black and rumors started flying -- >> a blonde, blue-eyed girl is kicked out for being black. go ahead. >> and, you know, he would a choice to make. he could have just moved to new york, moved to montreal at that point. he could have moved to just about anywhere, because, you know, if we're thinking about the color line here, for steven wahl it was a line between people who looked white and other people who looked white. but he decided instead to sue the d.c. public schools, and he -- he didn't challenge segregation. what he challenged was the fact that -- he alleged that the d.c. public schools have the burden of proof.

they had to prove that his daughter was black. and that they hadn't satisfied their burden. >> which is a lawyerly argument. >> right. i think it was an argument his father would have loved. what's amazing about that suit is because his parents were so well-known in washington, because his father was a public figure, a trial like this was bound to be essentially a pub memorialization of his parents. you know, this was a -- i mean, it was -- it produced a record that enabled me to really write their story. >> what is it like communing with the dead that way?

>> well, it -- i mean, it's -- in a way, i think a trial transcript is -- you know, in some ways you feel very distanced from people, because they're being asked very specific kinds of questions. you know, they're expected to give a specific kind of answer. but at the same time you have so many different perspectives that you really get a very intimate, three-dimensional sense of who people are and why they're doing what they do. with o.s.b. wahl, o.s.b. wahl was dead at the time this trial happened, but there are transcripts of the fugitive slave act case. he actually testified, and you know, what comes through with him is, you know, he's a shoemaker who is sitting in a

federal court. there are marshals and people armed, and he's someone who is completely unintimidated and is just constantly making jokes. in the trial transcript you're reading his words, and they're always followed by the brackets that is, laughter, order restored. so he was asked at this trial do you know the colors, the complexions, the different complexions of people of color? and he said, sure, i do. they're black, blacker and blackest. and everybody laughed. a lot of gavel banging. that tells you something about a person. there are certain -- there's a certain kind of performance that people engage in, and at the same time you can get a -- you can see people when they're very vulnerable and you can develop a remarkable portrait of a person.

it's also a starting off point. it just gives you so many different kinds of leads. what's really amazed me is the -- the kind of story that this is. it's a story that people tried to cover up as it was happening. you know, the trial transcript really helps. and then there are over the last ten years there's been just this amazing proliferation of historical and gene logical material available on the internet. i learned communing with the dead is that the secrets that people take to their graves. the secrets of the ages are no match for ancestry.com.

and our databases and databases that lead me to manuscript collections. so, you know, from that trial transcript in 1910, from the trial transcript in 1859, you know, i was able to connect the dots in a way at a level of detail. >> that detail, it all shows through, and the contrast between those two trials of the 1859 trial, i must say, is humorous, and it actually has -- if you read that in isolation, you do feel in some sense a sense of optimism about the

country, an optimism about the men and what they've done to free this escaped slave. by 1910 in the steven trial, there's a whole different flavor of the united states. the judge himself, the police who testify, everyone has ingested a sort of frank kind of jim crow mentality. >> the undertaker. >> yes. >> steven wahl's mother's undertaker testifies, and it's a white undertaker. one thing that he says is addition i definitely thought steven wahl's mother was black because her corpse smelled black. just completely absurd. >> we say that -- we sigh to that, and we should. understand that this mentality, this jim crow mentality, it

invaded our very senses. people believed at that time that you could touch -- you can discern black skin by touching it. that blacks had sort of a different aura and odor. a completely different temperament, and this was enshrined actually in the cannon of law. you sit there reading this, and you watch the judge just say these things over and over. so you see steven would -- the other thing i want to say, is i can identify with steven wahl. my family's not that grand. my great-grandfather missed being born a slave by 90 days. he was conceived in a relationship between a slavemaster and his mother, who was an enslaved woman. just barely born free. and he was a -- he was a pistol of a guy. the one thing about him was he didn't really take any stuff off

of white racists in virginia, which is a highly racest state despite what you think about gentility at that time. because of the fact he saw himself as white as they were, and he thought he was from as good a family as any of them and especially the poor people around his farm who gave him money. do you know where i'm from? i'm from that. that's the plantation right there. part of that is mine. that's where i was born. this is my father. so in wahl's sense, too, you see this indignation in them partly because of many reasons, educated people. also because we have this -- they have -- they were partly white. they had lived close enough to white people, and they had begun to judge themselves reference against them. you see this in the hemmings family. they're living with -- what can you tell, you know, madison

jefferson? he's lived in a house with his father thomas jefferson all his life. you can't tell him much. he listens to madison and lafayette. he's serving people. i don't think you can demean him effectively in his mind, because his experience he sees is he actually greater than yours. that's the element of this. you see this working in the wahls. also the trial itself, you know, is such a point -- although it's a bonanza for you and the reader. the reader gets to see some things he or she would never have seen, but it's such a great sadness that we know the end of this trial before it begins. we know that steven is go to be declared a negro, that he's going to lose his home, that his children are not going to be allowed to go to school, and that he's going to become a wanderer, lost from himself and eventually lost from his heritage, his colored heritage. >> right.

