Tracing the Legacy of Black Entrepreneurial Spirit

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Well, I'm gonna get us started. How y'all doing, how y'all feeling. First of all, I just want to say thank you for coming. It's cold, it's dark, it's December, but we're here and I'm just excited that you all are here for an amazing conversation with an amazing woman, somebody who I have just been enjoying talking to and getting to know. Really, I think what resonates most with me is your authenticity. I don't see that a lot of times. I don't know if you guys see people out here faking, stutting, doing everything, but whenever I can connect with somebody who's so authentic, it is refreshing to me. So I just want to say thank you for that. I've been enjoying that, whether it was on your show, whether we were talking before the show, whether we were just talking today. Your authenticity really appeals to me. So I just want to say thank you for that.

Well, thank you. I don't know who else to be but me.

Hey, but people out here doing a lot of stuff though, dr Malbo, but I'm gonna read some of your bio, because you got a lot going on as far as accolades, and I don't like missing people's accolades and I want to make sure people know who we are in the presence of. So but first I'm gonna give you a little bit about Mahogany books. So my name is Ramunda Young and my husband and I created Mahogany books wow 16 years ago. I mean, we've been married for 21 years, so that's a whole other book how you do that and do that. You know, be married and being in business together, but I love it. But we started. This is our first location that was open about seven years ago here in Anacostia. We just opened up our second location in National Harbor in the middle of the pandemic. That's a whole another testimony too. And then in September at National Airport, we don't call it Reagan, we call it National. Thank you, yes, I don't know. Yeah, they tripping with that.

You gotta have arguments with airline people. They'll say are you going to Reagan? No, I'm going to National, that's right. They say Reagan. I say National, we can do this for five minutes, we sure can, we sure? And then I finally say DCA, let me help you out, dca. And they say why can't you say Reagan? I said because I don't like cussing to people.

I do not know Exactly Like it's okay to be national. It's been national all these years but we just opened up like a footprint in National Airport in September. We partnered with thank you, thank you, thank you a footprint.

What gate is?

it near it is Concourse D, it's the American Airlines section and I don't know if you all know Juanita Busy B Britton, so we partnered with her, so she has the bigger store and a lot of different travel essentials and gifts and things of that. But then there's a section of black books that Mahogany books has, and so we have books in there that you don't see at Hudson News or anywhere else, like we have a Sada, we have the autobiography of Malcolm X, we have with this I know we were talking about.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, this will be in the airport too, but it's just been refreshing to see how fast they are moving and it just let us know that people are been looking for our books and I say are, as black authors and readers that are here want access to those books. So fast forward to Mahogany books now, like I said, 16 years, and we started online in a one bedroom apartment in Alexandria those years ago because we wanted people to have access to black books. And before I read your bio, I just want to tell this last little thing I grew up in Tulsa, oklahoma, and you referenced Tulsa quite a bit in your book.

Tulsa. I just came back from reparations meeting 200 local reparations activists and the Tulsa pieces are one that resonates. It's not the one that resonates the most but it's the best known. I will let you finish it, because I'll talk about that a little bit, about the other places that were like Tulsa, that we really don't know that much about. I mean, I'm working on this new book and it's like the things those people did to us, dr.

Mao, I don't go there, I'm sitting in the back of the Library of Congress, in the back, and I'm reading this lynching story, and I said y'all forget my profanity, but if y'all know me, you know I cuss, I'm in the back. I said, oh god damn. So the little brother, cute little boy, just graduated from Howard, maybe two or three years ago, and we always exchanged greetings pleasure. She came back to me, dr Mao, but you can't sit back here cussing like that. I'm in the stacks, I'm not out in. But I said well, read this. So he read it. He said oh god damn, I'm sure, I'm sure. No, some of the things. I mean, let me let you do what you do. I mean, it's just so. What can I say? When people talk about where we are as a people, they'll take all this devilment into account. Yeah, what they did, you know? Yes, diabolical is what I say.

And you can't some of the stuff I was telling my brother, my sibling, some of the things they did to men. He said, well, give me an example. I said, brother, I really don't want to talk to you about this. You know, I mean, they castrated people, that's right. You know they lit people on fire, living while they were living, you know, and worse if you could think of it. And worse. And worse.

Yeah, and then they have the temerity to talk about it, the abject, utter nerve to talk about our people in disparaging ways. It's a wonder they don't wonder we alive. It's a wonder they alive. I mean because, like I said, if I was, my grandmother used to tell us a story about one of my foremothers who apparently this is folklore, we can't prove it killed about four white people by grinding glass in a food when she got tired of their mess and she had been raping multiple times. It was like great, great, great grandmother, and grandma Rose said well, she has something for them, and so her life was always let me bake a cake for her. Just let me bake a cake for her.

Okay, bake your cakes. I'm gonna have to watch all I'm eating nowadays, but no, no, no, if the wrong white people gave it to you.

You should be careful. I don't eat white people food. I don't care if they my friends. Nope, nope, nope. Yeah, I'm not racist. I racial, okay, racial.

I've learned some new terminology this week, anyway, on a lot of different things, but what I was gonna say, too, is the last thing with Mahogany books. I grew up in Tulsa and my parents still live in Tulsa to this day. We're about two miles from Black Wall Street and growing all the way up through Tulsa, I never knew Black Wall Street was there. It was never taught in my books.

That's the reason for that it's a reason for that. It was never taught in my books. And so fast for me, and when I talk to people now, when I think about you know, I think I'm bold and audacious now, but I can only imagine how bold I really would be knowing that, two miles from me, innovators, educators, entrepreneurs were there, and so I to walk and stand on their shoulders with, I mean, the immense respect and confidence that I would have gained knowing that it was there. And so to grow up and not know it was blocks from, I mean I can walk to it, to that, to Black Wall Street in Greenwood, so, but didn't know it.

So when I think about books and for us, why we opened up Mahogany books, we said no, nobody should be subject to that. If we can do our part and make Black books accessible, no matter where you live Tulsa, new Hampshire, whatever then that's what we're going to do. So here we are, 16 years later and with Mahogany books. So I just appreciate every person that comes to our doors and comes to our events, because it's a dream realized all the time that it's working, that it's a good idea, that it's needed. So thank you all for coming tonight. So let's get into this. Let me read I feel like I'm on NPR. Let me I'm using my NPR voice, my Dr Malvo voice, but I'm using my PFW voice.

