The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Frances E. W. Harper: A Call to Conscience (Black Lives) by Utz McKnight

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Frances E. W. Harper: A Call to Conscience (Black Lives) by Utz McKnight Free Black woman, poet, novelist, essayist, speaker, and activist, Frances Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth ce...ntury’s most important advocates of Abolitionism and female suffrage, and her pioneering work still has profound lessons for us today. In this new book, Utz McKnight shows how Harper’s life and work inspired her contemporaries to imagine a better America. He seeks to recover her importance by examining not only her vision of the possibilities of Emancipation, but also her subsequent role in challenging Jim Crow. He argues that engaging with her ideas and writings is vital in understanding not only our historical inheritance, but also contemporary issues ranging from racial violence to the role of Christianity. This lucid book is essential reading not only for students of African American history, but also for all progressives interested in issues of race, politics, and society.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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 well hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here in their great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. To our live audience, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Go to chrisfoss.club. That's chrisfoss.club. And you can see where you can subscribe to all the different places the Chris Foss Show is syndicated across the interwebs.
Starting point is 00:00:55 iTunes, of course, is the most preferred one. But subscribe it and refer the show to your family, friends, neighbors, relatives. You can see all the Pulitzer Prize winning authors, brilliant people you have on the show who've written these incredible books that are going to make you learn so much. You can go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, see the video version of these interviews. You can also go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and follow what we're reading or viewing over there. You can also see all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places, which are interesting. And anyway, we'll be talking today with Utes McKnight.
Starting point is 00:01:30 He's the author of the book Francis E.W. Harper and A Call to Conscious. This is part of a series of books that I believe Polity, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, books has been doing on Black Lives Matter. So welcome to the show, Utes. How are you? I'm doing fine. How are you doing? Black Lives Matter. So welcome to the show, Utes. How are you? I'm doing fine. How are you doing? Good, good. So tell us your plugs so people can find out more about you in order to book on the interwebs. Okay, so I'm chair of gender and race studies at Alabama. You can find me there. Just look at the University of Alabama and Utes McKnight. There I am. I've been there about 18 years.
Starting point is 00:02:01 Before that, I was a visitor at UC Berkeley in African-American studies. And then I did my PhD work in Europe, right? On pro-immigration stuff and race and all of this. So I've been doing this stuff a long time. There you go. Yeah. Let's see. Give us a bio on your rundown of some of your history and everything else. What got you into this too? So first of all, I grew up in the Bay Area in 1962. So I'm the next generation after this sort of the big movement. So I'm the child, the little small baby in the arms of my mother, et cetera, et cetera. I was raised in Oakland and Berkeley and a small town called Albany. And I went off at about 18. I went off to school in the East Coast, Swarthmore College.
Starting point is 00:02:47 And then I went by circumstance. My father was African-American. My mother's Swedish. And so I ended up in Sweden when I was in my mid-20s. Like, who knew? And so I ended up trying to look for something to do. And I started doing a PhD. And so I finished there.
Starting point is 00:03:02 And so I started working there. Now, the reason why I say that is, you know, like Baldwin going in a very different person, obviously, in our intellectual history than myself. But like Baldwin going to Europe, it was very instructive for me to live outside the country for a long time. So I was in Sweden for 13 years. It's been a long time since I've been back. So I came back in 2001, 20 years now. I started working as a visitor at UC Berkeley and then came to Alabama in 2003. And really, I've spent decades now doing this type of work. And what I mean is researching African-American life and theories around how we should think of African-American life in the context of the larger society and historical development, politics.
Starting point is 00:03:48 And so Francis Harper, the book comes out of that idea, right? Where what you have here with Francis C.W. Harper is somebody who's relatively neglected, but wrote from 1850 to 1900. She wrote four novels, had more than 10 books of poetry, was actually the most important or at least well-known poet, right, across the country for decades. She was certainly the most important Black public, what we call, let's say, public intellectual for decades from 1850 on. Now, remember, if you think about the United States, 1850, 1865, that's the end of the Civil War, right? You've got the Civil War period, you've got
Starting point is 00:04:31 all the tensions leading up to the Civil War, 1860, 61, etc. And then you have decades of reconstruction and all this, right? So here's somebody who wrote, lectured, read her poetry in public, was an extremely important person for 40 years, and yet almost no one knows about her. And so that's the question for me was, why was she, she was not erased, but why attenuated? Why reduced? And instead you have Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells, other Black intellectuals put forward. And so I was just curious about that. And that led me into her work. And it really became a story for me. And the book is about this. Through her life, we have a story about how the Black community, both free and enslaved, tried to find a definition for, let's say, equality and democracy
Starting point is 00:05:29 for those last 50 years, 1850 to 1900. So she was born 1825 and died 1911. So it's like a critical period. But the reason I guess why I'm talking this way is like, everybody goes like, Frances Harper, who's that? And instead, we should be like, oh, Francis Harper. And not in terms of my book, but the book's idea was to lift her up. And this is about the third or fourth manuscript by people trying to do this, bring her forward.
