Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Are Americans Afraid of Black History with Michael Harriot

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

American history has been whitewashed, with the accounts of millions of black Americans pushed to the margins, and their narratives stripped of agency and action. In this episode, Adam is joined by Michael Harriot, the author of Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, to step out from behind the white lens through which our country typically views history. Together, they explore why confronting the unvarnished truth about this nation's past is a challenging but essential endeavor. Find Michael's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creatingpremium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy toachieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to ourshows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, the history that you were taught in school, needless to say, left a lot out. Specifically, it left out a lot of Black history. If you were lucky, you got Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, MLK.

You learned that white people in their benevolence ended slavery. There was that little Jim Crow problem, but then we had a civil rights movement. Now racism is over, the end. And that's what you got if you grew up in New York, like I did. If you grew up in some other states, you got even less. And that is fucked up because millions of black Americans

have lived in this country since its founding, since even before its founding. And each one of those people has a history unto themselves. There are countless stories that have not been told about how black people helped make this country what it is today. And so in recent years, there's been a move towards telling that history accurately, towards telling more of the story of black history. And you know what? That effort has led to a racist backlash from white people who do not want that history to be told. And what I want to know is why? What are they so afraid of? What is so dangerous and

threatening to them about black history? Well, on the show today, we have an incredible guest who's going to explain why and help us dive into some of the stories that should be far more widely told. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you that you can support this show on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free and a bunch of other awesome community perks as well. And if you like standup comedy and you live in St. Louis or Providence, Rhode Island, please come see me on tour. I'll be in St. Louis from October 5th through 7th and Providence, Rhode Island from the 19th through the 21st. Would love to see you there and take a photo and shake your hand. And now without further ado, let's get to this week's guest. His name is Michael Harriot,

and I am so excited to have him on the show because he is legendarily one of the funniest and most fascinating writers on black culture and black history in America. He has a new book out called Black AF History, The Unwhitewashed Story of America. And he also has an incredible podcast called Draped to Maniacs, which you can get wherever you listen to your podcast. Please welcome Michael Harriot. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. So how exactly, let's just jump right into it. How exactly does American history write out black people and the history of black people in this country, and why?

So it does it in a number of ways. Some of them are unnoticeable because what we do is teach history through a racial lens. There's all this consternation about CRT, critical race theory, which the real definition is to view, you know, the law or history or whatever you're studying through a racial lens. And I always argue that we've always viewed history through a racial lens. It's just the racial lens of whiteness. So for instance, right, if you're in a third grade social studies class and you learn about the English settlers and the pilgrims and the African slaves and the indigenous people or the Native Americans or the Indians, depending on where you go to school and what they call them. Now, what I just explained is I just gave all of the white people, the English settlers, when I say that, it gives them a political motivation.

It gives them a history, a background. You can go and study their history because it's English. They come from a country with a defined geography and monarchy. And then you do the same with the pilgrims. They have a religious motivation, a religious background, a history. And then all of the Africanrican people the slaves you made them a thing right you made them uh you didn't give them a history you didn't give them a background the same with the indigenous people right you didn't give them a tribe or a political motivation

or a geographic uh notation you just made them one amorphous thing. That is a racial lens. Right. When you talk about the discovery of America, we know, for instance, that people had come from the Australian continent before the Englishering Strait. We know that Africans were here in the 1500s. And we count white people arriving as a discovery in an already populated place. That is a racial lens, right? Because what it insists or infers is that America or this place did not exist or did not matter until white people showed up. That's a racial lens. And we do it in so many subtle ways that, for instance, you know, using my analogy earlier, you erase the past of the black people, even when you start with 1619, you're saying, well, those people didn't matter until they interacted or came here to help white people build a nation. That's whitewashing. Yeah. And you make such a good point that I learned as a kid, the governmental history, the governmental structure of England

and those settlers who came here. But when it came to, say, the indigenous people of the United States, you never hear about, okay, there was this confederacy, there was that, you know, system of government, there was this, you know, this motivation. It's just, oh, no, there were some Indians here, there's some Native Americans here, and then this is what the white people did to them. It's like, you're right, there's a lack of, like, the depth of historical explanation. And there's been a bit of effort to correct that in our educational system to a limited extent over the last few years. And that limited correction has resulted in a massive political pushback. And why do you think that is? Why are people so afraid

to acknowledge the deeper history that you're talking about? What's threatening about it? Well, there's two things that's threatening about it. The first is that in reality, so my parents' generation or yeah, that my parents' generation was really the first generation of people, first of all, to go to integrated schools and to go the, even the white people of my parents' generation was the first people to go to school that even had any semblance of black history so the black studies movement is a movement that started kind of in the late 60s early 70s and before then there was not even and that started in like really progressive schools. Before then, most white people did not know anything about black history.