Oh yes, yes, let me use my PFW voice. Let me get it together. Yes, my WPFW voice. But Dr Julianne Malvo is an economist, author, television and radio commentator and the recent dean of the College of Ethnic Studies of California State University in Los Angeles. Her weekly columns appeared nationally through Black Press USA and the Trice-Edney Newswire. She writes about economics, politics, gender and race, most recently tackling issues of body autonomy, student loan, debt and inflation. Dr Malvo is present emerita of Bennett College, serving from 2007 through 2012. And Dr Malvo is a radio host radio show host where she hosts Malvo. That airs on W PFW on Monday.

So please help us welcome Dr Julianne Malvo and Dr Malvo. We have to talk into our mice because we are recording this. We're talking to the mic. Yes, all right, I will All right. Yes, but I would love to know we can read, and this book is amazing. So all of you who are getting this book she's definitely gonna sign it today but I want to know about you, your origin story. Like you're an economist, but what in your life, what part of your journey helped, shaped you becoming an economist? There's not a lot of black economists out here in these streets, but what shaped you to even do that? Do that work?

Well, economics is a study of who gets what, when, where and how, and as his politics, how do you divide the pie up? And as a kid, I was always really curious about that, about why. I mean, I was like a total nerd. So, for example, some of the younger people don't know about encyclopedias, but we had encyclopedias. My mother was a book person, my parents, everybody in my family is a book person. My mom died two years ago and I inherited like 3,000 books that I have to figure out where to put. But she read everything and everything. She a lot of religion, da, da da, but she was a book person. My dad was a book person. He was a one of the first black assistant superintendents in the San Francisco Public Schools. My mom was one of the first black social workers. So but anyway, and whenever you something happened, she said go look it up. She wouldn't tell you anything. Go look it up. So with an encyclopedia, you know you've read an entry at the bottom and say, see also. And then they would have something and they would say, see also. Well, I wanted to have an uninterrupted read. So I would line encyclopedia down the hallway and make my siblings go to the back door because I was trying to read encyclopedia and I wanted to read it all at the same time. I didn't want to have to stop and go to and stop and go to.

So first of all, the nerdy thing comes from that I broke my arm at nine. It's really funny. So we have books everywhere and there was this book, la Vida, by Oscar Lewis. It was about Puerto Rico and he was an anthropologist and it was kind of scatological, had a lot of sex in it. So I was nine, okay. So I was like mommy, I want to read that book. And she's like no, it's too advanced for you. So after two or three tries I just climbed up to top. She had put away at the top shelf. So I climbed up there to get the book and I fell and broke my arm. And so she said well, you want to read it? That bad, go for it. So every other word I'm like mommy, what is fornication? Look it up. I mean, it did have a lot of sex in it. It was a little much for a nine year old, I mean. But everything I said she's like go look it up. But that stuff is in the dictionary, so I learned from it anyway.

But so she was a social worker who used to bring people home. I was telling you about my clothing addiction, which is a function of the fact that my mother would bring people home from the Department of Social Services and then she'd give them my clothes, mine and she would say Julianne Malvo, you have many things, you don't have to worry about it. But I had an aunt who worked at Macy's and she brought me a pink cash miss sweater. And why did mommy give that pink cash miss sweater to one of them? Welfare people? She said you have many things. I think today I have 50 cash miss sweaters. I'm still trying to compensate for that cash miss sweater.

But the social work part of her made me know we weren't wealthy because my parents were divorced and da da, da. So we weren't wealthy. But we weren't pitiful either. We were okay. If they had stayed together we would have been wealthy. But they liked to go to court. So that's a whole other story. They went annually. When I was 21, they were the court for the custody of me and I was grown. They were fighting over the tax deduction.

I can tell you stories but I won't.

But anyway, they were crazy. They were very intense black people, which is how come I got to be a very intense black person? But when she would bring the public assistance people home, we got to talk to them, we hung out with them. Sometimes they stayed with us two and three weeks and that's how I learned about poverty, real poverty, not sort of gentile poverty, but real poverty, and it also so it may be curious about how, and so I started looking at numbers before I was even an undergrad and I'm like how come black people always have less? And you know, dr King once said that the good things black people have half and of the bad things we have twice. Now I'm misquoting him slightly, but he said that in the 60s, before he was assassinated. So that kind of drove me to economics. Then, when I was an undergrad at Boston College, I took a econ class. You had to take some social science. I really wanted to be a lawyer and actually if I were wealthy I would be a bookstore owner. I remember you telling me that.

I actually had hooked up with some street people who had money and we were trying to figure out how to get bookstore. And then my brother, who is a street people, he is serious with them, but now that he's 67, I think he probably grew out of that, but he told me at the time he said Julia, you cannot do business with them people. I said why? He said I don't want to find your bones on the side of the road. I said, uh, they that bad. He said take my word for it. But we have found a space where I want to do a bookstore on the ground floor, a club on the second floor, and this is back in the 80s, so it preceded like an Airbnb kind of thing, rooms, not rooms, like little spaces where people, if they came to San Francisco, they could hang out like rent a room for night or something like that. My brother's like no, you cannot do that. But see, I mean I would love to own a bookstore. I probably wouldn't make any money because I would take everything home.

But the econ piece was just who gets what, where, where, how? And I couldn't figure out why black people never had anything. And so I mean not never had anything, but why we were always lagging. And so that was the impetus. And then I did. I think I did a paper as a freshman and the professor took the paper and copied it and well, I typed the paper. So I guess that was made it unusual and he passed out to other people in the class and said this is what excellence is. I was like, oh, ok, and he said you need to be an economist. So I'm like, ok, so that was kind of that got me to econ. Wow.

I'm still stuck at the. You had these dictionaries and Britannicas laid out. I do remember those in second grade and others go to the back.

Yes, which was that was always an issue why we got to go to the back door. I said because I'm the oldest. There's no other reason. I'm the oldest.

