advance their own agendayou think this is just a community center, it's more than that. partnering with a thousand to

create wi-fi enabled listings so students can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast along with of these companies supporting c-span2 as a public service. >> my name is rachel and i am i'm themanaging librarian at thh of the brooklyn public library temporarily offering lobby service as we eagerly anticipate the opening of the brand-new branch this fall. it is my pleasure to introduce this event tonight on economy hall history and the free black brotherhood. due to the connection between etthe highest of the group and it's a robust group.

reading the review in "the new york times" the opportunity to be able too host a program sharing this t monumental book t as the accolades and the publicity grew, notice the importance of this program and then the brilliant author this has become an event and we knew it. in economy hall they share with of the world of the free black brotherhood founded in 1886 through the civil war, reconstruction, terrorism and the birth of jazz. this narrow fiction is american history that needs to be shared. it highlights of voices that

needed to be heard and it's a deeply personal story as a new orleans native and the community the brotherhood observed that focused a treasure. i'm very excited about the conversation we are about to enjoy. please take it away. thank you so much for being with us. i've been talking about this for some years now which had surpassed my every expectation in being a work of history with an enormous sweep that covers a lot of ground and has a tremendous importance and yet it

is so readable and fun so i thought it's a very complex work and i thought maybe the best place to begin would be where you begin in your introduction. tell us how this book came to be. it really begins with your father. >> thank you for being here. we realized this was a really important part. >> can you describe what are the journals and what is the organization that produces them?

>> it's an organization that startedte in 36 and what i realized in reading those was this was probably the most influential and prosperous organization either before or after the civil war. >> in what years do they cover? >> journals themselves from 36 to t 35. they covered that more than 100 year period. some places that are missing around the civil war it's missing. the journal to 1867 is missing. so there are few.

>> your father always pronouncd it in a french way. could you explain what this organization did and the role in the community that it served. >> it was virtually a program if somebody gets sick and they help pay for the bill. alsoea they would take care of burial expenses and give the widow some money. over the century as policy began more importantly they became much more politically active and in the civil war became very involved in what was going on. >> you describe growing up in the 1950s in new orleans as a kind of erasure of your

community's history in which you were told stories by people with various varying memories of the past that somehow didn't quite connect with the official history that there is a quote from your book i want to read you said of the people that were telling these stories, each spoke of the past with a passion of a man wrongfully accused of a crime who repeats overer and ovr his account of the moment that proved his innocence. i love that and thought can you explain to us what were these stories trying to assert or prove to use the analogy that tyou give us, what was missing from the official history? >> the history itself. the history of a black community, anyto sort of communy with the white supremacist

narrative. you have to understand i went to segregated schools and in those schools we saw the move going on because our elders would sit around for the longest times and would tell us that friend you just brought home is this person's grandchild. when i went to high school i remember asking distinctly. >> this is something interesting to me and the distinction that you explain, two different

definitions of cradle that existed in new orleans as you were growing up. can you talk about that? >> there's probably hundreds of definitions but in my time that hit post reconstruction in the 1890s and 1950s in fact there's a quote in the book the daily newspaper you hear about creole food and natives but they arewh white, they are not negro. my mother spoke french to people around me and one thing i would like to say is creole is not a

color so what it means is the old a world into the new world t in louisiana. there can be any range of color and they are creole. we didn't make thatwe distinctin in my neighborhood because we felt it was the mixing of the old world and the new world. we grew up into race and color. >> you talked a little bit about your own history and how you came to be born in new orleans which told me about and it's a fun story.

