The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow south. “Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.”(Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad ) Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, The Oprah Magazine Named a “must-read” by the Chicago Review of Books One of CNN’s most anticipated books of 2021 After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who’d farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning’s home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family. So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history — one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters — among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O’Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself — that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare. About Ben Montgomery Ben Montgomery is author of the New York Times-bestselling ‘Grandma Gatewood’s Walk,’ winner of a 2014 Outdoor Book Award, ‘The Leper Spy,’ ‘The Man Who Walked Backward,’ and ‘A Shot in the Moonlight,” coming January 2021. He spent most of his 20 year newspaper career as an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and helped launch the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers collective. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called “For Their Own Good,” about abuse at Florida’s oldest reform school. Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York’s Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. He lives in Tampa.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, certainly, certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to see the video version of this exciting new interview that we're going to be doing on youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. You can see all the stuff we're reading and checking out and reviewing on Goodreads. You can go to facebook.com, the Chris Voss Show, and also LinkedIn forward slash Chris Voss. And also you can go to Instagram forward slash Chris Voss, the Chris Voss Show. There's numerous groups over on Facebook, more than I canoss. And also you can go to Instagram, forward slash Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show. There's numerous groups over on Facebook,

more than I can count, and the same with LinkedIn as well. So check those out. We're going to be talking about a book that I'm really excited to have here on the show. This book was named one of the most anticipated books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine. It was named a must-read by the Chicago Review of Books,

and it's one of CNN's most anticipated books of 2021. The book is entitled A Shot in the Moonlight, How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South. The author is Ben Montgomery, and Ben's with us today to tell us about his book. He is an investigative reporter and author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller, Grandma, Gatewood's Walk, and A Shot in the Moonlight. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in

2010 and now writes for Axios, one of my favorite places to consume news. Welcome to the show, Ben. How are you, sir? Thanks so much, Chris. I'm glad to be here. I'm doing just fine. Thank you. We won the Super Bowl last night.

I don't know if you heard that. The Bucs won the Super Bowl, so we've been out partying, maskless, all over the city of Tampa, just slinging COVID all over the place. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? I mean, what better way to celebrate the super bowl than death and sickness gets sick exactly that's what all of campus season think right about now kind of an interesting super bowl this year i mean well the whole season i think was it was interesting so nobody really expected i don't think the bucks to to come out as strong as they did but goodness

gracious tom brady has proven himself to be a winner hasn't he oh yeah i mean you just you just can't you just can't argue with his his thing i still i still take my raiders win back from on the super bowl he's only six out of seven because that tuck rule was bullshit but that's just i'm a raiders fan so that's my opinion uh thanks for coming on the show. Congratulations on your wonderful book. We've done a lot of these books and authors and talking about these things, shining a light on social justice and some of the horrible things in our history that still haunt us to this day.

And as far as I'm concerned, we have a 450-year-old problem of racism and everything else in this country when it comes down to hate, prejudice, et cetera, et cetera, that we need to resolve. And just until we do, we're just never going to resolve it. And so storytellers like yourself that find these stories, tell them, share what's going on, I think is so important. And we're sharing this on Clubhouse, I should mention. So we'll be doing a live broadcast on Clubhouse. You can follow. So there you can listen to the show. And we're actually making it so you can answer your questions to the brilliant author, Ben Montgomery, today across Clubhouse. So join us over there if you would. Ben,

what motivated you to write this book? So I have been an investigative journalist at the Tampa Bay Times, the biggest newspaper in Florida. And they cut me loose for about three years to engage in a long-term investigative project to try to take count of all the number of police shootings in the state of Florida in a six-year period. And we were shocked after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to learn that nobody keeps track of these things. And so it involved this massive public records, you know, element. We asked 400 police agencies in the state of Florida to cough up six years worth of records anytime one of their officers shot somebody in the line of duty. And so ultimately, I was reading all these stories. And as it turns out, you know, when we began to crunch the numbers, we learned that 40% of the people shot by police in Florida in that six year period were

