made their first businesses, where the black community tends to be quite inclusive so in the south essentially was very inclusive because people worked to gather and as i said, didn't believe racism, just didn't believe it as a premise, didn't make any logical sense to us. >> host: economy hall, your title, comes from an actual place. i wonder if you could talk about that place and its history and also just 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. >> guest: economy hall in 1836, they bought a piece of

property, in 1867, 20 years later decided to build a grand hall, they heard other organizations had halls so they moved them across the street from the original building so in 1857, it became a center of community. there were philharmonics, theaters, opera, the civil war approached, it became increasingly political, people coming down who talk about suffrage in the 1860s, black men having the vote, they did voter registration drives, making it important, that community basically survived until my generation. my father when he discovered those journals discovered them because a member of the economy society, he said the hall had been sold and they were getting

rid of everything, nobody wanted these books. they took them to the dump. this sort of storytelling and connection, with no more than 100 years. >> host: let's talk about the physical document. your father took them and you describe building a cupboard to put them in, staining it and very like ollie having a house that was elevated enough that katrina for example did not damage the documents which already were water damaged. you mention your father had to put them out in the sun and let them dry because they had gotten range on, it is painful to think about. many years past, and you became a journalist and a fiction writer and writer of children's books.

talk about your return to these books that you had not had a lot of deep contact with until then. >> i knew the books were there because when i was a child everybody said once the books got into the house, it is too important. i had it in the back of my mind, i could never make anything else, after i had been away for a long time and seen the way history was interpreted and knew that this was there, and when i saw the handwriting but we saw in the video, the handwriting alone tells you these are people that are very educated. i was drawn to that, the person, you saw his signature, i grew up around the new deal,

my cousin's cousin, i knew the name and then to find out he had been a schoolteacher and involved in the freedmen's bureau and all sorts of things, really fun to find out. >> host: it was surprising to me to see the beauty of some of the excerpts of 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 array ravished by prometheus, god created the world only because he needed to love. i mean, not what you expect to find in meeting minutes. would that we did find such things.

it is striking that these are literary documents. were you surprised by that? were you surprised by what you found in them and buy what they ended up taking a hold over you and your literary life. >> guest: i was surprised how literary they were. in a way it made sense because as i knew my father and my father's friends we were always encouraging each other, telling each other you can do this. i write in the book a little bit about how you couldn't get a phd in the united states so he used to drive from new orleans to canada, could live in a place without segregation so one of his friends told him to get out of the country for a little while. when i saw these guys writing

encouraging and inspirational words it was surprising that i saw it written but not surprising they did that. the same sort of language exactly but i heard the spirit in my community and my life. >> host: what about the language of these documents? you mentioned a friend of yours described it as french american. what is the language like and how is it different from just french or american english? >> it's not in question till 1926. they are writing entirely in french until a little broken french and broken english, 1926, for french, the way the french, i'm not going to put myself -- a difference -- the way the french did those

sentences, a sentence construction was like english construction or for example when they started to get around americans the time of the civil war, i call them americans because they usually came to america but started using words like chairman. i thought it was just beautiful because a chair and they loved you. >> host: i am curious about the on norma's undertaking of synthesizing 100 years of documentation into a historical work. and i guess i would love to hear the timeline of how that occurred, simply reading these

journals must have taken quite a while. where were you in your life at that time? how did you fold this in, when did it become a full-time project, take us through your interaction? >> guest: you are making me laugh. only now is it full-time. it was 20 years ago it started with the journal and i basically would go through a journal to summarize what i thought was going on and i came to something i couldn't understand because the french was too difficult and involved i would get somebody, there was a discussion of the discussion, someone who speaks something like 16 or 18 languages so would go farther and ask him was it just me because these journals were in french but some of the journals i had used

to understand were in spanish so he could read french and spanish. that took 5 years. after i did that i started seeing -- sort of as i was going along i assign names of my neighbors, family names, people that lived in the neighborhood. that made me closer. and sometimes some really sort of spiritual things that happen. there was a fellow who committed suicide and he wrote a suicide note, didn't know who this was and i saw a person i knew in grammar school for 30 years sitting at one of the microfilm machines, have you heard of these people, that is my ancestor.

and she didn't know. that was the first time too, had seen a letter so may be okay, better continue this, took 20 years. had i known i was going to work on this one book for 20 years, maybe somebody like you, i don't think i would have worked that long on it because i was trying to be a published writer of children's work, of part-time job as a teacher, some short stories which are possible in short periods of time, that is the timeline for me. >> host: you had a tremendous resource which was your own community who had been giving you in a sense oral history components of the story, as a kid you didn't always want to listen to them so what did you

reengage with that community and the role of oral historian to try to fill out this picture and what were those experiences like? >> the most fulfilling experiences, some of these people were old friends of mine who sort of merited my family. and aunt who was one hundred years old and somebody else and her daughter who is 18 years old and they advanced and her mother had also advanced, her mother's friends never met so many so when i got this -- the kind of music being played there, and parents didn't want them to know sometime so really rich, really rich stories. >> host: do you feel you further and reached your own relationship to your community?