Yeah, I'm the oldest, so I understand some of that. So this book Surviving and Thriving 365 Facts in Black Economic History this is the second edition. I think the first edition came about. Was it 2010? Was?

it, 2010. So I'll tell you, I was in the airport I think it's Detroit and a young brother had this, the first edition, and he apparently had well, read it because it was really beat up. And he came up to me and he's like he's pointing and pointing and I'm like, yeah, that me. And so we're chatting and he said, well, how come you won't? He's, I can't find it. He said why don't you re-release it? And I said I got other stuff to do, boo. And he said, well, he said just think about it. And then our mutual friend, patrick Oliver I raised. Patrick Oliver is a literary activist. He has an organization called Say it Loud. He especially focuses on black boys and literacy, so check him out. But anyway, patrick's like we can do this, we can do this.

And then, in the middle of me moving from DC to LA, we were in the middle of doing that and doing that, so we really didn't market it appropriately, but we did it. And that was I check the call the young brother. He said he was one of the first. He said I'm buying five copies for my friends. So they're doing like discussions of the facts, of the various facts which he said, a lot of them. He just didn't know, just like you didn't know about Tulsa and you know then the Tulsa story. I mean just evil white people. But there's a concept that I'm working on new book and one of the concepts that I'm playing with is economic envy. I mean, if you hear about lynchings, economic envy. Yeah, white folks see, they had so structured enslavement to make any white person be able to do anything to any black person with no consequence, so they basically brainwashed themselves into thinking we were less than so then when we performed, when we achieved, they couldn't take it. Economic envy. So the first lynching, as an example that Ida B Wells investigated, was a three black men. Tommy Moss was her friend. Here's what happened there was an area in Memphis called the curve that a lot of black people lived in, and in the curve there was a grocery store owned by a white man and he was ignorant, he was criminal. It was this 1896. Anyway, he was selling liquor when it was against the law. He had more than 10 citations for illegal whatever. He just was a low life and black women did not like to go into his store because people talked under their clothes white man might grab a sister, whatever. So Tommy Moss was a postmaster, a deacon in his church. He was like one of those A plus brothers. He decided we don't have to take this, we'll start our own store. So they started a store called the People's Grocery. So at the People's Grocery black people were respect two of his friends, so there's three of them Black women were respected, people were respected, the prices were better.

All right, two boys get into a fight over marbles, a black boy and a white boy. The white boy runs to the white man's store and says the black boy stole his marbles. White men go to the black store with guns. Now, this was a little bit after the Spanish-American War. Brothers had guns, so they brought their guns. Brothers brought their guns. No black person was hurt, but a white boy was shot. They didn't kill him, I mean, they just shot him.

Well, the next day the sheriff came back and arrested the three brothers and then lynched them. Now the economic piece of this story is and then a white man got the store and his contents for eight cents on a dollar. That's economic envy. Wilmington, north Carolina. Similar story.

This brother named Mr Manley I forget his first name, I old, I said my notes but a Mr Manley owned a newspaper and after a white woman Roberta Shelton, I believe her name, was she's first woman senator of the United States, this heifer wrote an article that said if we have to lynch a thousand black men to protect our virginity, she was too old to have virginity in the first place. But if we have to do that, we will all right. So Mr Manley wrote an editorial saying let's be real, this is not. All of these. Consensual relationships are rape. Some of these people are together because they wanna be, and he had some very he's like. If a comely last would like to couple with a handsome black man, let her do it. Well, you know, white folks went crazy and they did all kinds of things. But Ida B Wells had similar rhetoric. She said something like we're so worried about your women's virtue, you really need to worry about your women, because you know. So they burned her. You know. They burned her press down and ran her out of town.

In the case of Williamson, north Carolina, in 1896, there was. They were interesting. The Republicans were the good guys then. Then they had these people called the red shirts and the white hats, where the white hats were the precursors to the Klan, and so there was gonna be an election and the Republicans and the black people and some kind had come together for the election. So what they did was arrested all the black men who were prominent about 60 of them and then put them on buses and trains and ran them out of town. And then they basically did.

This was 1896, before the 1921 Tulsa. Then they did there what they did in Tulsa they burned everything. They don't know how many people died. They said it could be as many as 600. But the oral history says that the river ran red, which the Wilmington River ran red. The other thing they did they deputized all these random white people who went door to door forcing black people to sign over their property.

And then the brother who, manley's great grandfather, who was all that in a bag of chips. He was a wealthy black man, and now, also with these lynchings, the subtext is wealthy people, economic envy. He ended up being a house painter and Philly, after he escaped, they were looking for him, they had a price on his head, and so then, so you have this Memphis, wilmington, and so Tulsa. And Tulsa is interesting because they lynched a white man who stole a car and killed somebody. And then the newspaper said if we could lynch a white man, we could lynch a Negro. It was almost celebratory oh gee, we can do this.

And so the little Tulsa story, which is ridiculous a black man named Dick Rowland he was only 19 years old, he was an orphan and a white woman named Sarah Page she was 17, also an orphan. From what I read, there was a very vibrant orphan community. These young people had no adult supervision and they partied all night with each other black, white, whatever and then they got up the next day and went to work. So no one knows what happens be happened between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page, but here's what we do know she refused to press charges. They made they try to make her press charges to say that he had assaulted her and she wouldn't do it. What seems to have happened is that he made. She was an elevator operator. The only place you could go to the restroom in downtown Tulsa was at the top of this building, so we had to take the elevator and go up there. So what seems to have happened? My interpretation is these are ragny elevators in 1921. You've ever been a hand operated elevator? You see how sometimes it's just unsteady. I think he must have just jostled her and she must have exclaimed.

But a white man witnessed it and so he went around and said that Dick Rowland had raped Sarah Page. And then they had a headline that said to lynch a Negro tonight. That was a headline of the newspaper to lynch a Negro tonight. And so the brothers again. Now this is the group of black men that we just have to give high praise to. They fought in World War I because they thought it would earn them respect, but it didn't. But they still weren't playing and they had guns. So when the white folks said they were gonna lynch Dick Rowland, the brothers were downtown. They're like mm-mm, that's right, not on my watch. And so the next thing, somebody got shot and I gave white people permission to literally eviscerate a whole community.