So today, the people who are discovering black history or hear this, what they call this woke version of history, it's because they were taught by people who didn't know black history and those people were taught by people who didn't know black history so you know it feel for so for for most of history american history they feel like they learn they're learning something that isn't true because they never heard this stuff before right so it's a lot of it is ignorance the other reason is that when you teach history accurately it it's ugly right there's no other way to put it and it kind of it kind of contradicts the notion of this beautifully uh created country that stood for liberty and justice it undermines that notion and when you start in the second grade teaching people about the noble heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and then maybe when they turn 17 or 18 or when they go to college, they learn about the slave-owning's past. Well,

you're kind of undermining that hero that you've already created in their minds. Yeah. You're undermining the sort of moral lesson that we were meant to take, like the sort of history as sermon. Oh, George Washington, the could not tell a lie and et cetera, et cetera. Once you know the real history, it sort of interferes with the ability for these to be simplified morality tales about patriotism and loyalty and freedom and things like that. Well, well, how does your book and work offer a corrective to this? Where do you start the story? during the Crusades in England and when the African people were, you know, free and living on their continent. And then because we tell we start the story of America before America, but we don't start the story of anyone else before the white people arrive. So we know about, you know, the Reformation and, you know, the English conquistadors, the Spanish conquistadors.

We know all about that, but not about anybody other than the white people. So I just go back a little bit before we learned about we started learning about the white people. So you got to start in Africa before the white people showed up. You got to start in in the United States or this continent before the white people started out. You got to start in the United States or this continent before the white people started out, and the same with the Caribbean. So that's where I start, to show that these people were people who had politic politics and societies and cultures before white people, they were kind of rudely interrupted by white people. Is there a particular story about that period in African history that you loved telling?

Yeah. So there are a lot of them. One of them is the story of when Nzinga, there's a little what I call interstitial about Nzinga, who was a woman who became the queen of what her people did, the homie people. And she dressed like a man because she wanted that power and wanted that respect. And so when the Portuguese showed up, she fought them to a standstill and one of the interesting stories that i love telling about her is when she uh visited portugal to have a seat with the portuguese king and they wouldn't give her an actual chair and so she made her aunt her aunt arrives like okay and they formed a chair with their body so they could have like so she sat on a human throne while they sat in regular chairs.

And that interstitial is called Nzinga, the King of Queens, because her warrior force was made up of mostly women, and they fought the Portuguese settlers to a standstill. Incredible. That's an incredible story. What an image.

That's like... This must have been borrowed for some movie right i i this has to have happened if not this movie has to come out very soon yeah it's a lot of these stories you'll wonder like how did is this not in a history book or how is it not a movie or how do we not even know about this because these are such great stories that we don't like they're so great that we don't even need to create a myth about America because we have a great story. And you really make the point so well that, you know, again, growing up as a kid, I learned about British history. I learned about the Magna Carta and Oliver Cromwell and stuff like that.

And what is the implication of that the implication is that somehow america came from england or that americans came from england or that's where our history starts and like i don't i mean maybe one of my ancestors is british but that's not my you know that it's not even my family certainly is not for a huge huge number of people in america why are we not telling the story of nazinga in our uh in our history classes in elementary schools it's like a provocative question like why the fuck not right and the other thing is why is it like if you were doing it there was a study done a couple of years ago that showed that about eight percent of class time in america is dedicated to any type of black history when it's so it's not even proportional we're not saying like you gotta teach make the history

lessons half of what you teach but it should be representative of the people who are in those classrooms the public school system in america is about, between 47 and 49 percent non-white. And to focus 90 percent of the information we learn on the white people is. And so we think of white supremacy as this supercharged form of racism and not a system that is implemented to ensure, you know, one people's progress and to stagnate in other people's. But this is really white supremacy when you say that these people history are more important to learning than, you know, the collective people. So we're going to marginalize the history of the rest of this public school system to emphasize the white history. Yeah, it's a subtle sort of supremacy where it's just, oh, we're focusing on this. This is what you're going to get most of the time.