>> one of the first to come to the united states in the 18 '90s hed married a black creole woman was the granddaughter i believe of an enslaved person. it was purchased by her husband and then that is different from other side of my family who the great grandmother of whom. they were at least 20-years-old and if they said was your family

and they said who wants to know. they all went down to new orleans. >> what you are saying mirrors what you are describing about the community and the economy surveying and which was in the 19th century multiethnic and incredibly inclusive. i was struck by the fact the economy welcomed jews and put out an offer to chinese who semight want to join and i wondered if you could explain to those of us who don't know necessarily that much about the south what did multiethnic mean in the 19th century? >> i don't know if they want to use the term because the people

that had privileges because we are living in a segregated systemem and everyone who was nt white orpe was nonwhite, they might call them colored, the people who came into the community and to tell you the truth if you look l at many communities in the united states you will see that's where they have their first businesses and so in the self especially it was inclusiveh because people needed each other and as i said they didn't believe racism, the promise it didn't make any ological sense to us. >> the title comes from an actual place, and i wonder if

little bitalk a about that place andat its histy and very eloquent in your book importance of actually having a place. let's talk a little bit about the place in economy whole. >> in 1836 they bought a piece of property. they heard other organizations. it's going to be across the street from the original building that became the center of the community. there were theaters, operas and the civil war approach became more political so they had people come down.

they lied about having the vote. his friend was a member of the economy. it's sort of storytelling and came down to the idea. >> so now let's talk about the physical document. your father took them and you described beautifully the building of the cover and a very luckily having a house that was elevated enough that katrina,

for example, didn't damage these documents that already were water damaged because you mentioned you had to put them out in the sun and let them drive because they'd gotten rained on and i have to say it's painful to think about but in many years passed, you became a journalist and fiction writer. talk about your return to the books that you hadn't had a loat of deep contact with until then. >> i knew the booksks were there the whole time because when i was a child everybody said oncee the books got into the house. i had it in the back of my mind i never could make anything of

it. after i had been away for a long time though seeing the way that it was interpreted i wanted to read and see what was in them and when i saw the handwriting, just the handwriting alone tells you so i was drawn to the person that you saw so i knew the name and then to find out he'd been a schoolteacher and involved in the bureau. >> one thing that was surprising to me to see the beauty frankly of some of the excerpts from the documents. i'm going g to read one short

excerpt the aspiration of the known to the unknown, god created the world only because he needed to love. not what you expect to find but what we did it's striking that in a sense these are literary documents. i was surprised by how literary they were. i knew my father and my father's friends and they were always telling each other you can do

this. i write in the book a little bit about how he couldn't get a phd very easily in the united states. it was one of his friends. ci saw them writing these encouraging words it was surprising it was written but it wasn't surprised they did that but i heard that spirit in the community. >> what about the language of the documents because 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 english until about 1926. the sentence construction when they started to get around americans [inaudible] i thought was beautiful

[inaudible] >> tell me about the process synthesizing 100 years of documentation into a historical work and i guess i would like to hear the timeline of how that occurred. it must've taken quite a while. where were you in your life at that time, when did it become a full-time project. take us through your interactions with them. only now is it a full-time project. i basically would go through the journal to summarize but i

thought was going on. the journals were in french. after i did that i started to see as i was going along with it the people that lived in the neighborhoods. >> then some spiritual things

would happen. for example a suicide note i was in the library and didn't know who this guy was i saw her sitting at one of the microfilm machines and she said that's my ancestor. it took me about 20 years. i don't think i would have went that long to become a published

writer. your own community who had been giving you in a sense components of the story. to engage in that role of oral historians to try to fill out and what were those experiences like. i think it's about a hundred-years-old.

their parents didn't want them to go sometimes and so it was a rich story. >> do you think it further enriched your relationship with your own community? >> we can live somewhere else but it gave me more people. my friend and i connected and

her parents ancestors were both members in the 1850s. it's so lucky that you begin the project when you did in the sense that you caught a moment where more of this existed in living memory then i'm guessing does now. a load of these stories are so crucial while they are here and can still remember. >> the four people i wasas talkg about i was lucky to speak to them. i spoke to them when i started

seeing the names of people that i knew. but this whole process i found something in the book. there are séances in the book. >> how many meeting minutes, to find out some of these historic events and there would be this real thing that happened.