And what you have to know about black Tulsa, which you must know, the black people bold and bodacious and entrepreneurial. The first automobile in Tulsa was driven by a black man who was so brilliant that he took it apart, put it back together and then started an auto repair shop, a theater that held 750 people we're talking 1921, y'all A theater. Because black people were not admitted to the regular hospital, black doctors built a hospital. I mean, this was economic self-sufficiency all the way through. So, basically, I had the enormous privilege of knowing one of the survivors, dr Olivia Hooker. Do you know about Dr?

Hooker. In your book I read some about Dr Hooker.

Yeah, dr Hooker was a trip. I met her because she and I were both speaking in Syracuse, new York, and I had the cutest little outfit to work out in, but I forgot my shoes. I always forget something when I travel. I forgot my shoes. So I'm in her suite. They just gave me a room but she was old so I guess I'll forgive them. But I'm in her suite fussing.

I had on my little cute outfit and I had on some regular flats and she said where are your jogging shoes? And I said I'm gonna be an evil ass. You know what If I don't get my workout on, because if I don't work out three days a week, I ain't really mean, because I just had to get my endomorphs and all them things. They had to get a line. And she said well, I don't wanna be around the evil people. She said we're on the same program tomorrow. I said well, what would you suggest? She said what size? And I was all. I really was evil. So I put a little old lady. I said what size you are? I said 10. She said go in my room and see if you can find some shoes. Because she said I'm getting on my nerves. So I went in her and she had size 10 sneakers and so she used to always after we became very close, we talked a lot and she used to tell people I was her soul sister and people thought it meant soul sister. She said it meant soul sister, that's my soul sister. No shoes, yep. But Dr Hooker said she was six when it happened.

She remembers a lot. She remembers looking out the window and seeing troops and she said she asked her mother why is my country trying to Kill us? She remembers the crazy white people again economic envy invading their house and taking that, her mother's Caruso records. I mean she remembered that details, the Caruso records and but what she she what? She also remembered what her dad said. Her dad owned the department store and the blessing of that is a lot of people kept their money in the vault in the store Mm-hmm before they went to the bank, so like they go to bank maybe once a week. So that was some of the money that they were able to use to rebuild.

But you know she said that this had been. She believes that something had been brewing, that the dick rolling. Sarah Page, they was just an excuse that you know they have because she's a white man have been collecting guns. Law enforcement had cracked down and that article, if you can kill, if you can lynch a white man, you can lynch a Negro. She said she thought it gave a lot of people ideas. Sure, and you know, to this day there's been nothing. I'm, you know, I'm gonna try to go down to Tulsa they're doing a Juneteenth thing and I'm gonna try to go the. There were some Tulsa folks. There's a one black woman on the city council in Tulsa. I think her name is a Vanessa with a hyphen.

I'm not Hawkins, is it?

maybe he'll some. Anyway, she's got a hyphen in there and she's a pistol and she raises it all the time. But should they they're not doing anything. The brother who was the pastor of the church that the one of the surviving buildings. He now lives in Baltimore. He took over Jamal Jamal Bryant's church, I think.

I know that.

Reverend Robert Turner. Once a month he walks for 40 miles from Baltimore To the White House and he calls it 40 for 40. So he walks 40 miles for HR 40 and reparations. And he's joined us in narc, the National African-American reparations Commission. So he, but he, he talks about Tulsa. He's you know, he knows about every. You know everybody should know about it. I'm the only thing I'm grateful to the orange man for. I ain't grateful to him for much. In fact I pray every day for his untimely demise. I really I know you're not supposed to do that, but, uh, the Lord will forgive me or not, but when he tried to do something in Oklahoma, people pushed back and he brought a lot of attention for that to Tulsa. I'm like, okay, you know, the devil might have brought up a God used it.

Yes, you know he did and I we went. This is what December, maybe three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago this is our second time but me and another young lady brought 25 black bookstore owners to Tulsa, flew them everything. We got a grant, pay for hotel flights, food, because we wanted black bookstore owners. When you think of black bookstores and what they've meant to communities over the years and what it meant to black people in pride and information, all that kind of stuff. But we wanted them to go to Tulsa. So we walked, we stayed there for three days. We also kind of brainstormed at what it looks like to bring black bookstores together and create community.

I want that list. Yes, easy, easy, easy. And so for the past three years I've been leading this group once a month on zoom. But we took him to Tulsa and on the grounds of Tulsa, down at Greenwood in black Wall Street, you'll see names and on plaques in the ground and the sidewalk of where this was, where so-and-so Barbershop was and it's gone now, of course, there's a plaque there and this was so-and-so hospital here and it's a plaque in the ground with the name of that, the person who owned that hospital and if it was Destroyed in the riot or after the riot, a lot of people think that's good, it wouldn't arrive a massacre.

Come on, yes, yes and the massacre. And so all throughout the streets down in Greenwood You'll see all these plaques where the actual businesses were. The last thing I really love about black Wall Street, too, is I mean so many things, but when I think of community, there were nine barbershops in that. It's a large area. Where we were, black street was but nine different barbershops. And when I think of community, now a lot of black people feel like we got to be In competition or compete with a lot of different things. But yet we existed and I think a lot of that Competition or I'm out for you and you out for me came, did not come from our community. We are a communal people. We came from us all helping each other. So it's just interesting to know that we could coexist. Like you mentioned, there were several hospitals, there were several theaters, there were several Businesses of the same type in that community, all serving, all thriving In that space. So we took those bookstore owners there and took them on an in-depth tour.

That is amazing, so that they would know that. Yeah, you know one of the things about Tulsa also this young lady she works for the council woman. They got a grant. We don't know how many of our people were swallowed by evil. We don't know how many people were killed. And Tulsa, we don't know how many people were killed. In Wilmington there's a book called by hands, now known, that talks about all the. You know they were somebody black would die. They said, well, oh, they died by hands unknown. And so there's a, there's a lab in at Northeastern University Led by a sister, and they're looking at all of this stuff. But in Tulsa, as an example, you know, they don't know how many.