And until you finally ask questions about it, it might seem natural. It just sort of seems like, at least to me, it's like the water that I drank growing up. Until, you know, you're actually forced to engage with it as your book does and go, oh, hold on a second. Why was there this prioritization that I always sort of accepted? And once you see it there, you start seeing it in other parts of your life. What about the, you know, the pieces of Black history that are taught in schools? You know, like I had as a kid, it's almost like a joke. Oh, George Washington Carver peanut butter. Right. There's like these things that that every that every school kid did get. Is there any you know, is there any

pattern that you see in the stories that do get told and why. Yeah, even when we talk about people like, you know, the big four or five that you learn, you learn about Harriet Tubman, you learn a little bit about Frederick Douglass, you learn about Martin Luther King, and yeah, they'll throw one more black woman in there. And those stories are pretty much whitewashed too right so when you learn about the civil rights movement first of all it that implies that like black people didn't

want freedom until like 1955 um and that it was not part of a ongoing struggle that like white people didn't even notice or care about until 1955 and then it also implies so when you talk about think about the civil rights movement you always hear a lot about non-violence when non-violence was a tactic that was part of non-violence non-violent resistance and direct action so you never hear about the resistance part. And it also implies that the civil rights movement was nonviolent when it was plenty violent. The white people were plenty violent, like all of those people that we would name, like they were being, you know, there were people who were trying to kill them and successful sometimes. And then we don't emphasize

that nonviolent resistance was a tactic. Those people, they practiced armed resistance not as a protest strategy, but as a strategy for survival. So when we, even the black history has been whitewashed to make it palatable for white people. Yeah, I mean, we harp on nonviolence, but what's often left out is the extreme amount of violence at the time that nonviolence was a reaction to mob violence against black people at that time. That when you, you know,

people setting buses on fire, I mean, you know, what you get in school is all the fire hoses and the dogs and like a little bit of that. You don't get that. Like there was endemic violence across this country against anybody who tried to uh tried to stand up it's like that that part is left out um and again when it's tried to reintroduce be reintroduced

to the curriculum it is there's a violent reaction against the curriculum people say oh this makes me feel bad about being whiter or XYZ, when it's just an accurate telling of history. It's disheartening how difficult it is to get the real story into our schools. Right. And the other thing about that, right, is when you teach it in that whitewashed way, first of all, it makes people repeat the lessons, right? Because, for instance, if you talk about nonviolence by itself, it contradicts every other achievement that America has ever, like we became a country through violence. Like we went to war for violence.

Like when we wanted to end slavery there was there was violence like what has america ever achieved as a country right as a country without violence that's how things are are done and so you can't erase the violence on the black peoples in the black people's story but say hey these brave soldiers stood up to the british and you know there was the bloodiest war in the history of the continent was to end slavery it wasn't but you know that's the narrative and you know we went and freed the the nazis in world war one and i mean world war two and we preserved democracy it was the other way around but i, we went to we went to fight the Nazis and free the enslaved people. But the interesting part about that, if you listen to what I just said, right, is when you talk about people feeling bad.

It first of all, didn't we go fight the Nazis because people felt bad? we go fight the nazis because people felt bad right didn't we right want to put you know democracy around the world because we said oh these people around across the globe are oppressed so we should go spread democracy because we feel bad when we know about that but we're not supposed to feel bad about what happened to black people or what this country did to black people and not only are we not supposed to feel bad right we we didn't do that like i my ancestors didn't own slaves so i'm not a part of that we so why is am i lumped into that we but we freed the jews from concentration camps we spread democracy around the world. We defeated Hitler and we defeated Stalin, but not the we that did the slavery thing or not the we that did the Jim

Crow thing. That was some other kind of people. Yeah, we're very happy to say we when we're part of the good thing, but not when we're part of the bad thing. But then even when people say, hold on a second, that's not me because my ancestors didn't do that. Well, then why are you so mad about it? Why are you mad about me telling the history if you don't feel you were part of it? If you thought it was somebody else, it doesn't reflect poorly on you. Then why are you mad that the history is being taught in schools? It's sort of like folks want to have it both ways. So I want to return to something that you said a little earlier, though, that I was really interested in. You said, even if we start at 1619, that is sort of making

an assertion about this is where, you know, black history wasn't important before this point or that could you just expand on those sort of early days of America and, you know, black history at that time. So when we talk about first black people coming to America, I do a podcast called Drapetomanics, and we had a two-part episode about who was the first African-American. Well, we got to start a century before 1619 when Ponce de Leon landed here, he landed with a man, a black conquistador named Juan Garrido, who was, by historians account, a African king who became a conquistador who was the first man to grow wheat in the Americas in 1525, right, the first man to grow wheat in the Americas who participated, who landed in a place that they named La Florida of Florida. And then who also went on an expedition to this place that they named after these mythical black women who had this island. The women were called the Khalifaha so they named the place california right this was a hundred years before 1619 and then you go to the first uh european settlement in the americas was a guy named aeon who bought enslaved people with him who revolted