black. And this is way out of whack with the Florida population, only 15% or so are black. And so I was just, I was just swimming in tragedy. And, you know, because my book work has always been extracurricular, I do it in the evenings and on weekends and on vacations. I was looking for a story. I felt myself longing for a story that didn't end in tragedy, where the man or woman of color did not get killed in some sort of tragic fashion. maybe had some grave injustice done to them and then went out in search of revenge or retribution or justice. And so I started pouring through the historical archives and looking everywhere I knew to look for a story that kind of facilitated, like, let me talk about that element and explore that element. And I stumbled across the story of George Denning, which all takes place in the late 1890s. And it had all of the fascinating features of a good book, compelling characters, dynamic action, lots of twists and turns. The public records were there to support the story. There was a full trial transcript that I found in the governor's papers in Lexington, Kentucky. So all of these things suggested to me that this was a story that should be told. That's interesting. I've been reading the book Cast, and I saw in some of your interviews you're talking about, I think it's in Alabama, the lynching museum and stuff like that. And Cast

is a brilliant read, but it's also really hard to read. But I think everyone needs to read it. It should be something that should be in every K through 10, 12 school. And so, you know, stories like this. I've had that experience, Chris, too. You know, being a part, I don't know if you've been there, but that lynching memorial in Montgomery, you walk into it and it's sort of this physical sort of experience where at first you're standing face to face with these coffin sized boxes that are suspended from the ceiling of this what amounts to be like a sort of great hall. And upon each box is carved or inscribed the name of an American county. And then every man or woman who was lynched in that county in the period between the Civil War and the 1940s, the sustained civil rights movement. And so there are hundreds of these boxes. And as you move through this

exhibit, just reading the names and the names of the counties, eventually you sort of go down underground to a point where at the end of it, these coffin-sized metal boxes are all sort of suspended over your head. And it brings the problem of lynching, the burden of lynching that we still deal with today into this powerful relief. And I visited a few years ago, and it's one of these moments that I'll never forget. And it was at the beginning of me doing this book work. And I started wondering about, you know, what names were not on those boxes, not men and women who are, whose lynching went unnoticed by the newspaper and whose, you know, bones and records have been all the lost, but who escaped the lynch mob. And that was another compelling factor in

trying to unearth a story like this. Yeah, the stories are horrific. And I mean, it was sheer terrorism, if not the worst terrorism I've ever read or heard about. I think I saw Oprah tour the lynching museum, and it was quite extraordinary. If I get to that part of the world, I'll definitely check it out. So give us an overview of this story, and then we'll get into some of the world, I'll definitely check it out. So give us an overview of this story and then we'll get into some of the nuances and details and things that really stuck out to you. Sure. In 1897, a freed slave who was in his early forties named George Denning was at home on a farm that he owned, asleep inside of a cabin that he built, a two-story cabin with his wife and kids,

when 25 gun-hung white men, mostly his neighbors, rode up on horseback to his house, approached his front door and demanded he come outside. And he refused to open the door and he asked them why they were there. He was trying to recognize their voices. They all lived right in the surrounding areas, but they were disguising their voices. They said, you just come on out here. We need to talk to you. There's been some thieving going on in the neighborhood. And they accused him of stealing livestock from neighboring farms and also setting fire to a couple of buildings, barns. Well, he refused to come out. He said, you know, I've got plenty of white neighbors who can speak to my good character. He had never been in trouble before, never had a criminal record or anything like that. And so he refused to come outside. And

during this short exchange, one of the men who had sort of snuck around back, fired a couple of gunshots through the back door of George Daniels' little cabin. And so this, by the way, also came about five years after Ida B. Wells, the famous muckraking anti-lynching journalist based in Memphis, Tennessee. She had written in an editorial, the Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every black home to provide protection that the law refuses to provide. And she thought the only way we can stop these white men from lynching us, from killing us at will, is if we start defending ourselves, specifically defending ourselves with weapons. And so George Denning grabbed his shotgun. He started running upstairs, still having no idea the size or nature of the crowd outside. He started running upstairs and he took a bullet in the arm that had sailed through a window. So he's bleeding as he ascends the stairs. He reaches a window on the top floor, throws open the shutters, leans out. As he leans out, he takes a bullet in the forehead, and it