>> guest: sure. .. >> sure if you know anybody from new orleans, we don't really leave. we are always -- we can live somewhere else but they would know how i was connected like they would find out like i i found out my friendd i were connected at least -- found a primer pairs who admit come her parents were both comfort parents were both members of the economy hall in 1850s. i mean, you know, that became much more fun. that was fun to know. i guess i always carry new orleans around with me, as you probably have seen. >> it so lucky that you begin the project when you did in the sense that you can't a moment

where more of this existed in living memory that i'm guessing it does now. a lot of these stories are fading and it's so crucial to get to people and record them while they're still here and can still remember. >> right. the four people is talking about, my friend's mother has passed, the c100 woman and her daughter have passed some of these people are still around. i was very lucky to talk to them. i talked to them when astarte, like the second step when you started seeing the names of people that i knew and history reaching out to some of them to see what i could talk to their older family. body really come look, this whole process was sort of, it was luck. it was like my dad found the book. it was like i was a writer and found something in the books. it was like i would bump into these people, do you know what mean?

there are séances in the book. >> i love that. there are stances in the minutes. how many meetings minutes including the presence of ghosts? it's really nice -- >> do know what was fun, to find some of these historical events of the notebook in the séances journals and it would be a ghost talking about this real thing that happened. i could quote the ghost. it was great. >> oh, boy. so now i'm curious about how you the fiction writer and journalist undertook the mammoth job of trying to synthesize answer to crystallize this in numismatic history and material into a story. and you make some bold choices,, a lot of them you literature earlier but he choose to focus

your days on one particular person -- how do you say? >> the french initiation. we can say both deal in english. >> possible that, he's a fascinating figure with an amazing history. i would love to hear about it he tells about him and what it was about him that made you feel like he would be the gays to lock in on for this story. >> right. at first the story was, dorsally thinks went on. i defined a person doing the story on in order for it to move and not to be a historical account. i'm a a fiction writer so i ry wanted it to move like a novel. and likely bogiel lived from 1812-1892. i had a very long -- yet a very long life.

he was also present in summary things at a time when it was against the law for the enslaved to read, he had a school and yet in fact, tots some of the enslaved kind of on the side, wasn't supposed to. then he became part of the reconstruction government. he became active. he was the grand marshall of the emancipation celebration. which was covered in accordance and also covered by the "new york times." they didn't mention it but they mention the celebration. and then he was very, he was also a a poet. he started out life as a poet. so here this beautiful handwriting and every once in a while the minutes would say he gave a spontaneous poem, you know? how can you resist? how can you is somebody who stands up at a meeting and gives

us spontaneous poem was wonderful. i loved this character. he gave this poem 50 was politically active and he named his children after writers. his one child was named -- another was named homer, i think was homer. all of his kids were named after, all the boys are named after poets, writers. it was really fun to follow him. >> so it was a combination of his sensibility, is a literary awareness, the fact that he was present for so many important historical events and so deeply involved in the economy that made him the guy that could bring you all the rest. >> he was the go to guy. he also when he took the minutes he was very precise about the way he took the minutes.

every time it would to something new he would number them and then he gave a cotton speech. so you could look at the content page and see was going to come up in the minutes. that made it really easy, very clear to me. he also when anything foreign happened he would underline and to make exclamation points. or he would write letters sooner people were telling him. he was a really easy person to follow. and he's one of these people who is not, he's not a senator or president or a congressman. he was just a person who lived in the community. they had little more than 100 years. >> it must feel as if you know him, you know? it if he is liking of his personality. you know what mattered to him. he was sort of like a helpmate for your.