burned down the the settlement and the white people left. And then you go to a man named Esteban the Moor who came on an expedition and traveled from South Carolina all the way through Texas, Florida and eventually into Mexico. And, you know, there is the Pueblo people of New Mexico say, well, the first white. There's a saying by them in their oral history. The first white man we saw was a black man because he was the first person to cross the Sierra Madres. So all of that history is before 1619 is before white people arrived in 16 in 1609. And then you get to 16, 16, 19. 1609 and then you get to 1616 19 and so that story when even that starting date starts with slaves or enslaved people yeah right and we don't tell the history that comes before that i mean

that's really interesting to me because so often you know the the history of black people in america is centered around the history of slavery as makes some sense because we're talking about you know slavery existed for longer than it hasn't right for hundreds of years um but are you a little resistant to that narrative like it seems as though you you feel that's a little bit of a limiting lens to use well first of all i i contend in my book that first of all the history of slavery is the history of white people. Right. Like, you know, you talk when you put that in a frame, black history is starting with slavery. You're talking you reduce the people to something that white people did to them.

And then. Right. Even if we go back to what you just said about his slavery existed in all kinds of ways, what I point out in the book is, well, yeah, because slavery is a really broad word, right? Like, is slavery a woman in a forced marriage? Is it indentured servitude? Is it unpaid agricultural workers? Is it a prisoner of war? All of those things fall under the umbrella of slavery. But what I point out is that what we're talking about is race based, color based, constitutionally enforced. Extraction of labor and intellectual property through violence or the threat of violence. And that is particularly unique to america right um you know most of those other countries they got rid of slavery by saying oh our charter or our magna carta or our constitution really doesn't allow that so we have to outlaw it we had to change our foundational document

to end it because it was something that white people had written into our foundational document to end it because it was something that white people had written into our founding document and so yeah painting slavery as the history of white people as black of black people when it is a thing that white people inflicted on black people and it is not the same as like what was going on in rome The difference in America is not just how widespread it was, but that most of the people who were enslaved in America were never involved in a regional or political or even a religious conflict. They were not prisoners of war.

They were not people who lived free in a country that was in a war. It was a totally transactional institution that reduced people to property based on their race. Yeah. To a degree that was not done elsewhere in the world and unique in America. was built on slavery, like the literal economy of the country was, that was the economic engine of the country in so many ways to a degree that's really hard to appreciate now. I mean, like when I, the comparison that really stuck with me the most a couple of years ago, I heard someone compare it to fossil fuels as being this engine that powers, you know, powered like so much of the entire nation, except that instead of digging things out of the ground, it was being dug out of an entire people.

I don't know how you feel about that comparison, but it's. I make that comparison often because. Yeah, because it's what you're talking about is a natural resource, and that's how the African people were seen, right? When you think about this, one of the best comparisons and examples I use is that on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, because the people, the African people who were enslaved, four million of them, were considered property, not humans, not, you know, they didn't have rights. They were property. Well, the value of that property, it was used to as collateral for mortgages. You can insure your you know, you can get a loan by saying, well, you know, I'll put up my slaves as collateral. by saying, well, you know, I'll put up my slaves as collateral. You could get a mortgage that way. But the value of that human property was in 1860 worth more than all of the money in all of the banks in America,

plus all of the railroads, plus all of the manufacturing in this country combined. combined. And when you talk about this country that in a very astoundingly short period of time became a global economic superpower, where does that economic power come from? It comes from the work and the intellectual property of Africans. Well, God, I have so much more to ask you about this period, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Michael Harriot. Okay, we're back with Michael Harriot talking about black history. We just talked about, you know, the huge economic engine that slavery was throughout most of American history. I want to know, in terms of the school version I got of slavery, what does that miss about the actual experiences of enslaved Africans in this country?

What are we, again, because you say we focus so much on what was being done to people rather than the people themselves. So it misses out a lot. First of all, we think of when we picture slaves in our mind, we picture first of all, working on plantations when there were a lot of enslaved people that worked on in agriculture and plantations. in agriculture and plantations, but most of them did not. You know, there were people who owned enslaved people who ran stores and built ships. And there were people who owned a bunch of slaves that basically used them as like a labor force where you would rent out your enslaved people. I don't have a bunch of land, but I got a bunch of slaves and you got a factory.

So I would. So that was a business. And we also miss out on all of the things. Even when we talk about resistance. Right. We talk about the right um we talk about the underground railroad when the underground railroad was a a very a means of escape for a very small uh few people right uh most of escapees were what we call maroons where they would just escape to places where white people weren't uh there was there is a place between north carolina and virgin Virginia called the great dismal swamp where it was so swampy that, you know, you couldn't get there by horse or canoe. And so they had huge enslaved communities and the white people called them

like it was their land beyond where people lived. So they called them the outlands, which is where we got the phrase, the word outlandish. And I tell a great story about this guy named forest joe right right um and he's known in history they were his in history they called him the outlandish forest joe and which is the first episode of my podcast draped to maniacs telling the story of this maroon who became a myth.