just grazes the top of his forehead, but it's a wound that would be observed by many people after that. And as he leans out, he squeezes off one round of a two round shotgun that he's got in his hands. And that shot, unbeknownst to him, struck and killed a 32 year old scion of the wealthiest farm family in southwestern Kentucky, a man named Jody Kahn. The lynch mob retreated. George Denning ran out the back of his house and hid out in a field until they had fully left. He overheard them talking about maybe it's a good idea if we set fire to the cabin and kill his wife and children. They did not. They retreated to try to provide care for this, you know, 32-year-old man who was dying. Denning runs to a neighbor's house, tells the white

neighbor exactly what had happened That neighbor says well You know You can stay here for the night the next morning Denning starts to go back to check on his wife and family and he runs Into somebody who's been to his house and they say that the word is he's killed a man So he immediately proceeds to the sheriff's office in franklin, kentucky That's where all this is set southwest rural county in southwestern Kentucky, north of Nashville, not far. He turns himself into the sheriff, and this sets in motion a series of events that is sensational and shocking even to this day. He is, a few months later, tried and convicted, but in order to bring a conviction, the men who were at his house that

night had to testify against him. And they realized the risk of doing that was outing themselves as vigilantes. They had no right to be there. They knew what they had done was wrong. But nonetheless, they stepped forward, testified against him. An all-white jury convicted him of manslaughter and sentenced him to seven years in prison. And as soon as he arrived at the state prison at Eddyville, Kentucky, he got word that the governor of Kentucky, who happened to be a progressive white guy named Bill O'Bradley, had pardoned him. He issued a pardon because men and women, white and black men and women,

had come out in great numbers demanding that he be pardoned. They realized that this man had just defended himself and had committed no wrong and should in fact be celebrated for what he had done. And so the governor pardoned him. And as soon as he got out, the mob had returned to his house, chased his wife and kids off the next day after this event occurred,

and then set fire to his house and burned his house to the ground, burned his barns to the ground. So he had nothing to return to back in Simpson County. After he was pardoned, they burned his stuff down? Well, the day after the attempted lynching, they returned. Well, he wasn't there after he had turned himself in and they burned his way to Louisville and teams up with a fascinating character named Bennett Young, who was a Confederate war hero. We can talk about him some if you want, but he had agreed to take George Denning's case pro bono, and they sued that lynch mob in federal court.

That's really good. Wow. A Confederate soldier, too. Lawyer lawyer not just a confederate soldier he had led the northernmost land action in the civil war which is this forgotten episode except among serious civil war buffs but he had been in prison at camp david in chicago and then escaped and reconnoitered with some other confederates and they made their way up into Canada. And with the hopes of redirecting the Union's attention to the northern border, they led a raid into a small town in Vermont called New Albans, Vermont, and held a

Vermont town hostage basically for 24 hours, hoping to get some attention so the federal troops might head up north to defend that border. So he rode with Morgan's men on these famous raids, and he was a true son of the South. But after the war, he committed himself to some pro-Black causes. He founded an orphanage for Black children and took on pro bono cases like George Dennings pretty regular. Wow. And some of our Clubhouse audience is listening live to this. We'll be taking questions somewhere in the near future here. We're talking with Ben Montgomery, the author of A Shot in the Moonlight, How a Freed Slave and Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South. So if you have questions, put them together and we'll see if we can cover them. And if not, we'll be taking your questions at the end