>> yes. yes. he was a lot of fun. in fact, at one point, they getd in arguments with each other and at certain points, and then he wrote, there was one point there was one fellow who didn't agree with another one and he saw them on the street and he hit him with his cane. so the two men came to the meeting and they talk about this group. one of them said i'm still bruised in the face because of your cane. i am bruised because your insult and your cane. and then boguille writes a word for word and at the end he says, and the other one says, it is not, it is not my apology. it is my arms. boguille writes that they embrace so closely they were like one. i mean, you know? it was beautiful, beautiful writing so it was a lot of fun. >> i want to take this poem to

say that in the chat i believe by links are appearing for this book. these are pretty amazing anecdotes and remarkable to this. it is a very, very fun book to read and urge all of you to buy for yourself and your loved ones. >> thank you. >> another thing, and so for sure he's a big 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 that a think probably wound in utah as a fiction writer and as a journalist. you bring us senses, clothing,, smells. you really put us in the moment. and it's tremendously compelling, and i'm wondering because like you also have a gigantic quantity of footnotes and i know that you are relying heavily on sources but also on your own imagination. and i wondered 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. there is imagination in the setting of a scene, in choosing the scene. the scene itself is proof, , so let me put it this way. one night they had a meeting in 1863. there was talking about vote for black men. it was november, november 1863. i looked up the weather in november 1863 on that date. i looked up the time of the sunset. i was able to say that -- i know for example, he walked into the room. i know he had to walk into the room because he wouldn't give the speech from outside, right?

so i can say that france law, and another meeting was run 7:00. i know the sunset was at 6:00 so now i know it looks like, right? i can say he walked into the economy hall just about the time the sun was setting. the room was warm because everyone had their overcoats on and it was crowded. i think there was like 600 people or something, i don't remember but hundreds of people. so you figure hundreds of men packed into a room and would be sweaty and moist and its plaster walls, you know, last walls. so i can do that because it's back. it's not imagination. it's not imagination in any of the words that are in your or the words that were used, they were in the newspaper of the court and newspapers for the journals. basically everything, the fact i had a fibrous editor, kathy nelson who would not let me get

away with anything, not a thing. she asked me, there was one street, the street the economy is on is called ursuline street. she said when did it become a street? when was it in avenue? was it an avenue in 1862 or an avenue in 1867? i felt like five references come three of them at different things. everything in there has been checked out, thanks to kathy. >> it sounds like it's not so much imagination as using your tools as a writer to connect the factual dots in ways that bring the sensory quality of it to life in the moment. >> right. fiction itself, i have to feel fiction as the kind of reader i am. i have to feel something is going on and the way i take

information in fiction is to my senses, right? i have my five senses and that's i get my information. so for me to feel anything that somebody feels, through their senses. for my reader to get anything they have to know what it smells like and how it tastes and what the sound is that they are hearing. then they are in the room. those are things, and also brought a little bit from journalism and did a lot of pieces, but if you want to read something else i got some pieces in these times that are very sensuous and that, not sensuous like sexy, centrist in a way that talking about what it felt like after katrina coming through the senses. >> you make an katrina and action want to jump on and ask a question because i was surprised to hear you write in your book

that in the sense of the biggest structure, the biggest disruption of this community that you are tracking going back to the early 19th century really was katrina. that is the event that really fractured the community in certain ways. that was sort of shocking to me that in all those years and events of this century is the one that has been so disruptive. can you talk about that? >> yes. because most of these people, most of these generations that i'm talking about live in the downtown area of new orleans, at the downtown areas of new orleans is where the levees broke. so the flood came in to our neighborhood, and a lot of people lost their home. you figured builders were in her '70s, '80s, '90s at that time. so we lost that connection. -- elders. there was one couple that you will read in the book that drowned in their house who would

very closely connected to the economy hall. most of our elders were evacuated. my cousin evacuated my dad's home and they took them out of tampa then there were getting heart attacks and strokes, that they were out of their environment. i think the statistic was more than 80 people who were in new orleans at the time of katrina were born here. so it's the city where people just state. they don't really leave. they don't leave. but that disruption of having all those downtown neighborhoods flooded out, losing those elders, one thing or another, that really did them in. >> it also mentioned basically a diaspora that has resulted with the number of people leaving the city of that return probably it was almost 100,000. >> yes, almost 100,000 have not returned.