you know, i like at steven wahl's father, someone who is really a hero of african-american histories. i have to ask myself, why don't we know who he is? why isn't he on a stamp? i think a big part of that is that his children became white, and it became imperative that they forget everything about him. and, you know, you really see how -- you see what is lost by this process. you know, for wahl to -- and in a way i think steven wahl new that this would be the result of the trial. >> uh-huh. >> the fact that he pursued the trial meant he had tried to become white by keeping his mouth shut, by really just, you

know, letting people look at him and assume he was white. then newspapers reported the story. they didn't just report the story. they reported what block he lived on in his neighborhood. so there was -- >> "washington post," wasn't if? >> it was "the washington post." it was about every washington daily that reported this. he was denounced pointedly by the major african-american paper of the day, "the washington bee" which promised honey for our friends and stings for our enemies. >> they delivered on the latter. >> yes, there were a lot of stings for steven wahl. so in a way he tried to be quietly anonymous, but then he did something.

he could have stayed quiet and anonymous. but he did something that forced everybody to think about o.s.b. wahl one last time. >> and it's interesting, you know, as one -- as a person of color, one can put one's self in these scenarios, because as i said, you know, this is our story. i mean, i can tell you. when i was about 14 years old, i was -- i grew up in a town just outside of philadelphia, a factory town. i was 14 years old. i was on the bus doing an errand for my mother. a bus pulled up to the corner and a gentleman got into the bus who was a friend of family, passed whole days in my living room and he walked by me and didn't speak. i got up to -- i thought he hadn't seen me. i got up, and he was with a woman who was white. and he pushed her down the aisle with one hand and turned to me with one hand and raised his hand like that with pay look of

horror on his face. he didn't say a word. he said like that. and in that moment, 14 i was, in that moment i realize that had our friend was black with us, and he was white on the white side of town. no one had ever given me this calculus, but from then on i knew not to speak to him when i saw him on the white side of town. so these kind of -- and one of the really interesting things in steven's case, steven for a time is a tenant of a woman named mary turrell is a famous civil rights activists, educator, writer and journalist. her husband was the first black municipal judge of washington. mary is basically sitting on the school board when they eject steven's daughter, and she tries

to argue that the girl is, in fact, white. also, mary in her heart of hearts kind of wanted steven to succeed. she understood. if you look at her and her memoirs and her letters, even people -- the race proud people that were civil rights activists, they understood segregation was so grueling and a source of deprivation to children, that sometimes they just closed their eyes and they let their friends become white because they knew it was better for the family involved. you see, she was really supporting, maybe, boosting steven across the line. >> yep. i mean, it's unclear to me whether by renting to steven wahl she was trying to bring him back in or whether this was --

she just provided a weigh station for them on their path, you know, from brookland in northeast washington, kind of over eventually to georgetown. >> uh-huh. so finally in that last thing, i mean, when i -- i did a piece about this wonderful, wonderful book. you see it gets me going. and i compared them to the hemmings family. customarily in history the value of newly acquired whiteness can be measured in dollars and cents. you know? among the hemmings family, the people who became white, they became army officers, doctors, heads of banks and so on. the people who essentially looked identical and who decided to remain colored, well, they were caters, small farmers and laborers and so on. the value of whiteness came in. i know it's fashionable to think

whiteness doesn't have an advantage, but believe me it does. you can always measure it. so in this sense steven, you know, he finally escapes at the cost of his house, his tranquillity, his relationship to other people, the black elites, they know him, and he could have lived very comfortably among them. but he escapes out of that, and he gets to be this itinerant white person, but he becomes white too late to make any benefit of it, does he not? >> for him he was 65. and becoming white was really a downwardly mobile move for him and his family. >> say more about that. what do you mean by that? >> so, you know, had he stayed african-american, you know, he was retiring and there was no

social security. it was not an easy plif for retirees, but he would have been part of a community that really knew him where he had a certain amount of status. you know, certain kinds of opportunities. and by, you know, moving out of that community, by moving from place to place, his children really -- they didn't have the same kind of educational opportunities. they wound up with less money, less status, very -- a very isolated and anonymous existence. >> the sense -- i got that sense in the book, too, this idea that them, you know, stort of just this downward mobile thing for them. and washington, it would have been really apparent. and also it would have been really obvious because of the

elites of washington were extremely visible at all times. we're going to begin to take questions shortly, so the deal is if you want to ask questions, you have to walk to the microphone because we're being recorded here. you can ask questions, and we can go sort of right on talking if you'd like. but daniel, also, you know, i take it that this subject matter chose you in a way. i mean, daniel, i thought, was going to be a lawyer practicing in a law firm and go home with suitcases full of money. but this subject matter got ahold of you. what happened there? >> you know, this was -- and i kind of story and a kind of issue that i first encountered in college. i -- it was a story that i kept kind of putting down, kept