of the show. And hopefully we'll have Ben joining maybe at the end of the show as well. So where does the story go from here, Ben? They sue him in the federal court. Is there redemption that comes from this? Yeah, well, really the only reason that they were able to bring this federal lawsuit is because every man who was involved in that lynch party had outed himself in order to testify against George Denning to secure that criminal conviction. And so these buffoons, you know, sort of trusted that the system was racist, that he would be in prison. They did not suspect that the governor of Kentucky might step in and pardon in prison. They did not suspect that the governor of Kentucky might step in and pardon this man. And I'm sure they were surprised to receive

federal service, summoning them to federal court to inform them that they had been sued by George Denning. And this lawsuit was filed for $50,000 in damages. And so these men tried to argue that they were there peacefully that night to tell George Denning to stop stealing. They said they weren't going to hurt him, even though they were all carrying guns and covering their faces with handkerchiefs. And the judge and jury in that federal court case did not buy that for a moment. It didn't hurt that Bennett Young, who this Confederate war hero, was one of the best lawyers and certainly one of the best orators in all of Kentucky and maybe all of the South. He would go on later to speak at the unveiling, to offer keynote addresses at the unveiling of many Confederate statues that we're actually fighting over right now, talking about what we should do with them.

Some of them have already been pulled down. But he was a Renaissance man in certain ways. He was a collector of artifacts. He was a lawyer. He was a railroad entrepreneur. He had brought in the exposition to Louisville, sort of like the World's Fair in the Louisville. He was a businessman. He wrote a handful of books, including one that's called Confederate Wizards of the Saddle

that tells these almost mythological stories of the chivalry of Confederate soldiers, his colleagues that he rode with. So that a guy could represent these two very different things remains really interesting to me. On one hand, you can be benevolent and philanthropic and help Black men and women in Kentucky. And then on the other hand, you can perpetuate the myth of the lost cause and the idea that the South would someday rise again and establish independence. And those two things are, you know, the juxtaposition of those embodied by this one man really makes him a fascinating character to me.

And a fascinating story that you put in your book. Yeah. Yeah. So was this the beginning of some sort of progressive age? Was there a reason that people, white people were supporting him in Kentucky? Was he just in a good area that was progressive? Or what were some of the things that fomented him catching a break that I don't think a lot of other people caught in the South? Yeah, there was, surprise of surprises. There's a pretty well-studied pattern of black men and women after the Civil War seeking relief from federal court and in many cases getting it.

The federal court system was one of the few tools that black men and women could access that might help them in cases where they had been treated unfairly or unjustly. And there are plenty of lawsuits that stand that we can examine today that show that to be the case. So, yeah, there was a progressive period of politics, especially when it comes to the federal government, but also in the state government. Some of the governor's houses in that era, and this is like at the end of construction started jim crow in that era there was this progressive movement in politics mostly led by republicans who claimed governorships with the black vote blacks had finally gotten the right uh to vote in many states and and so a lot of progressive republican governors rode rode those block votes to state houses and implemented

some progressive politics. They were hiring Black men and women to work in government positions, appointing them the same. And that was the case with Bill O'Bradley in Kentucky. Now, it was short-lived. As you know, the second rise of the Klan was on the horizon, starting at about 1915 with the release of the film birth of a nation and this gave rise to a new a resurgence in clan type violence but for a moment there things seem to be headed in the in the right direction in the south yeah it's it's it's a sad state of history when you read the story of the jim crow south and everything else. You've gotten great reviews on this, the most anticipated book of 2021, CNN, Oprah Magazine,

must-read by Chicago Review of Books. Why is this story important in your mind or what you think readers should take from it in our age today? What is important to take from this story? Well, we're still fighting the civil war yeah i saw that on january 6th i still ptsdz that flag yeah yeah it is crazy to me but you know i'm not the first person to to say this or write about this you know most notably at least recently hannah nicole Nicole Jones for the New York Times