And the interesting thing about him was like enslaved people on plantations were kind of like his intelligence network. They would tell him where he could go, when he could go on this plantation to steal food. And those kinds of resistance, we think about slave revolts, but we don't even talk about like the most prevalent kind of slave of slave revolt was on the ships before they even arrived here. There were most people escaped before they were even, you know, on a plantation in America. We don't talk about the other forms of resistance. Like, for instance, they would slow down their work to intentionally inflict a financial burden on their masters. And so there are all kinds of stories that we focus on the palatable, broad ones instead of the specific ones that were very common during the era of enslavement.

during the era of enslavement. Yeah, I mean, that's what's so often left out is the specificity. I mean, we focus so much on the number of people, the economic system, the labor that was extracted, but every single one of those people was like an individual person with a specific life and history that is as specific as anyone else's um it's uh think about this

though the think of this this is another interesting point right that you people really think about when they say well i didn't own slaves so think about the people who came to america in the beginning right well how could they like afford it was their money didn't translate well if you could go to a country and buy a shirt that was cheaper than where you could buy it in your country because it was made with free labor and all the food was raised with free labor and all the agriculture was done with free labor and the ships were done with free labor you have a lot more opportunity in that country because you haven an you're benefiting from an entire economic system that even now the biggest labor, the biggest cost in industry is labor costs. And if you get to exist in a country where there are no labor costs, you benefit from slavery no matter who you are, as long as you're free.

labor costs you benefit from slavery no matter who you are as long as you're free oh my god so people didn't just come to america like white people didn't just come to america because that's the land of opportunity it's because they got the slavery discount on everything it's because everything is cheap because we've got all these people doing free labor and they were doing this labor that the aristocrats who came over here didn't know how to do remember when you know at the beginning of america you didn't just get first of all the idea of free land just imagine getting free land from the indigenous people and at the beginning they had a system called head rights where every enslaved person you brought over here you got 50 free acres because you were bringing a free labor force over here. So you got 50 free acres.

Well, in 1638, a dude named George Menifee figured out, well, what if what if I just brought the Africans over here instead of indentured servants? servants and so he applied for 150 head rights for 150 enslaved people 3 000 acres for what he called quote the slaves i brought out of africa and that started the head right boom so the blue bloods we saw over here got that wealth and authority specifically by enslaving people not by building and growing stuff with the enslaved people, but it was just owning slaves that gave them that wealth and power. So what's the real story about how this system started to collapse and why it finally ended? Because, you know, you're describing a system where it is economically woven into the fabric of the country. And yet we have this story that, you know, one day, this is the way

we always tell any sort of civil rights history in America is like one day white people went, oh my God, oh, slavery, that's bad. We got to stop that. You know, we got to, we got to wage a war and help these folks out. Or we have to, you know, I don't know, knock the, knock the sign off of the colored zonely bathroom, right? Oh my God, we all became enlightened and we did it. History has always struck me as insultingly simplified. What actually happened to bring about change, and how did the black people in America participate in it? Well, what happened is economic anxiety, really. You know, you think about it.

anxiety really you know you think about it so the the civil war wasn't started by people who wanted to end slavery right it was people who were scared because they kept hearing this rumor that oh they're going to end slavery in the south and so they started a war and the people fighting on the other side wasn't fighting to end slavery they were fighting to preserve the union but how did that war get won well in my book i posit a new theory it is based on a theory that has been throughout history um wb du bois called it the general strike when the civil war started hundreds of thousands of african americans stole themselves because they were property remember and so they created these huge camps called contraband camps while removing that labor force from the biggest economic engine in america that is what won the civil war so there has never been a piece of legislation that was introduced the past

to free enslaved people until after the civil war uh the 13th amendment there was never a proposal by the founding fathers there was never a political effort um a real political effort that was realistic the african people removing themselves from that labor force is what crippled the south because and so what i posit is the slaves freed themselves yeah right because nobody fought nobody was signing up to fight to free the slaves let's that is a historical myth that has no his accurate basis it's not in a speech by abraham lincoln in fact he said the opposite if i could free the if i could save the union by not freeing a single slave slave i would um it wasn't uh from any large group of people except like the