thinking this was fascinating. i'm going to -- you know, i'm so glad that i spent all this time researching this and now i'll live my life. when i finished college, i thought, you know, i wrote my thesis about a north carolina divorce case from 100 years ago where a husband sought an annulment on the ground that he had unwittingly married a black woman. i thought this was wonderful, and now i'm going to be a journalist. i worked for three years as a journalist, and then i went to law school. i thought i'm here here in law school to be a lawyer. i thought i was going to be a criminal lawyer. in my first year there as an elective called topics in 19th century legal history. and i thought to myself, i know i should take something practical. but i have to take this class. and i thought, does it show the

weakness or character that i'm interested in this class? but i took it anyway. in that class i wrote a paper about a slander case in southwest virginia about 100 years ago where it was like an appalachian family feud, but in stead of bullets, one family shot rumors at the other family who was black. all around the county. that forms the core of another family i write about in the book. then i thought, that was great. my family, we had moved to boston, and i was in the process of interviewing with boston law firms. and at the same time, i applied

for a fellowship from the national endowment for the humanities as an independent scholar to work on turning this paper i had written in law school into something bigger, and nine months after i applied, basically, and had forgotten i applied, i got the fellowship. so the national endowment for the humanities saved me from a life of gainful employment. >> we have one question, yes. >> say your name and say your question. >> my name is robin blasker. it was a wonderful presentation. thank you. this is a country where everything is defined as we the people. everything is defined by who we people is. i think there's a difference though in thinking about who is black, more black, blackest and in thinking about who's white,

less white, least white and not white. many people who have been in the country originally or have come here as immigrants, very different than african-americans, who did not come here on their own, have been considered not to be white. even people here who are women were not considered to be people. >> and your question. >> and the question -- no -- the question is as we start looking at this issue in today's world, where white people are becoming a minority in this country, is there a difference in how we actually approach it in terms of how we change what's going on in this country? whether we consider who is not white or who is black? >> that's a very interesting question. and i think that one of the lessons that i draw from the

stories of these three families is that, i mean, in some ways maybe it's less importance to talk about race and drops of blood than talk about racism and inequality. so, you know, we can think of blackness in terms of black blood. but plenty of white people have black blood, too. so what does that leave us when we think about what race is? i think what we're left with is race as a crude marker of discrimination. it's like what w.e.b. dubois said. he said, people ask me what is a black man, and i say the answer is easy. the black man is the one who has to ride the jim crowe car

through georgia. and i think shifting our focus towards discrimination and inequality is, you know, we supposedly live in a post racial era but as long as the inequality exists and the discrimination exists, then race exists, too. >> i think we'll leave it there. thank you. >> thank you. [ applause ] this year c-span's local content vehicles are traveling the country, exploring american history. next, a look at our recent visit to wichita, kansas. you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend, on c-span 3. >> from 1930 to the middle of 1945 i did occupy that position.

and that was the period of the great rise of the late movement in the midst of which the communists played an honorable and effective part in one certain degree of influence in america. that influence has always bng exerted for actively organized and solidifying the labor movement and uniting labor with all progressives. communists do not control any labor unions. and do not want to control them. especially during the war, it could be combined with the most complete support of the war ever. >> we're looking at kellog. it's the major thoroughfare through wichita. the grassy area in the house is where the house was for early browner. he was the general secretary of

the communist party from 1920 to 1950 he ran for president twice under the communist party in 1936 and 1940. in 1989 when kellogg was widened, there was talk of moving his house. because of the connections of moving it to save it. it proved to be so dilapidated, they were unable to save it. he was born in 1891. his family was fairly poor. assen early boy he had to start working. he was a messenger at plenty of

places in utah. including the western union, the union national bank and a drugstore. and at age 16 he began reading karls maarhx. he heard you gene dabbs who is in the socialist party lead talk about socialism, and he became so moved that he began selling the appeal to region. it was the nation's largest socialist newspaper at the time. it was publiced here in kansas. at that time there was a huge diverse economic zi cotmy going on. you have the very, very wealthy, and you have the very, very poor. and the browder family was certainly among the very, very

poor. what happened was world war i broke out. and rather than serve in the military, he went to prison. when he got out of prison he helped organize the communist party in the nation. went during the 1920s to china and helped organize the chi need communist party. then he came back and was the general secretary of the whu nis party here in the nation. ran for president in 1936 and 1940 against fdr. did not receive any votes from wichi wichitants. this was before world war ii. it didn't have quite the negative overtones that it does today. in 1936, earl browder said that the united states is economically ready for communism, but it's politically not ready.

>> some issues are beginning to stand out so that they can be seen by the masses. you don't have to give long winded explanations anymore. people see that people understand what they need is a voice to express it for them. and an organization to rally them. he advocated for merging the united states and the soviet communist parties. that's what caused stalin to kick him out of the communist party. during the 1950s he was brought before the senate foreign relations committee with joe mccarthy. he had to answer questions and refused to. he refused to name names. he died in 1972 at the age of