has said, the Civil War never really ended. It devolved into skirmishes, but it's still playing out in high school hallways and in city streets. And I think most recently on January 6th in the steps of the US Capitol building. And so we're still dealing with these issues of race and fairness and justice and really white supremacy. And it rears its ugly head time and again. You know, if we would have had this conversation during the presidency of Barack Obama, I would never thought that we would be looking at a state of affairs that we're living in right now, where you have hate groups marching openly in city streets, the Proud Boys, etc. But that's still with us. And to think that's not who we are is wrong. That is who we are right now. And so this story is a vehicle to take a look at the roots of some of this hatred, the roots of the myth of the lost cause. raise money for Confederate statuaries. Bennett Young was close friends with Jeff Davis, close friends later with his daughter, Minnie Davis. He led the Confederate veterans home

for years and years. Like I mentioned, he delivered keynote addresses at the unveilings of many of these Confederate statues. And this is what we're dealing with today. How do we regard that part of our history what is the best way to do that i came across in the reporting of this book i came across a a very prescient editorial in the new york times that was written in 1864 while the civil war was still raging and it essentially said there will come a day when slavery is as much a thing of the past as gladiatorial fights in Rome, as the barbarism of Italy in ancient times. But the men in our politics today will be judged on how they came down on that one most important moral issue of slavery. And this is the time we're in

right now where we're bringing that judgment to bear on these men who were previously given a pass when it came to owning other human beings. And this came to, it was crystal clear to me watching President Trump deliver, you know, a jingoistic address in front of Mount Rushmore on January 4th of 2019, I think. And I thought Rushmore was carved by a guy with close affiliation to the Klan. Was it really? It was. I just learned something new. It was a fascinating history of the fellow who carved that thing.

That might explain who's on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then two of the men depicted there were slaveholders. No question, no doubt about it. So what we're doing now is reckoning with that. And I think maybe this book is appealing right now because because it gives us a chance to understand better understand the roots of of you know these conversations that we're having today

this is why I really love the show and having authors like yourself and everyone else that we've had on the show over the last year or two is is getting a deeper understanding of what's really taking place in our world and and like I prefaced to the show, we've been dealing with this issue for 450 years, and we're still plagued by it today. The elements of racism that we're seeing in the Senate with the filibuster, you know, being a thing where the South used that to keep control where they wouldn't take away slavery. The voting system that we have where, you know, we have this weird way of counting the votes that isn't popular. The college evidently was built for racism and power to keep the South powerful and make sure that they could continue doing racism. It's just extraordinary that the

same crap that we've never resolved, never wrapped up and never finished and said we're cutting that off we're not doing again and then to see the embracing of you know the q anon and the and the confederate people i mean just that i mean i i just seeing a confederate flag in the in the in the capital was just mind blowing to me especially when you consider that it never made it there from the south you know they didn't get that far right and and right down here well really up until up until the black lives matter protests started gaining some steam here in tampa the largest or second largest confederate flag in the world was flying over the intersection of interstate 4 and Interstate 75. It's the sort of gateway to the Tampa Bay area. This region with 3.2 million people from all over the place, not just the South, the Midwest and New York and New Jersey

and also Central America and South America. And anytime you come here, a visitor comes here, you drive right past this giant Confederate battle flag. And that that's still with us is just, you know, it's just crazy to me. And it's, but it speaks to the lasting legacy that that was put in place in many ways by the guy who's sort of like a hero in this book. I mean, he's not a hero. I addressed that head on and these, these conflicts in his character, but,

you know, this is a guy who helped a lot of black people as well, on one hand, and then established part of how, you know, that ideology of racial hatred that was, you know, pro-slavery racial hatred that was so prevalent in the South, in the old South. And those of you who are listening on Clubhouse, I'll be taking questions. So just raise your hand if you have a question and we'll throw it at Ben here. Just keep it concise if you would, please. So as people come away from reading your book, what do you hope? We may have covered some of this territory, but is there anything we didn't cover? What do you hope people will come away from reading the book? I think this was a man, George Denning was a man who never learned to read or write. He was born into slavery. The first public record that was ever created