well, you can read some posts on the website actually about this. because there was the diaspora, the houses were flooded. it was a difficult -- here, let's follow this whole white supremacy thing all the way down the road. we are in red line neighborhoods, right? however going to get enough insurance for housing? how we going to rebuild our houses? people had all kinds of problems like that. who could get the loans, a lot of people with money. usually from out of town. what we got a lot, we could not rebuild are being built back up by corporations, standard time housing or people with a lot of money who can come in and 200 or $300,000 for a thousand dollars for a house doesn't mean anything. it was a bargain, right? items for people who bought the

house for $5000 and house now is worth $300,000 and you can't get a loan because they were fired, d.c. the disintegration of the community. they will go to houston or atlanta and there was a i will just stay here. >> it feels like it's exactly what the economy was there to do, to try to hold the community together, to find tangible ways for people to help each other. and it feels like that is what we don't seem to have any more of that community does not seem to have anymore. >> that community is having a a very hard time. there's still people who hold it together a little bit. i have a lot of friends who still live here, get together and stuff but we lost a lot. because the economy, , they were operating in a time of enslavement. educated part of the goal was to educate one another, help one

another. that's what they did. they educated each other. if it didn't get a a house but to ask one of the friends. the house and sitting in right now, a new part of her house i can remember the day all of the relatives and friends came over and built the back of the house. a friend at the back of the house. they were cooking food. they cook and the guys came and a friend at the house and half a day. the priest came and blessed it, you know. and i don't know -- the next person that had a house to be built, everybody went on saturday over to their house. that's how the community was built. >> i'm wondering how your community has reacted to this remarkable contribution that you made to it, which synthesizes so much history. >> well, they like me a little bit more, you know?

what can i say? i mean, i think i like it. i think they like it. everybody is thumbing through the index trying to see -- >> that's so funny. so really it is that personal. >> it is real personal. >> amite in the book? >> exactly. [laughing] that's exactly what's going on. and that if they're not in the book, why am i not in the book? >> that is so funny. i mean, it's a measure of how diffracted my own pascoe i can't imagine the part of the community like that but it's really, that is really so telling and it's so human nature. >> it is. >> we all want to be included and make sure that our ancestors were given their proper due. >> right, right. exactly, exactly. i had with my everybody, when you're looking at history this is something i i learned, youe

not responsible for your ancestors and you cannot take any benefits from your ancestors. so if your ancestors were terrible and you don't want to claim them, then you really can't claim the others either. you have to make a choice here. and do something for yourself. do something on your own. not all on your ancestors. >> you are in new orleans right now. >> iamb. >> is this the house where you grew up. >> yes, this is a house where i grew up. this is a house where i grew up. the porch behind me is the porch where my dad and i -- [inaudible] this is house i come to come 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 he evacuated, but were able to keep the house. so this is very special to me.

the book is really special to me in many different ways. >> it's special to be in-house with you, which is something we really wouldn't be able to do if it were not for this virtual, this virtual nature of her getting so it is a silver lining to actually be present in the house where so much of this took place. i am seeing some questions coming in so i'm going to take a look at those, and we will hear from some of you. >> i have one more thing i would like to talk about. let's get some questions first. >> all right and then you can pull that in whenever you want. was there a connection between the economy and the church? >> there was a connection. they were very attached to the catholic religion in the very beginning because the catholic religion gave them the ability -- [inaudible] for example, the government did

not recognize marriage with blacks come right? they did not recognize them as the people of color. catholics could get married in the church and they would recognize them as married. after the civil war when white supremacy became, after the civil war and near the end of reconstruction when white supremacy so cold, and also took hold of the church. the guys in the economy said, many of them broke away from the church and we start seeing them go more, we talked about having séances, going towards spiritualism and protestant, of the protestant religion because the catholic church was segregated and they went up to that. they wouldn't go for that. lots of them left then. >> one comment, if you would stay close to computer when you lean back i think some having a lot of trouble hearing.

>> okay. >> then we have a question that i really love basin what you just said about the family connection to your book. do you know the crump family? >> yes. my aunt georgia married frank crump. >> frank crump the musician -- [inaudible] [laughing] , okay. was boguille almost killed by a mob? >> yes. thank you for mentioning that, yes. boguille was in, remember i said they were trying to get suffrage for black men, right? the constitution at the time louisiana constitution when they first came back into the united states, lincoln wanted the southern states back into the united states as fast as possible.

so he did a 10% solution in louisiana came back. it came back however without giving the right to vote for blacks. so many blacks decided to have convention and it would change that come against constitution. boguille boguille was at that convention and it was set upon by police. the police came and they killed everybody that they could that was in that room. boguille was there and so with several other economy members. i think his son was nine or ten years old. they staff the boy. they shot out his eye. they shot others. boguille almost killed when his turn to come out of the building, people can't get out of the building as they recorded. he was almost killed but the grabbed the man in front of him when he was coming out of the door and killed him so boguille was able to run away. kaplan made a statement, he said that the floor was slippery with blood. the things i wanted to mention,