Starting point is 00:06:01 And it's an interesting journey. There's sadly a lot of these stories that have been lost in the whitewashing of American history. The beautiful thing that I love about my podcast is we have so many authors on that have educated us, especially over the last year. And I've learned so much from our history and people are really starting to delve into our history and go, hey, there's a lot more that went on with the John Wayne just running around shooting Indians and being a racist. There's a lot more that went on in American history. Yeah, that's right. And it's great that these stories are starting to come to light.
Starting point is 00:06:33 People are identifying, shining a light. And we're really embracing the true history of America and facing down some of these kind of myths that we've always had, these silly things that we've always had of American exceptionalism. So this is great. It's funny you went to Sweden like James Baldwin went to France. Yeah. We had Eddie Glaude Jr. on the show on Begin Again.
Starting point is 00:06:54 And then, of course, Jimi Hendrix had to go to England to become a hit, which was – Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I wish Jimi would have lived, man. Can you imagine? Have him on the show. Yeah, I would have had him on the show. Oh, man. I wish Jimmy would have lived, man. Can you imagine? Yeah, man. Have him on the show. Yeah, I would have had him on the show. Hey, Jimmy!
Starting point is 00:07:08 Ah! All along the watchtower, buddy. Why did you want to kiss that guy? What was that about? Excuse me? Oh, yeah. That's not even going to stick. Excuse me while I kiss that guy.
Starting point is 00:07:17 Anyway, one of the most famous misheard lines ever. But what an artist. I still love watching him set his guitar on fire but i digress or i side dress her that's good no it speaks to francis harper because what you've got is you've got somebody who she lived a very long life she was the most important black activist within let's say the women's suffrage movement after the civil war. Like she was a national figure involved in all the big movement stuff that eventually in 1920 led to the right of women to vote. So here she is, she's an activist, she's publishing. If we think about it now, a black woman, right? 1860s, 70s,
Starting point is 00:07:57 80s, 90s, who writes, publishes four books. We don't have anybody like that. There's nobody else like that. Really? Wow. So who is this person that we've decided let's not consider? And so why have we done that? And I, at first, when I did, when I started the research, I was thinking there must be some reason, like she's not resonating with people. But in fact, she was on stage with So You're No Truth. She knew Frederick Douglass really well.
Starting point is 00:08:24 She was best friends with Ida B. Wells doing the lynching project work. So she was front and center. And really, I found that it was because she advocated for a different way than what we had after the Civil War with Reconstruction, the need to maintain or reinforce segregation.
Starting point is 00:08:43 The sort of, the product of those, and we talk about the Klan and all of this, the product of those very nasty decades for African-Americans after emancipation also meant that somebody who was advocating for a much more democratic process had to be elided, had to be erased. Wow.
Starting point is 00:09:03 And it is because maybe she's a woman in that age, and we seem to have vaulted a lot of male people. That's right. That's right. And I think also I couldn't do this work. It's important. It's a different type of plug. But I couldn't do this work without the last 30, 40 years
Starting point is 00:09:21 of work by Black women historians historians poets and historians who really felt that francis harper's work should be well they were they had to find it wow there's a lot of them three of the novels were serialized so they actually had to find the different editions of the different excerpts and all of this and it took a lot of work i've only recently discovered her early book of poetry i depend or let me say this. And it took a lot of work. I've only recently discovered her early book of poetry. I depend, or let me say this, we all depend on this type of work. We all depend, like when we talk about
Starting point is 00:09:52 re-imagining our history and making the United States a better place, it actually requires this type of labor. And so people are constantly working. And I'll say like this, you wonder what it was like in the 1960s when African-Americans and women in larger numbers come into the academy, at least in the sort of predominantly white institutions. What it was like is it allows for this type of work because without
Starting point is 00:10:18 their presence in the academy, there was no space for them to do this type of research to figure out like, what were people doing? And I think we all wonder like the last 50 years, sure, we have President Obama, we have a lot of change like this. But but really, like in a concrete way, what has allowed for example, that the death of George Floyd was impactful for a lot of people. But it was partly important, and resonated through society because of the last 50 years of the academics, public intellectuals, like the growth of a sort of black public conversation, not exclusively black, but everybody together.