>> now i'm curious how you undertook the job of trying to synthesize and crystallize this enormous amount of material into the story and you make some bold choices you focus on one particular person. tell us a little bit about the fascinating figure. fi would love if you could tell us about him and what it was about him that made you feel

like he wanted to be what to lock in on in the story. >> there were so many things going on to be the historical account from 1812 to 1892. he was present in so many things. he became p t part of the reconstruction government. he was the grand marshall of celebrations covered in new orleans and also by "the new york times." they didn't mention him but they

would get a lot of color from that. he has this beautiful handwriting and every once in a while they give a spontaneous point how can you resist. it wason wonderful. politically active and he named his children after riders. all the boys were named after poets were riders so it was fun

the following him. >> with his sensibilitysi and hs own literary awareness and hewa was present for so many historical events and so deeply involved in the economy. >> he was the go to guy and very precise. he gave the accountants page. butt also if anything important happened he would make an! it was an easy presence to

follow. it must feel as if you know him and if you know his personality and what mattered to him he's sort of like a health made for you. they get in arguments with each other and then one didn't agree with another one so they came to the meeting and talked about

this because of your insult and then the other one says [inaudible] i believe the links are appearing for the book. these are pretty amazing anecdotes and its a fun book to read. a big part of what makes this so readable you bring us into these moments with a full array of

tools that i think were honed in as a fiction writer and journalist and the census closing smiles you really put us in the moment. it's tremendously compelling and i'm wondering because you have a gigantic quantity of footnotes and you were relying heavily on sources but also your own imagination and i wonder if you could talk to us a little about the challenge of deciding where to draw the line about. in the setting what me put it this way.

1863 i looked at the weather in november and the time of the sunset. i was able to say because he didn't get the speech from outside. i can say they walked into the economy whole. it's hundreds of people packed in a room.

[inaudible] the quotes basically everything. the street to the economy is on when did it become a street and was it an avenue and 52 or 57. we expect that out of

everything. >> it's not so much imagination as using your tools and in ways that bring the sensory quality of it to life in the moment. >> this is the kind of reader i am and the way that i take that information for me to feel anything, for my reader to feel anything then they are in the room but also brought a little bit from journalism.

i've got some pieces that are very sensuous not like sexy but in the way talking about what it felt like after katrina. i want to ask you a question because i was surprised to hear tyou writing in your book thatn a sense the biggest disruption of this community that you are tracking going back to the early 19th century really was katrina. that has really fractured the community in certain ways. can you talk a little bit about that? >> most of these people, most of

these generations. so the flood came into our neighborhood and they were in their 70s, 80s, 90s so we lost that connection. there's one that you will read in the book that drowned and were close to the economy whole. we took them out of town but the labor getting heart attacks and strokes. the statistic was more than 80 people in new orleans ator the time. so it's a city where people don't really leave but the

description, the neighborhoods losing those elders over one thing or another. .. >> so how do we get the insurance to pay for our houses? people are having all kinds of problems like that.

who gets the loans? a lot of people with money. usually from out of town and those that are being built back up by corporations or people with a lot of money who can come in two or $300,000 for a house that's a bargain if they buy the house for $5000 notes 300,000 but now they can't get a loan because they retired. they sayay live in the lifestyle is better here. >> it feels like it's exactly what the economy was there to do to hold the community together. defined tangible ways for

people to help each other. feels like that's what we don't have any more or the community does not have that anymore. >> there are still people holding it together i have a lot of friends but we lost a lot so that educated part of the goal. >> mike the house i'm sitting in right now. i remember the day they framed up the back of the house they were cooking food andse they framed it up.

and an office says much of anything but everybody went on saturday to their house. >> and wondering how your community has reacted to this remarkables contribution which sympathizes with so much history. >> they might be more. [laughter] i think they like it. so really it is that personal. [laughter] to see exactly what is going on and then if they are not in the book then why am i not in the book? >> that's t so funny.