So this young sister who works for the council woman was telling me that they, um, where there these trees? That was in the middle of the area when everything went down and she said the trees, what does she call the trees? I wrote it down somewhere, but it's like the trees, by the way they grow after they've been burned, show trauma. So they believe that there were people buried In trees. So they had whatever technology they did and they found some children who were had been killed. They found their bones and everything. They took them to Corner and they were about to do autopsy.

Some the mayor of Tulsa said no, and so they just reburied them. They didn't even try to, but what they want to do was DNA testing to figure out, because they have DNA, dna from some of the people, the elders, some of the people who were, you know, basically so. But the the mayor said no, I mean, the white people in Tulsa now are trying to reclaim it and they don't want the stigma of what happened with the massacre. And so, you know, this little sister was telling me. She said oh, they had a little ceremony but they didn't tell the black people. So they had some committee that was. They didn't tell, they didn't tell the black people, they did the ceremony, like seven in the morning, you know. And so they and they reburied them in the same place, whereas they knew who they were, they could have united their remains with their families, you know, but this is, this is the evil.

Yes, speaking of the evil, there was a question. I have my questions on here, so I'm not just not looking at it but when you talked about, you said, economic envy. There was also something you mentioned predatory capitalism. You mentioned that throughout the book and of course, you got to 365 facts in here right, they're all there. But I just thought it was so Intriguing and beautiful and needed the preface in the book Um, that you talked about it. But you mentioned, um predatory capitalism, um, as pretty much a. It's a travesty that happened in our country. How do you define predatory capitalism and what should we know about it? You talk about it in this book. What does that mean?

Well, predatory capitalism is regular capitalism on steroids. It's exploiting x, it's exploiting people's excess value. So let's say that you're making 25 dollars an hour but your employer is getting 50 dollars an hour from your labor. Predatory capitalism is underpaying you that way. Predatory capitalism is what happens in the rental market, when people are having their basically surplus value extracted from them.

So I guess, as capitalism on steroids, I think something is wrong with capitalism in and of itself. But I'm a mit trained economist, which means you know I don't have an alternative. You know I was trained in capitalism, although you know I play with the possibilities of socialism, the possibilities of Communalism. But at the end of the day, you know, the capitalist system doesn't have to be as exploitive as it is. I mean, basically, I look at capitalism as a wolf, I look at government as the dentist. So here's the deal Do you sharper the wolf's teeth or do you you playing them down? See, what we have in the past, probably 40 years, is the Wolf be having his teeth sharpened. So we've had past law after law after law that allows people to exploit. In a more quote, gentle period you would have the basically the wolf's teeth Playing down so that people could thrive. We could look at a bunch of numbers that show that. Well, I can.

The last recession, not the the 2008 the top 10% came back with 115% of what they lost. But people at the bottom never came back. But the top, the people at the top, they got theirs back and then some. But that because we're giving banks money because they were failing, we'll give the people who were depositing some money because they were failing. I mean so predatory capitalism. Like I said, it's capitalism on steroids and has no moral compass. The compass. That compass is profit maximization. So the job of the catalyst is to make as much money as they can, no matter who you hurt.

Got it cause I was like, ooh, let me get my. When I see her I'm gonna ask her about this, cause I just thought it was. I love that you gave it a name and gave it words that we could continue to use. So in this book you have 365 facts. I wonder how did you stop at 365? Cause there's probably so many more. What was that determining factor for you to stop there?

A fact today, in a year. Fact today, I mean I will probably. I mean I'm working on my lynching book. Now it's called the lynching culture, not just lynching the lynching culture, the wealth gap and reparations. So I'm working on that and I'll probably come back to the facts because there are plenty and in fact people have written into how come you didn't have this, how come you didn't have that. So I will probably come back to it.

So why a second edition? Why now? Why 2023? Come on, what a second? Why now?

Like I said, a little brother rolled up on me in the airport and it just seemed to me actually also, it just seemed to me that we need to know what has happened to our people. What I call this age is a graceless age. There is no grace in this age that we're in to the point that books are being banned, facts are being denied. One of the first states that passed that anti-CRT stuff was Oklahoma, and which means can you actually teach the story of Tulsa given that law? And so it seemed to me that just, even though these facts have been out there, it just seemed to me that it made sense, with less work than writing a whole new book, cause it seemed just let's just release it so people know and people can use it and people can talk about it. And there are more facts. Because I've been mostly what I do these days I need to do more writing and less reading, but the reading is so intriguing it's like it got me like this and I just can't let it go.

But some of the things, some of the reasons that people were lynched you could get lynched for spitting on the sidewalk, lynch for not saying sir to a white person. A man was lynched because a random white woman. He didn't know her. She asked him to run an errand for him and he said no. So they lynched him because he was disrespectful. But there's a case in Paris, texas, where two black men unrelated that happened at the same time. In one case the brother was renting his land and white folks wanted it and the woman who was renting the land to him, leasing land to him, told the white folks who wanted it you have to work that out with him. Guess how they worked it out. They lynched him. And in the same year in Paris, texas, there was an older black man and I'm reading this. There's a book that the NAACP put out in I forget 1920 something, and this brother was described as very inoffensive, elderly and prosperous. So he was asked to sign his land over and he said no, lynched him. I mean so when people you know and the issue here is the collective trauma that people you said you didn't know anything about it. There's a book called Lynching and Spectacle and the woman talks about how people want to spare their children the trauma of knowing. And so they didn't talk about it.

And then there were people who were afraid to talk about it In the Rosewood case people. There's a book about Rosewood and there's a woman who was there and knew she was really old, but she was afraid to even talk about it Because, you know, her son knew about it. He had, she had told him. And when she told him about it she said to him you can't talk to anybody else about this. Then this white man found learned about Rosewood and wants to write a book about it and he did.

But he what? Was going door to door asking people did they know what happened? And people would say no. And then finally someone said you need to talk to this guy. And the brother actually got the man in the car and drove him out of town before he was willing to talk about it. He didn't want anyone to overhear him talking about it. That's the. But Richard Wright, the author who wrote Black Boy, said if I hear of a lynching in Mississippi, I could feel it in Chicago. That's the collective trauma that our people have experienced and that's why we need comprehensive reparations.