Starting point is 00:10:55 And that's really the legacy of the civil rights movement. Yeah, this is American history. This is all of us. How was she educated? Because one of the evil things that they would do back then is they wouldn't let people read or write. James Baldwin, I think, used to have to sneak into libraries and he would get in trouble, of course, with the police for being out of his area. So how was she educated? Yeah. So what you have to do, we also, there's a lot of, okay. Learning about Francis Harper allows us to reimagine the United States, 18s, 30s, 40s, 50s. So we think today, a lot of people think, oh, the black readers, there were no black readers. In fact, there were black salons, Philadelphia, remember, there was a very active, vibrant, and let's say permanent free black population.
Starting point is 00:11:50 And so Frances Harper came out of that. Her uncle actually had a sort of academy. So you would think of it as, it's wrong to say it this way, but I'm trying to think how our audience would think about it. The small private school from elementary school up through high school, would be like that so she actually attended that school that's her education so what if you think about it this is somebody who wrote her first book of poetry when she was 20 21 that a free black woman in a time when because i want to point to that too a time when black women were and women were not expected to be in public way they were not supposed to read their poetry or give speeches in public
Starting point is 00:12:31 oh wow um and so here she is and she just asserts herself and so the force of will that she had and also the support of course of her community but she was you're right the difference so you're in her truth and others were the enslaved populations. This is somebody who was free. She was free and she wrote and she did the lecture circuit where she read her poetry. And she basically advocated, she was a very early person as a free black woman to try and work with the underground so she was an activist right at a time when i think now the journey is you get your ba you maybe get your phd you get your master's law degree something like this and then you go and do public speak speaking or you do a lot of social media work remember there's no social media yeah no twitter back then and so those were the dark ages i know it's terrible right like this and then also what you've got is she would have her poetry books that she I know. Those were the dark ages. I know. It's terrible. Right? Like this. And then also what you've got is she would have her poetry books that she would sell at the lectures.
Starting point is 00:13:33 And these are what we could think of as chapbooks today, like a few pages. And then she would do readings. And so she had to promote herself. Yeah. Really. She did tours all through the North. And then she did tours in the South. After the Civil War, she went and tried to educate and build schools. The school was actually burned down at one point, like a sort of classic thing.
Starting point is 00:13:49 So, yeah, I know I'm going on about it, but this is her life. My problem really in writing the book was this is somebody who I really should have taken a piece of. But because taking two or three of her books or a few of her long poem but instead because there's so little known about her you have to take her whole life yeah you have to lift her up yeah so where was she born free and then where did she usually live and tour and speak and stuff like that was she's the north of the south yeah so born in baltimore maryland grew up there and then moved to philadelphia and then ohio and and then also boston new england so circulating like that generally she ended up living in as an adult
Starting point is 00:14:40 and for the rest of her life in philadelphia's actually a house, Francis Harper's house, a little plaque and all of this. And she contributed. She was also, which is normal at that time, she was also very involved in the religious movement in the Black Queen. So she contributed to that too. That was the contact. And I think maybe it's a reason.
Starting point is 00:14:58 Well, I don't want to focus on why she has been ignored in that way. I think it has been important for us until, let's say, the last 10 years, maybe 20 years, to stick to the narrative of how black history developed. And the idea that, wait, there was an active black readership and writers and everything from newsprint to journals to all of this in the 1820s
Starting point is 00:15:27 and 30s and 40s that black women and black men produced literature and poetry that goes against the narrative of the sort of like we have rescued you from slavery and we have rescued you from jim crow and all of this and all And the narrative instead should be that, you know, the black community has, since it came to the United States, always had a lot of people doing creative work. Yeah, there's no corners on brilliant ideas and smart stuff. And sadly, reading books like Cast and other things that I have, you see the extreme prejudice of that era and the attitudes
Starting point is 00:16:04 and the things that just have. You see the extreme prejudice of that era and the attitudes and the things that just limited everybody in a society. Because when you have a, what's the old line that I love to use? Rising tide lifts all boats. So as a society and working together as each other, we lift each other up. But back then they had different ideas, sadly. But this is interesting. What was a motivator for her? Did she get married? Did she have kids? Was there something in her life that struck there to this chord in her to want to resonate this way? Some people have that moment. And she wanted to make a difference in that particular way. And I think we know that this is true in the sense of who she was around, that if you're a free black person in Baltimore and you're living near slaves, like enslaved people, like you're constantly in contact with them, you would see this sort of injustice directly.