it's a measure that i cannot even imagine she part of the community like that but it is so telling. >> and then to be included. i have to remind everybody looking at the history you are not responsible forle your ancestors and you cannot take any benefits from your ancestors. and then to do something on your own. >> 's you are in new orleans right now.

is this the house where you grew up? >> yes. and this isn' the house i come to. we were able to keep the house after katrina. so we were able to keep the house of this is very special to me. >> it special to be in your house with you and that's not something we could do for not this virtual nature of the meeting. and that's where much of this took place.

and we will hear from some of you. so let's get some questions first. >> was there a connection. >> therere was a connection. because thec catholic religion and did not recognize that. so after the civil war white supremacy come after the civil war. after reconstruction.

and then to see them to have a séance and go to spiritualism. >> ift you stay close to your computer some people are having trouble hearing. >> andre then we have a question that i really love based on what youba just said about the family connections to your book do you know the family? >> yes but was he almost

killed bywa a mob? >> yes. thank you for mentioningg that. and trying to get suffrage for black men. and then tont come back in the united states. and then coming back into the united states as fast as possible. without giving the right to vote for blacks. so many decided they would have the convention for the constitution. so the police came and they killed everybody that they could. with several other economy members.

and thenso we think that right now history, everything that we do is new but it is not. these men were fighting for voter registration. and people who are trying to stop it. that would sound pretty familiar right now. took a lot of members of the white supremacy andem the

militias and then there were moms and militias. but then realize there is a playbook. but then you can do something about it you will know when they start denigrating people with a mob start to threaten me of something that world foil over. >> what about plessy versus ferguson? one oh two black societies in

the 18 thirties. plessy versus ferguson was 18 nineties there were hundreds of associations at that time. but then the president of the economy society and the citizens committee. and then to check the plessy case to court. and then with the legislation to address the jim crow law. and struggling very much against the jim crow law in a case that was taken to the

united states supreme court. >> isk wanted to ask one more question and then maybe we'll and fairly simple could you talk for a minute about music so many of us associate new orleans with music with jazz inin particular and you write about music in the book can you talk about the economy and its relationship to music over time? >> it is based because they have fill harmonics and all these things in the early years and that tammy hall was jazz but the same people so

when they were driven through the white supremacist legislation one of the places they played music was tammy hallth because they the money that they would raise we go to the poor people and then the money would circulate so if and when you read the book you would see louis armstrong was discovered in those who came to economy haul were the first. >> did economy haul have members that were enslaved as well as free people of color? >> they did not. >> because these people were

millionaires. and one of them hit home in louisiana no more than new york society. and the second thing and the morepl important thing then the police started to attend the meeting so the free people would insight the slaves and her father was in the haitian revolution so there is good reason for them to be afraid. they really did not want them to be enslaved so they would go to jail so they did not do

it was a social class. >> when thisu is done i urge you to look at the chat in the recording you have other people who know and that means more to you than it does to me. we are out of time but i will ask one final question which is tough. but just the quotation from the economy mission to help one another and to teach one another while holding other protective hand to suffering humanity you cannot shoot much higher than that wet live in a moment such tremendous division andh racial tension and political strife and i wonder what economy haul can tell us if anything but what

can this story tell us about how to improve her own situation. >> may i give you a quotation? from the members in 1858 said to be oppressed justly to follow the test for fraternity out of the isolation that they would like to see yes united only being featured in our hearts for one another. so we do is not have hatred in her hearts for one another.

>> i think that is an excellent note to and don. itur has been such a pleasure to talk with you i'm excited to continue the conversation. thank you also much for joining us. we encourage you to buy the book. i hope you all enjoyed this conversation tonight is much as i have. and with the free black brotherhood i urge you to. thank you so much again i hope y'all have a wonderful night.