And that that just leads to me, and I know James, but I don't have his quote in front of me. But what I do have is my question to you in that kind of same vein what can Black folks do today, if anything, to quiet our minds about what was wrongly taken from us, like whether it be the case in Tulsa or Black Wall Street, or colleges who built their institutions off of enslaved selling enslaved folks? How do we quiet our minds? It's just very complex emotions, or do we not? Do we keep moving? Do we keep fighting for reparations? How do we quiet our?

minds with all of that. Well, we, you know, if we're not whole and I'm not whole when I read about lynchings I get real angry. I told somebody the other day. I said this would not be a day for a white person to step on my foot. This will simply not be the day, and I think there's a level of anger with many of us. Others just stuff it in.

I think, first of all, we have to fight for our own mental health and give it and understand the trauma that our people have experienced, and basically fight for wholeness, and wholeness does mean talking about it, it doesn't mean stuffing it in. But I think, secondly, the fight for reparations, for social and economic justice. I think the history of our people ought to basically invigorate us in struggle. I mean, if we do nothing, we're basically saying that it was okay, and so I think now others disagree. I mean I've got a dear friend, dear dear friend, and she's like I don't wanna talk to you about reparations, that's how it goes. She's like I don't wanna talk about it. She's like that was then and this is now, and she tells me you would be better, your time would be better spent doing something else, blah, blah, blah and I respect her position, but I disagree. I think that as long we're struggling for justice, we're saying we resist evil, we resist what happened, we're gonna make it right, and then they're just really.

We have a wealth gap and that wealth gap determines the terms and conditions of the way so many of our people live In terms of what we have access to, in terms of the fact that 70% of white people own their homes. For black people it's 44. It got up to about 48 or maybe 47. And then it went back down after the recessions. So I mean, what does that mean? Well, I know people whose parents borrowed money against their house to send them to college. You know, I mean I had a little dry spell. I own a home downtown. When I bought it was $300,000 and I couldn't buy it today. But when I went through a little dry spell, what did I do? Refundance my house so that I could and I had access. Home equity is the way that middle income people get a foot into the door, develop wealth and especially intergenerational wealth. So while our kids, somebody's kids, their mom, took a loan out against their house, some other kids, our black young women, have more than twice the student loan debt that white young women have. So they're starting out in life with basically a shackle of that student loan debt. Brother Biden I call him brother when he does the right thing, which ain't all the time, but Brother Biden tried and the Supreme Court knocked it down to try to provide some relief for people in terms of that student loan debt. So the wealth gap is a function of the disparate treatment of our people and we don't have to go all the way back to enslavement.

We can look at the reconstruction era or we can go and look at the 1940s where the GI Bill was unevenly applied so that black men in particular, and black women, but with many of these military things, as it's black men. In Mississippi, fewer than a thousand black men were able to go to college on the GI Bill. Why? Because they had this board. You have to ask the board. You say I'm John Jones, I've served blah blah and I wanna go to Tuskegee and they would say, well, no, maybe you could go to barber school. So the GI Bill was designed to have former soldiers come out and be home, but black men were. It wasn't every. Obviously we got our Whitney Youngs, we got many. Brothers were able, but many were also not, and especially in those southern states where they basically don't get me started.

Don't get me started because I will have to tell you the story about Isaac Woodward. Isaac Woodward was a black man who served in the military, served in the army. He was returning to South Carolina for Washington DC, actually on a bus. They didn't have bathrooms on a bus then, so the rule was if I asked the bus driver, could you make a bathroom? Stop, you're supposed to do it. Isaac Woodward. The bus driver called him a boy. This man is in uniform, called him a boy and blah, blah, blah. I said he wasn't gonna stop.

Isaac Woodward had some choice words for him. He radioed the police. When he stopped at the next place, they pulled him out, beat him, blinded him, blinded him, took the backs of their Billy Cubs and blinded him. And then they poured liquor on him. He didn't drink. They poured liquor on him and said he was drunk and disorderly. This is how we got the Civil Rights Commission, because Harry Truman learned about it. He was a racist, he was a segregationist, but he learned about it. He said how could they do it to a man in uniform? Coincidentally, in the same year, 1946, two couples, two black couples, were lynched, and again, one of them was a veteran. And the president was just horrified. It's like how could this happen? This was a veteran and because he had high regard for military service, so he's like he didn't mind other lynchings, but he did, you know. But the military part really got to him. But when you think about Isaac Woodward, I mean that's, you know, like I said, my mental health ain't right, but I'm okay with that.

I think a lot of us, you know, like I said, just reconcile it sometimes, especially as I read, and we have customers that come in our stores. It's just just staving it off sometimes, cause I can't. When I think of Tulsa, when I think of not knowing, when I think of the book bannings and all these things that are happening, having to keep that rage sometimes under. It's a balance sometimes. Then other times I'm smiling and hey, how you doing. You know it's just this balance and dance that we have to do all the time. So I was just curious, you know how do we combat that.

But I do want to open it up to the audience for questions. But my last question for you is out of all these amazing facts that I went through and I have some of them earmarked, but were there one or two that when you discovered them that you were like, oh my gosh, like this was just mind blowing for you? Or were they? Was it all of them Like? Was there one that sticks out, one or two Facts that you recall that really like blew your mind once you read, discovered it?

The things that I was most excited about were lifting up some of the black women who people didn't know about we all. Everybody knows about Madame CJ Walker. Very few people know about Maggie Lena Walker, who was just an amazing woman from Richmond, virginia. There's a big old statue to her in downtown Richmond. She started a bank, the Penny Savings Bank, which became a consolidated bank. She was brilliant and just.

I've been down to her papers. Actually, at one point I was thinking about writing a book about her but I didn't. So this has been a circuitous route to get to this particular. But Maggie Lena when I think about her I just smile. She, because she was just so before her time she started a department store and it failed because the white people made it fail. What happened was she was very successful.

We as black people, we have all these ceremonial things, we Elks and we granddaughter rulers and all that, but all those uniforms were being obtained from New York and she said, well, why we can do that at my store? So they were selling. But then the white people told the distributors from New York if you supply to her, we won't buy from you. And that's how her. The store lasted for seven years and it ended up failing. But I just like I said, and then in 1929, when we're looking at the depression she suggested to two other black banks that we should consolidate because we won't be able to make it if we're on our own. You think about that, just like what she said about the barbershops.