and i'm glad you brought this up, that history, we think that like right now that history, everything we do is new, right? and it's not. these men were fighting for voter rights, for voter registration going on in economy hall and there were people who were trying to stop voter registration of blacks. that ought to sound pretty familiar right now, right? there was police violence because a lot of the police are members of the white supremacy. they were militias that went and tried to kill elected officials, legitimately elected officials. there were mobs and militias that when he to try. so if you can learn something from this book, i don't want to be preaching, but realize that there is a playbook for white supremacy and it happened in the 1860s and if you know the playbook you can see the things that are coming down the pipe right now. and you can do something about it. because you will know when they

start denigrating people come when they start using the police to kill people, when mobs start taking duly elected people and threatening them, you get something going on is going to boil up. >> another question, how was economy hall related to plessy v. ferguson? >> the members of the economy -- probably one of the first, they were among the first, maybe one of the two black societies that started in the 1830s to plessy v. ferguson was in 1890s. there were many more, hundreds of mutual aid associations by that time, and many of them supported the plessy v. ferguson case. the president of the economy society was also a member of of the citizens committee, who were involved in taking the case to

court. so economy raise money for it. the president is saying i know, he says it in french, but i know many of you are in support of the legislation against this jim crow law. they were very much against the jim crow law, and the plessy v. ferguson decision for those of you don't know was a case that was taken to the united states supreme court to prevent separate but equal. it simply did not win. >> okay. and i wanted to ask one more question that, at the maybe we will and 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 to write a lot about music in the book. can you talk a little bit about

the economy and its relationship to music over time? >> sure. if you go to the new orleans jazz and heritage festival you'll see a tenth basin this particular hall because the economy have the music all the way through. they had philharmonic, opera, all the sinks in the early years in the last incarnation i was a music in the economy hall was a jazz. the same used to come together and support each other to build houses and educate each of us children come when they were driven out of jobs to white supremacists legislation, they played music to make money. one of the places they played music was in a economy home. they would have party. they raise money with the party and they would pay the musicians that way and the money that the rays would go to the poor people or to the nines. and the money would circulate in the community that way. so if and when you read the book you will see that louis

armstrong played in economy hall and he was discovered in economy hall. the people came to the economy hall with the first people to take outside of new orleans. >> another question, did economy hall have members that were enslaved as well as free people of color? >> they did not. they did not. these were, well, they did not. they were probably a little snooty, number one, because these people were millionaires. one of them had homes in france in louisiana. they really didn't mix with the enslaved more -- no more than the new society mix with people of lower class in the new york society, right? the second thing and the more important thing is it was against the law. when there was slavery, free people of color and the enslaved could not mix. and, in fact, the police started attending the meetings that i do

want to go into long, but there was a fear that the free people would incite slaves, the enslaved to revolt as they had in haiti. boguille father was in the haiti revolution there was a good reason for them to be afraid. so there was, the police really did not want free people of color in the enslaved can expect i think that was more, they would go to jeff and the police started attending the meetings so they didn't do it. besides the social class things it would also go to jail, everybody would go to jail. >> fatima, when this is done i urge you to look at the chat in the recording equipment frank trump's granddaughter, other people who know other people. means more you to you than s to me. we pretty much at the time but i'm going to ask you one final question which is kind of a tough one but just to quote, you quoted this in part from the

economy mission, to help one another and teach one another while holding out a protective hand to the suffering of humanity. you can't shoot much higher than that. we live in a moment of such tremendous division and racial tension and political strife, and i wonder what economy hall can tell us, if anything, that's a lot of weight to put on you, fatima, but what can the story tell us about how to improve our own situation and live better? >> may i i quote to you from e economy hall? i wasn't expecting that question. [inaudible] it said this african blood that runs in our veins is all of our crime. whether it is being oppressed

unjustly, let us -- they must follow that path to eternity and come out of the isolation that are in pressers -- for they like to see us forever disunited, tearing each other apart have the own hatred and hearts for one another. so i think if we say what we could do, we should not have hatred in her heart for one another and we should join together to try to fight the oppressors. >> hear, hear. i think that is an excellent note to end on. it is been such a pleasure to talk with you, fatima. i'm excited to continue the conversation the next time i see you. 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 that you all enjoyed this conversation tonight with fatima shaik and jennifer egan as much as i have if you haven't had the honor of the able to read this

book, "economy hall: the hidden history of a free black brotherhood" i absolutely urge you to. it is a treasure. thank you so much again, and i hope you all have a wonderful night. >> if you are enjoying booktv then sign-up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to see the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, festivals and more. booktv every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at booktv.org, television for serious readers. >> begins on c-span2 on intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories and on sundays booktv brings you the latest and nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 come from these television companies and more including wow. >> the world has changed.

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