only people who gave their lives to free enslaved people were enslaved people. And so the thesis of that chapter in the book is, and I call it the northern side did it, it removes agency from, as you say, hundreds of thousands, millions of Black people who were, I mean, these are people, right, who presumably didn't like their circumstances and must have done things in every, you know, to whatever degree they could in order to try to improve their situation and that system. I mean, there's, there's no possible way that that isn't what happened because again, these are,

these are people who were talking about who had minds and hearts and spirits. There must've been a million stories for all those millions of people. Yeah, man. And you think about how absurd and crazy the whitewash version sounds that there were two because if you're enslaved person it was just two different kinds of white people fighting right and so the narrative that

there was the bloodiest war in the history of this continent being fought and the black people didn't affect either side or. Right. Like they just sat down and watched. Like you ever been. Like just imagine you in a room with like 10 of your friends and they start fighting over you. Right. And you just sit there.

And afterwards you said, hey, you know, I wasn't in that. Like the story of that was just they were just i don't even know what they were fighting over they were fighting over me but i wasn't involved and i didn't join the side that was right um so it's a crazy story to believe if you look at it objectively except that is we've been so indoctrinated with it that we believe is like the craziest backwards stories that don't even make any sense yeah and just i mean on a human psychological level like people fight hardest for themselves not for other people you know i mean you can you you i care about other people and i fight for them as often as i can but hey you know i'm talking to you we just came out of

this big union struggle people come together and fight for themselves and for their common interests. People don't take bullets for someone they've never met, generally. They take it for themselves and their family members. And so when you look at who would have been fighting hardest at that time to end slavery, it would have been enslaved people, I would imagine. That's just basic human psychology. Are there any specific stories of that that you tell in the book? Yeah. So there are a bunch of them. I tell the story of Harriet Tubman and we always talk about now well the combi hatchie river raid right where

she lit where she never let a river raid and freed 700 enslaved people because she you know harriet tupman went south and joined the union effort for free she wasn't paid as a as a soldier and so she showed she sold pies to uh the soldiers to make own living. And she helped a man named General David Hunter draft a version that would later become the Emancipation Proclamation. named Moses Dixon, who started this group called the Knights of 12, and they were stationed all over the South. He was a barber on a riverboat, so he had visited most of the states in the South, and he had gotten these leaders to create a secret force of 200,000 men that were going to start a national slave revolt. And it just so happened that the Civil War started before their date was chosen. And so that group became a secret fraternity. And by the 1920s, they had over 100,000 dues-paying members.

And that group eventually took their dues and built the first black owned hospital, the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all black town. And what's interesting about it is if you read the stories of like the civil rights movement, like so many of those people were born at the Taborian Hospital or would go to like Jesse Jackson went down there to sell insurance at the table for the Taborian Hospital. Mega Evers was an insurance agent there. The reason we know what happened to Emmett Till is because they went to Mound Bayou and was protected by the chief surgeon, T.R.M. Howard. And he who had an armed compound because blacks in Mississippi weren't allowed to carry guns, but they wouldn't mess with T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. So these reporters and journalists stayed there and kind of canvassed the area to see what happened. And that's how we know who killed Emmett Till is from that same Taborian hospital that was created almost 100 years earlier.

I mean, that you just blew my mind with like those were two back to back incredible movie pitches, right? That you just that you just pull out of there. And yeah, there's so much more connected to it. And yeah, there's so much more connected to it. Like that town kind of funded the civil rights movement. And they had this rally in Detroit and the preachers, they didn't want the preacher's daughter to sing because she was pregnant. And so the guy who was the chief surgeon said, let us sing. And that woman was that little girl was a woman named Aretha Franklin.

Oh, my God. Well, they only let her sing one song. So the guy, you know, Aretha Franklin was a piano prodigy. So the guy who took her place was another little kid. And one of the people in the audience named Little Richard saw the guy, took him on tour with him. saw the guy, took him on tour with him, and that guy was Billy Preston, and he met the Beatles because they were the opening act for Little

Richard, and that's why Billy Preston is the only person who's known as the fifth Beatle, because of the Mount Taborian Hospital. Because of that hospital, which was founded because of a sort of not quite completed slave revolt just

before the Civil War. What an incredible connection through history. My God. Well, let's talk about the period right after the Civil War. What do we normally get wrong about that period and how it's told well we'd like to come uh think of reconstruction and the violence of reconstruction even if we think of violent divide talk about the violence as these individual acts and not a national terrorist campaign to ensure and instill white supremacy so it's again these absurd ideas that we think of like white people all over the country were all doing the same thing and using the same tactics but they were individual sporadic acts is absurd on its face right like it doesn't need it defies logic

and uh so that story and then one of the things that we really don't get right about Reconstruction is there was like that brief period where there was black power and how black when, for instance, South Carolina for most of its existence until 19 to 1940 census was a majority black state. So, you know, after the Civil War, those states had to get admitted back into the union by submitting, you know, a new constitution, new state constitution. Well, the South Carolina delegation, the constitutional delegation was majority black. And they created many of the things that we know today, including before the majority black constitutional delegation of 1868 in South Carolina. A constitutionally enforced free statewide public education system system had never existed in America. Black people invented what we know as the public education system. We never talk about that. No. Right? And that period of, for instance, many of those states, especially the ones that were majority black, created reparations programs.