And she, I mean it wasn't easy but she managed to do it, and so I was excited to write about her, excited to write about my own mentor, dr Phyllis Ann Wallace, who was the first black woman to doctorate in economics from Yale and she was the first black full professor, black female full professor at MIT. So she was one of my professors and just a lot of people don't know about her and they should. She was a researcher at the EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and she just just so many things. And she was my friend who put up with me Every time I curse. She said, don't we have other language? And I'm saying, yeah, we do, we ain't using it today. That's the one I chose. That's the one you chose right.

You know Addy Wyatt, who was a labor leader who a lot of people don't know about when we talk about the labor movement. She's had another one. So that excited me is to bring some of these black women to light and to life, because and the brothers too, I mean ain't Philip Randolph, you know, but I always, you know, for some reason our black history so often sidelines women, and so it's always important for me to include them. And I think even with Dr King, he certainly was all that, you know, he was amazing, but he couldn't have done half of what he did without Coretta and we very rarely lift up Coretta, and she was as passionate, as much an activist and you know and she was his thought partner.

He wrote her a letter in 1957 and said if he wasn't, how did she put it? Basically, he said he could be considered a socialist. And if you look at his speeches, like what, I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, peace and freedom for their spirits. That's an economic conversation, but this is an economic conversation that was developed with his thought partner, and so all too often we don't think about her when we think about Dr King and his legacy.

I love that. I'm thinking about Mahogany Books. There's a thought partner here. There's Ramunda and Der. Ok, I'm just I need to go to therapy back. No, no, I do want to open it up for questions to. If the audience has questions, I'll open it up to you all. So raise your hand if you do have one, and if not, I got to. Ok, I see your hands, so I'm just trying to come to you, since it's going to be recorded. So, yeah, I want to make sure you can speak into the mic.

Thank you. This has been so enlightening. You kind of mentioned in home ownership and kind of going through a little dry spell and refinancing, which I think most of us maybe do. Is that not advised to refinance? When you kind of talked about then legacy of generational, wealth.

Well, it's not the best thing to do, frankly, but it's your asset. So, rather than borrow in another way or it was right for me at the time I have a financial advisor. We talked about it. I have six figures worth of equity in my home. So you know it makes sense, when I croak which I will one of my God children will get my house and if Actually, I'm probably out of there in a minute because those steps are getting on my nerves, but you know, the equity is what they'll inherit, or it's what, when I move to the next chapter, a one-story, something you know that will be what you know sees me through. It's my retirement, you know so. But it depends on where in life, when in life, you are in terms of refinancing, and it depends on the interest rate you get. You know, like today, if anybody refinanced today with these higher interest rates, no, just know, figure something else out.

I think you had a question.

Good evening. This has been amazing. I listened to you on WPFW and so being able to see you has been a treat.

I am a historic preservationist. I grew up loving history and I believe that the reason why I was able to really dive into history as a young age was because I went to a school where, in the fourth grade, I had a class that was especially about African American history and that sparked it and I just kept going with it. I was always encouraged that history was something that was a positive thing to learn and you should grow in it, and so, with any interest, world War II with African studies. I took it through college and now I work in it, and I talked to a lot of African American communities about preserving history and what I hear is a lack of education, a lack of knowledge of what's around them. So, for example, I'm doing work on Nanny Helen Burroughs.

I'm trying to preserve her campus, which is here in the Deanwood area.

It is not designated a landmark.

It is six acres that she designed and vision for a campus for African American women and was able to be a leader for it for over 30-plus years and had great like just amazing connections throughout the city and throughout the country, and when I tell people that I'm even studying Nanny Helen Burroughs, they're like the avenue oh well, I never, really they never put a person with that actual avenue, the naming system that we even have for streets. It's not being transferred into the education system and oh okay. Well, I was in a lecture previously with Khalil Muhammad and he spoke about how to combat the anti-woke movement was to instill African American history in education and we should be trying to push that. But the question was how do we get African American history into our education system if they're banning our books? Your book is something that I think would be a great introduction for younger people to learn facts about excellence, but how is there a way we can get your book into younger people's hands? Is that something that you've been thinking about, or even speaking at schools?

Well, whenever schools call me and can pay me, I can't come, and when it's in the district, though, I'm always happy to show up in the district and I usually don't charge them much. But and I have been thinking about how to my friend Patrick, who helped with the book, has been looking at librarians and how we can get the book into libraries, and I've actually donated boxes but my accountant says I can't do it anymore of books to various schools, with friends who our teachers call and say can I get a book? I'll just send them a whole case because I want people to be able to read it. With the Nettie Helen Burrows thing, though. So first of all, let me start with how we learned it. I don't wanna say something about Nettie Helen Burrows. We have to start doing Saturday schools. We have to start. We cannot depend.

Malcolm X said one time only a fool will allow the enemy to educate their children. Now, so just thinking about Saturday schools, even for an hour, about churches doing or education, but more people on boards of education have to push. I don't think we have the problem here in the district, but we might, but I know that there are many places where it is the whole banning of books, and they're banning stuff like Toni Morrison's Beloved. You know Alice Walker, not Alice Walker who I'm already talking about the Bluest Eye. I mean. 1640 books at last count have been banned in some place or another. It's absurd. So we have to. But whether you have children or not, you have to have some engagement with public education to ensure that our young people are having access. And, as I said, we can't depend on even in a almost even in chocolate it ain't chocolate city number. Even in chocolate chip we have to basically try to emphasize the chocolate. But with many Helen Burrows is there's no marker, there's no nothing.

We're working on it. I picked this up after my mentor. She had been working for almost 10 years to get this designation. There was some issue with the ownership of the property because oftentimes landmarking requires some sort of preservation of a site. You can't just do whatever you want and that wrote contention, so it took a long time. In the meantime, there was designations of the corridor, there was designation, there was mention of a day of many Helen Burrows, which is in May. But the designation of the preservation of physical landmarks, for example, like Anacostia Historic District, is the only historic district in Ward 8. There are several historic districts all throughout the rest of the Ward and so when you think about just the inequality of historic preservation within our African-American community, it really does start with us, because we have to be the bullhorn to say that something is significant. But if nobody knows things are significant, then they're very much likely to disappear more easily. So yeah, it's a tough battle.