Starting point is 00:17:00 And for a young black woman who has the ambition of being a writer or an artist. And I do think, remember, this is unusual, right? It's somewhat unusual today, too, but then this is completely, it's not like somebody said, this is a path that you could, but I think that she just, from when she was a teenager, she just had this, and of course, she grew up in a family in which they were doing this type of salon work. They were talking about the future of America and what should be done and all of this, the sort of black intellectual community. So with a school that her uncle had started, all around her,, from people around, people running the Underground Railroad. Because the point was, here you have a young woman who is asking to participate in something that kind of goes against gender norms and acceptable. And she puts herself at risk.
Starting point is 00:17:56 Why do you want to be put at risk? And so the option for her was to create, to develop her muse, to become a poet. Wow. and there's some bravery in there that wasn't a fun time to be sticking your head up and calling out social stuff and people they both the racial slurs the threats to her life they would attack her verbally when she would give her talks she would read her poetry and people would be disgusted and demonstrate that type of thing. And so why does somebody do that? What is it that if you think about who we talking about abolition and the slaves are all around you? In the North as well, right? There's slavery. And that there's a real resistance that results in violence.
Starting point is 00:18:54 And yet you're willing to stand up there in your 20s and say, hey, let me read this poem to you that I've done about the injustice of slavery. Right? Yeah, that's the type of advocacy that we should admire definitely that's brave from all the books i've read about that era it's that's a brave thing to do i'm glad she was in the north too because in the south things might have gone yeah it didn't work different like with after the civil war she went down south oh did she yeah and so then and then she her record she wrote letters back to the black news newspapers her letters then she was almost like a journalist like reporting on the conditions and the sort of poverty and all of this yeah and it was it's important people are
Starting point is 00:19:39 calling this out and showing it to it and how is the book written received so far do a lot of people are a lot of people delving into her history? You said there were maybe some other books that some people had written. Yeah, I think so. I think people like it. And I think, like you initially pointed out, it's really important to bring up these things. Now, what it needs to do, not so much the book, but the idea behind it, what we need to do is we need to reimagine, say, the future. The last four years, certainly four and a half years now, and COVID as well, even let's say the last 20 years have been a real struggle to figure out what a positive contribution we make to democracy. Like, where are we going? Are we in retreat? Are we, what does it
Starting point is 00:20:22 mean to vote in our first black president? It's like these types of things. Like, in other words, the politics of representation where you have a black person in the room, we now know that's not sufficient. Instead, and we know it's not sufficient. What I mean by politics of representation is just a person, just a face, just a person who is, has a title is not enough. Instead, we're struggling with the substantive changes that we need in society. And so what Frances Harper did in her four books was she worked out, she addressed different things. What does progress mean?
Starting point is 00:20:57 Should we, one of her books, Trial and Triumph, is about should we grasp for material wealth and financial success at the expense of the idea of community and lifting everybody like lifting all boats as you say and then one of her books sewing and reaping directly addresses the problem of let's say what she would what she called sin so let's say too much social media use and video that's definitely sinful i'm going to hell on that one i know yeah we're all we're going down that down the hill she clearly had an iphone 10 there you go exactly it's not too much coffee no but that but this type of what kind of character do you need right and what does the community mean in terms of social behaviors like what should we do let's
Starting point is 00:21:43 say okay so all of a sudden you're free and you've been enslaved. And people say like this, okay, so what's a family? What's a community? What are the values? And so of course the church kicks in in a big way and learning how to read and things like this, like great practical things. But what should the ambition be? Should the ambition be to recreate the type of real injustices, economic injustices, or should something else be the goal? And so she attempted to do that in her literature. Wow. I'm reading here on her wiki page, her short story, Two Offers, was published in the Anglo-African in 1859, making literary history
Starting point is 00:22:20 as the first short story published by a black woman. That's amazing. I know. She was just a pioneer. Yeah, yeah, she was. But I would say like this, it's one thing to talk in that way. But I do think it's important to look at the substance
Starting point is 00:22:35 of not just how we go, oh, there's a first and there's... She was important in this. She also had a message. And so as we now look at these types of issues, what does equality mean? What's the role of the police in society? What does it mean to be part of a movement and a movement for what? If I say like this, my success is success for the black community.