Right? Right. South Carolina had South Carolina Land Bank when the legislature was majority black and they had a program where, hey, we're going to give you the land where you were enslaved. We're going to give it to you in parcels and it's going to be a loan. But for the first seven years, it's going to be interest free. So whatever you produce, if you pay back half of your loan in seven years, then the rest of it will be forgiven. So just think about how that funded the economic progress when you had those landowners giving back to the state, but it was ended by this campaign of terrorism that ensured white supremacy. Georgia was kicked out of the union twice because of the massacres same thing with louisiana so we never talk about like how organized this uh

period of violence was and that there was a time um which is you know the basis for tony tony has tony hossie coates's book We Were Seven Years in Power, was because of those seven years after the Civil War, when we had power and created a freer nation. Universal suffrage came during that time. And many of the ideas that we take for granted came from those Black constitutional delegations. Yeah. And I mean, when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, this period was such a shock and a revelation to me to learn about that in the years just after the Civil War. As you said, was it North Carolina or South Carolina?

Carolina had a majority black state legislature. That's incredible. That's South Carolina. South Carolina. Right, South Carolina. It Carolina. Right. South Carolina. It made me understand why a lot of times when you see a black political leader is elected, they'll say, oh, it's the first governor or legislator or whatever in 100 years. Because actually there was a period 100 years ago when there were a lot of folks elected. And then suddenly everything changed and that ended and white supremacy clamped down and this little window closed.

And I mean, what was the cause of that if there was this sudden flowering of black political power in the years immediately after the Civil War? Why what what caused the reverse the reversion of that? So why what what caused the reverse, the reversion of that? Well, again, it was a period of racial terrorism that ensured like that resulted in the disenfranchisement of black people, not just kind of socially, but it was written into the laws. So and the interesting thing about it is in the beginning when it happened, whites were proud of it. So they these weren't called like the so-and-so riot they were called wars and like in south carolina that process started in 17 1876 when they overturned they basically overturned the government of the state. And so for the next 40 years, most of the politicians who are elected would say, I fought in 76. Like that would be your credentials. I fought to ensure white supremacy in 76.

And then in many states, like in North Carolina, it was called the Polk War. In South Carolina, it was like we just fought in 76. And in Arkansas and in Louisiana, these were called wars. And then they changed the name to riots. And now we kind of made a massacres. But they were initially seen as battles just like Lexington and Concord, just like the battle at Fort Sumter. They were seen as the beginning of this war that ensured white supremacy. Look, I understand hundreds of years of slavery. There's an economic impetus, right? It's like I'm financially benefiting if I'm someone at the top of the system War, what was the motivation for white people to instill? I don't know. To me, that's a bizarre question. But to me, it seems like the amount

of violence being done, the amount of effort it took to reestablish essentially an apartheid state that lasted for a century is immense to me. And it sort of boggles the mind that people made the effort. Well, again, economic anxiety. What if you had all of the land and all of the government positions and all of the power and all of the stuff, and then one day. You lost it or had the saw the potential of losing it. Right. Just because some people might be equal to you now. Imagine if you're in a state like Mississippi or South Carolina where you are also the minority. You are also the minority. Right. Right. Right. White people are the minority in the States. Yes. Right. You might think, well, they might do the same thing to us that we did to them. That never really happened. But that is your mind frame. Now, here's the other part. Right. the stuff, but imagine when all of those people were freed and black people were working and paying taxes. When those black people paid taxes into the system, they couldn't attend those schools. They couldn't attend those colleges. They couldn't use those public facilities.

schools. They couldn't attend those colleges. They couldn't use those public facilities. So if you are white, you are getting the benefit now, not just of all of the stuff that your ancestors took through force, but you are still getting the benefit of their labor because they were funding the economic opportunity and the educational opportunity for your future generations. Your children got to go to a school like Clemson that was a state-funded school that black children couldn't attend. In South Carolina, there were seven public colleges, zero black colleges, and segregation was the law the same thing in most and then most of those even the black schools the k through 12 schools were built through communities they were not government funded they were built through communities and charity um you know 30 percent of people in the south through the 1930s went to what what we call these schools that were built by the guy who started Sears.