Well, I would love to know more about it at another time.

I love it. So I want to make sure people get their book signs. I'm going to do one more question and then we'll go across the hall If you have a book. If you don't have a book, we have books there. Oh, we have. Look, I'm going to say two questions. Make it brief, y'all. We want to make sure y'all get your book sign. You can make it brief, and then we'll make sure. So I'll do you, and then we'll have you as our last one.

Okay, this has been fabulous, fabulous, fabulous and very informative, and thank you for coming to Ward 8. My question is this what can we do to further support and stop the erosion of black banks? Your thoughts on that?

You can patronize them. Once upon a time in our history there were more than 100 black-owned banks. Now we're down to 23. Many of our Industrial does a great job. Doyle Mitchell was my leadership Washington classmate. Wonderful brother supports the community, does a lot and you know. But for black banks like Doyle's or Magdalena I mean back when she started her but their people in Richmond today will tell you they wouldn't have their home were it not for Magdalena and the work that she did. And Doyle does all kinds of community education about home ownership and things like that.

A lot of us, however, want all the bells and whistles that majority banks have and in wanting all those bells and whistles, we don't support our banks and we just need to do a better job at it. And we can, but it's not. But even if the deposits were greater, what we also need to do is to figure out how we can incent more investors. You know, I've had this conversation with Doyle a couple of years ago and he was saying that the deposits are great, but you really don't make money off deposits but investors are people who buy stock and then basically hang in there. But again, with investors, if you go, let's say I don't. I wanna get a good if you buy that bit crap.

Whatever you can say oh, I got 30% return on investment. You're not gonna get that with bank stock. You're gonna get 5%. That's how it is. It's a low turn-up, it's a low profit industry. But if you care about it, you'll support it and we're blessed in. Washington. Industrial is one of the oldest surviving black-owned banks, consolidated bit the dust in, I think, 2003 or 2005. And the banking regulatory system doesn't often work well in the favor of small banks, not necessarily black banks, although black banks tend to be judged far more harshly than others are.

But I think it's three in Chicago and I think all of them are from who?

Yeah, the last one was. I forgot the name of it, but yeah, you're right, I think it all went from Pullman Seaway and after that yeah Seaway, they had a couple of friends who were on that board. I don't know what they were doing, but the bank failed.

Okay, sir, you said you were good. Excuse me, this is a question about black pedagogy in general, about how black people learn and how we teach things. Based on some of the things you just said, I consider white people, in particular white males, the most dangerous animal on the planet. Okay, wherever I tend to agree with you Wherever they go, wherever. That was there when they got there is worse off after they got there.

But black people, I find, have been anesthetized into teaching their young people, their children and followers that white men in particular are the enemies of black people and they try to assimilate into a society that Dr Keane said is a burning house. So my question is how do black people begin to start to objectively state what their condition is vis-a-vis white people so that all these young men and people who are around here who become disillusioned because they were not told by other black people that white people will not allow them to go into their systems up to a certain level and that there needs to be more specific behaviors and actions and goals for black people to become independent and not see white people, white systems, white structures as the basis for how and why and what to do things for.

Wow, that's a mouthful. That's a dissertation I was trying to process some of that, not a question.

But you raised several very important points about developing and encouraging black independence. Many points about how we encourage, how we teach our young people to be more independent and to necessarily separate themselves from the superstructure. And at the same time if I ever write an autobiography, that's something that I will write about is a sort of contradictions of basically what does our view? Lots, lord say that master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house, and when I think about that as a MIT trained economist, I think about what kind of indoctrination did I have? And when I talk about revolution reparations, these are things that were not taught at MIT. Of course, I read extensively so I can talk about those things, but there's always. Do you encourage people to embrace a capitalist system or do you encourage them to resist it? And if they resist it, how do they resist it and what does that mean in terms of their own livelihood?

And because the capitalist system is our system, and if you can't win, if you don't play, and so you've seen a lot of people play, and play very well.

You look at a Bob Johnson, you look at a Robert Smith, you look at an Oprah. They play, and they play very well, but at the same time, they represent what percentage of the black population? And what do we say to our young people? No, you're not gonna be Oprah. Well, you might, but the likelihood is low. What can you build for yourself? So it's the internal contradiction of, as Du Bois talked about it in terms of living in white America, two warring souls and one black body. And I think that that's. Some people will go that's route, some will go the other route. But what we must do, and what we are not doing very well, is we must be connected.

We don't have to be on the same page. You can be a socialist, I can be a Marxist and somebody else can be a capitalist, but we have to be connected, and that's what's missing is the connection.

Well, Carter G Woodson said about Du Bois, Harvard, because Du Bois was the first one to get PhD out of Harvard. And Carter G Woodson said, who lived in DC, of course, started Black History Week, then became Black History Month and they kind of had an argument. And Carter G Woodson said about Du Bois Harvard has ruined more good Negroes than bad whiskey.

He did say that, yes, he did.

Well, I think that's the perfect way. That's in this evening. Please help me give it up for Dr Julianne Malvo Woo Woo. Thank you, I appreciate you, we honor you and we just thank you for making space for us here at Mahogany Books. Thank you so much. And people can buy the book all over the United States. It's in our warehouses, so people can buy it online and here at our stores as well, but we do have them online as well. So thank you all, and we'll be hosting the signing on the other side here, but thank you all for coming out tonight as well. Give yourselves a big round.

Thank you all for that. Appreciate it. Thank you. Discover a world where words ignite change. Tune in to Black Books Matter, the podcast, where we celebrate the profound impact of African-American literature. Join us as we delve into iconic works and hidden gems, discussing their power to shape minds and transform societies. Get ready for thought-provoking discussions, author interviews and insights that matter. Don't miss out. Subscribe to Black Books Matter, the podcast and your favorite podcast platform, and let the voices of African-American authors resonate with you.