was on the slave roster, and it didn't include his name. included m for male b for black and five for his age first public record he scraped and earned after emancipation and bought fair and square 114 acres and built himself a house and began raising a family on this property. And that property was stolen from him and his family. And he was driven away and had the courage to go after justice, which is not something I don't, you know, many of us wouldn't have done that, right? In 1897. And I should mention, when he makes it to Louisville, nobody knows the details of this. It's lost to time. Nobody's ever prosecuted for it. But he is found about six weeks after the newspaper in Logan County, Kentucky, down near where this whole event took place, published a story, a libelous story about what George Denny was doing and how he was celebrated by the black community in Louisville a couple of hundred miles away and that he was you know living in a home across the border in Indiana they published all this information about him and his whereabouts and then he was attacked one night in Louisville somebody cracked his head open with a brick gouged his eye out and left him

for a dead in an alley And he did not die. He recovered. And it was after he recovered from that that he linked up with Bennett Young and sued this lynch mob in federal court. So after the mob has taken your land, burned down your house, chased your wife and kids off, done enough to send you to prison for seven years, you get lucky enough to get pardoned. I might have been, I might have shut my mouth.

And he did not. This was a guy who just refused to stop. He wanted justice. And so if anything, I hope it serves to inspire. I hope it helps us reconnect with this conversation, to have it with clear mind and to move forward in a spirit of unity as we try to decide how to remember this past, which as you said, is undergirded by racial injustice and white supremacy.

Wow. Wow. One other question I had for you, it mentions that some of this was never before published material. What sort of work went into that and what did you discover? I have some good friends who are great researchers who helped me out a lot in Kentucky in terms of finding information, finding documents. It turns out for the criminal case, we found a folder that contained, it was called the Petitions for Pardon folder, and it contained everything related to the criminal case, to George Denning's criminal case, including a full transcript of court proceedings, including every letter that any private citizen had written and sent to the governor asking for Denning's pardon, including a couple of handwritten letters by Denning's wife while she was in exile in Tennessee. You know, it was a lot of time stomping through cemeteries in rural Kentucky, trying to find, you know, old markers. It ultimately meant, you know, led to a day that I consider one of the best days of my life, which was meeting the great grandson of George Denning,

a man named Anthony Denning Sr., who now lives in Indianapolis. He had done his own research, but he drove down to Louisville when I was doing some work up there. And we ate some steak together and hung out and drank some whiskey and drove around Louisville and Jeffersonville where he had grown up

and talked about his lineage and talked about his people and talked about whether his family feels like his great granddad got justice. And they do not. They, you know, he never, he, at the risk of giving up sort of the climactic moment of this book, he won. He beat the lynch mob in federal court. These farmers from southwestern Kentucky had to pay him $50,000, but he couldn't get them to pay. They all claimed they were destitute. He stayed in court for about 20 years after the case was closed in 1899, trying to get them to cough up money. And they would pay a little bit here and

there, but he never reclaimed the full amount. his family was never able to return to their farm in southwestern kentucky and so you know they live with the legacy of both the bravery of their great-grandfather but also this generational sense of injustice that it didn't really work out even though the courts ruled in his favor it didn't really work out for the though the courts ruled in his favor. It didn't really work out for the family. And that, you know, think about how many times that same thing would have happened. And the guy never made a fuss. They just left their home and white people moved in and took over. And I mean, it's just not uncommon in the South.

So, you know, so we have a lot of work to do in my mind, too. You know, nobody wants to talk about reparations. Somehow in the 80s, that got sort of a bad rap. it became a, you know, what do they call it, a black flag. But it is high time that we talk about the historic injustice that we're, you know, forced to reckon with as a country and also what we can do to move forward together and to repair some of the damage that, you know, that's happened in the past. Yeah. And there's a lot we need to reconcile. And, you know, I, I grew up with kind of the flowery, I mean, I saw roots, but I grew up with the kind of flowery sort of, yeah, there was slavery and people got whipped and they were in chains and,