And he would donate half and then the community would raise and the churches would raise the other half. And they built these schools. So most of the black education system was not even built with those taxes. And so just imagine if you were benefiting from all of the people's work and they were using often people describe this period of slavery by another name, because it's in the same way, it's white people extracting economic value from the work of black people and using it for themselves without the black Americans seeing any of the benefit from it by a different mechanism, but it's just as powerful. And my God, I mean, when we're, just to take the big picture view here, and by the way, there's a whole lot of history we're not even going to have the time to get into on this show, but just the part we've talked about

so far where you look at the many hundred year history of slavery, then it ends, there's this brief little blip where Black Americans are able to build political power. Then there's this brief little blip where uh you know black americans are able to build political power then there's this uh a nationwide campaign of racial terrorism to end that and then we have 100 years of apartheid in many states in america um it this is american history like this is the when i look at it this is the foundational story of American history, or at least it's impossible to tell the history of the country without telling this history. It makes it seem like such a crime to try to eliminate it, as so many people are trying to do, or trying to whitewash it and sweep it under the rug. Because this explains America like almost no other set of stories do. Right. And here is the point of the book, in my opinion. Like almost no other set of stories do. or on this earth that hadn't been done to black people in America in mass, all of the raping and the torturing and the killing and the genocide and the

theft and the violence, all of that has been done like in like Costco, Sam's, uh, club, uh, bulk, uh,

amounts to black people. And when you look at America now and see what black people have achieved, that is really the greatest story in the history of the world. If you believe anything about America, the story of what was done to black people and where black people are now,

that is something to be proud of america about you do not have to wipe you do not have to tell a lie to yeah to make people think that america is great and to make people think that this is an exceptional country because look what the people of this country did to make this country one of the freest places on earth that is in that is a superhero type marvel dc comic story that if you wrote it without real history people were like nah it's like too unbelievable you gotta add something like you know you gotta be a man who could fly or something to to for black people to arrive on the shore with nothing and to get to where they are now right with and having done it largely by themselves that is such a great story of a country

that i don't know why you would tell another different variation of that story. I love that. That's such a beautiful note to end us on because it completely eviscerates the argument for why we shouldn't be telling this history, that it's somehow going to make people feel bad, that it's negative, you know? And even in my own telling, you know, I tend to dwell on the things that white people did to Black people, Indigenous people, other folks.

But telling the real history, though, means lifting up what people did to black people, indigenous people, other folks. But telling the real history, though, means lifting up what people did that was inspiring and great and how, you know, black people brought, you know, created their own freedom and own prosperity. And I'm just, God, I'm so grateful for you to come in on the show and sharing it with us. It's been, it's been an incredible view. The name of the book is Black AF History. You can get a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Michael, where else can people find you?

You're a man about the internet and I've loved reading your work for so many years, but if people have not been so lucky as to encounter it before, where can they find you? They can find me on Twitter, Instagram, all the places at michael harriet h-a-r-r-i-o-t two r's one t and of course the drapedomaniacs podcast uh which is on all podcast platforms tells a lot of these stories through a comedic funny lens with celebrity voices it's

kind of like the old school radio plays, but about black history. And then, of course, I am a columnist at The Griot, so they can find me writing there three, four times a week. What does Drapedomaniac mean? I have to know now that you've mentioned it a couple of times. So the name comes from an actual medical diagnosis that a doctor came up with in 1851 to describe the mental illness that makes black people want to be free. And it was a medical diagnosis until the 1920s. That is incredible. Thank you so much for coming on.

Go listen to the Draped to Maniacs podcast. Check out the book, Black AF History. Michael Harriot, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. My God, thank you once again to Michael Harriot for coming on the show. Once again, his podcast is called Draped to Maniacs, and you can pick up a copy of his book at factuallypod.com slash books. When you head there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. And once again, I want to thank everybody who supports

this show on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free. Fifteen bucks a month means I will read your name on this very podcast. Now, most often, I read the names of our most recent Patreons. I want to read some of our classic Patreons, though. People have supported the show for a long time. I want to thank Kelly Casey, Susan E. Fisher, Sam Ogden, Ann Slagle, Kelly Lucas, Ryan Shelby, and Nuyagik Ippaluk. Thank you so much for your support of the show over the past few years. I also want to thank our

producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. You can find me online at Adam Conover or at adamconover.net. You can also find my tour dates there. Once again, reminder, I will be in St. Louis and Providence, Rhode Island this October at adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates thank you so much and we'll see you next time on factually that was a hate gum podcast