and yeah, there's slavery there. But yeah, to read this, the horrific stories like in cast or like in the, the lynching museum and stories like the you expose. I mean, you really see the horrific nature of it. We had a great future author. She's got a book coming out in March, but she did the inclusion course for LinkedIn and you can go to their site and take it free and stuff. And she's inclusion officer for a lot of fortune 500 companies that she advises. And we talked about, you know, what do we got to do to resolve this? And she said, you know, people just have to get empathy. They have to develop empathy. I think reading books like yours,

people can get the humanity of it and, and hopefully gain some empathy and some understanding of of how we needed to change this and what we need to do and and how painful it is and how what's what's even the more i started thinking about i'm like we're really not that far removed from the 60s or we're not even 100 years there's still and there's still just so much uh inundation of of social programs and everything else that's rampantly racist in this country that's still providing prejudice and stuff so i'm really excited what would you put in the book this came clear to me when i was a newspaper reporter at the tampa bay times and i i wanted to look into this unsolved lynching it happened in 1934 in a small county in northwest florida and i'm thinking 1934, goodness gracious,

that's a long time ago. I was born in 78. I'm 43 years old now. And 5,000 people participated in this lynching and it was sadistic and barbarous and they took souvenirs from the man's body and so forth. Anyhow, I start to peel back the layers of this story and come to find out the lynch victim's daughter, his name was Claude Neal, his daughter, who was two and a half years old at the time, was still alive. And I interviewed her. Allie Mae Neal was her name, the sweetest old woman I've ever met. But that's not that long ago. That one generation ago connecting us to 1934 so this is not the past you know this is the present this is what we're dealing with right now yeah and and i mean we came really close to having our democracy overthrown i sincerely believe that

if madison hadn't made it so that states controlled the voting, Trump would have seized the federal election if he could have. I sincerely believe that. And it was just, they put it in the Constitution that the states were in charge of it, and that kept it from not having it in one place, kept them from seizing it. And then, of course, he tried very much so on December 6th. And I think he expected more people to show up. And strangely enough, as dumb as he is, he expected them to succeed in their numbers. I mean, sadly, there could have been a lot of

things that would have happened. So Ben, anything more you want to plug in the book before we go out? Let me just say that this was a, you know that this was something I'm very proud of. It's something that I did in the good graces of the Denning family, those who remain. They've joined me on a handful of programs similar to this, book talks and so forth. And I'm honored to include them in this process because I'm in many ways an interloper here. This wasn't my story. This is their story. So it means a lot to me that, you know,

they have their support. And then I think this is, you know, it said in the 1890s, but it's as timely today as it's ever been. And I'm, I hope that it compels us to continue to have this conversation and that, you know,

that should serve my chief desire in this whole deal, that enough people will read it that we can have some solid ground upon which to move forward. There you go. Then give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs, get to know you better, and order the book.

Yeah, let me try to remember off the top of my head. I'm on Twitter at gangrey, G-A-N-G-R-E-Y. Instagram at ben underscore writes, W-R-I-T-E-S, facebook.com slash author Ben Montgomery. You can find me on Amazon and you can find these books anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I'd suggest you go to your independent bookstore, your local library and pick up a copy. And I think that's it, yeah. There you go. There you go.

Ben, it's been wonderful to have you on with us. Thank you for writing the book. Anything we can do to shine more light on this, but thank you for spending the time with us today. Chris, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks, Maddie and Sun Clubhouse, for listening in

and hopefully sharing and getting involved in some of the different things we're doing. Be sure to check out the book, A Shot in the Moonlight, How a Freed Slave and Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South. Ben Montgomery. You can order up, of course, on all the interwebs. You can see the video version of this on youtube.com for just Chris Voss. You can also go to goodreads.com for chest chris voss facebook.com the chris voss show linkedin the chris voss show and instagram the chris voss show or chris voss will be broadcasting uh live versions of this tomorrow there'll be pre-recorded live version blast out and you'll see the videos there but definitely check it out on youtube and order up his book thanks a lot for tuning in wear your mask stay safe and we'll see you guys next time