Starting point is 00:23:00 That is right and it's wrong because I'm just an individual. And so the connection between the individual and the community, that's the type of thing in terms of aspirations. So where do we get our aspirations as a larger community from? I think it's relatively easy. It takes a lot of courage, but it was relatively easy to see that if you have different signs on drinking fountains, you can't ride in the front of a bus there's your target right for change what's our target for change now and so francis and so francis harper offers up that what she says is that you should have a self-contained like the community itself should generate a type of language for justice and democracy. I haven't gotten a chance to read her writing,
Starting point is 00:23:46 but just scanning the Wikipedia and some of the stuff that you have, it sounds like she's very James Baldwin-ish, where she's focused on the big picture. A lot of people during the 60s were breaking up into different ways. You had different ways of people trying to approach it, whether it was Martin Luther King trying to do peaceful demonstrations, or you had the Black Panthers that had a whole different thing, Malcolm X. Everyone was trying to figure out a way to solve this equation. But James Baldwin, of course, had that bigger vision of, hey, why can't we all get along?
Starting point is 00:24:17 I don't know if that's an appropriate analogy of it. But he talked about love and emotion, and he really brought a humanness to it. I really love his message and it sounds like she did a lot of the same where she the rising tide lifts all boats let's get a bigger vision for the society stuff so yeah and i think that's a good way to look at it it's also a good explanation for why people could easily ignore her because it's personal and so you she uses example of let's say a a couple and their struggle to find a correct path in a community or the fallen child, like the child has been abandoned and has done the wrong thing. Like she uses things like that, that it makes it very easy to say, this is not important.
Starting point is 00:24:58 It's too personal. It's just romantic. It's just, and what Baldwin did, certainly, and of course he, it's a different time, but Baldwin, like Francis Harper, what they did was they asked, so how are you living? Chris, Utes, like, how are you living? How are you living directly connects to these larger questions as opposed to, I can just do my thing and then somebody else will deal with this larger thing. And so for her right action, and it sounds different in the context of how we think of it, but right action directly impacted how we thought of the community. Without a type of character and a responsibility by each individual, the larger community, this is something we never talk like that now.
Starting point is 00:25:46 We don't think, we don't think, let's say, let's say somebody is arrested and they go to prison. We don't think of that as a problem for the community directly. We do indirectly, right, with the sort of collateral problems with family and all that with the person. But we don't think of that person as somehow letting us down, being a product symptomatic of another problem for us, right? Not normally. And Francis Harper was very explicit about that. So there are things we can learn from her writing that we can resolve today if we give it the focus. And she also talks about everything from colorism, the problem of identifying as a Black person, to what's allyship price of allyship she has certainly in our most 1990
Starting point is 00:26:35 i think we're um okay i think we're losing you a little bit on the video. It botched up for a bit. Let's see if we can. I think it's going to come back here. I think you're pretty back. Is there anything you can close in your background? Let me see if there's anything. I think you're back now.
Starting point is 00:27:01 We just maybe hit a speed bump. Okay, yeah. I'm back? Yeah, I think we're back. I think we're back now. We just maybe hit a speed bump. Okay, yeah. I'm back? Yeah, I think we're back. I think we got it back. We just hit a speed bump. We're on the run, regardless. Sorry about that.
Starting point is 00:27:13 No, but I think I want to riff on this with Baldwin just a little bit. So you think about why somebody writes. So Francis Harper wrote explicitly within the black press. So there's evidence, therefore direct evidence of a black readership, right? Within the black press, she's serializing these novels and publishing her poetry. And she is doing it to reach out, not just to the readers, but to build a community through the work. That's what she's writing about. She says, this is how things have happened.
Starting point is 00:27:51 This is what we need to do. She spends a lot of time on the relationship between men and women. She talks explicitly about, okay, now that men have the right to vote, but women don't, right? Can we rely as women on the generosity of men to protect our interests? In order to do that, she writes, and she uses examples of families and betrayals and examples of men who don't do what the women like this. what would that look like? What would the relationship have to be between genders to have men stand in for women instead of just giving women the right? What does it mean? So she's very, like very political in that way. But those aren't questions that we don't have today. We have them today too, even though of course, everybody's got the right to vote. Yeah. Yeah. But I do think that part of it is that it may be
Starting point is 00:28:47 important for us to think through, I think about other people's writing, Kiese Lehman and Jesmyn Ward, using fiction to talk through everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, Adichie, et cetera. If you think of Harper in the same way, as using everyday examples, it makes it very easy because it's not conventional in the way that it was at that time, how people wrote. So it makes it very easy to dismiss her. But really, we should look at it and say, so she's describing how people lived. Maybe we need to reassess, like when we say slavery versus free, maybe we need to reassess the role of education in the Black community as something
Starting point is 00:29:25 that's been enduring, that that is a staple of Black community life. And so it means that really, we might have to look at Jim Crow, the sort of eight decades or so of Jim Crow, as a suppression of Black life. In other words, we're still recovering from this kind of iceberg like this, crushing everything. And when we ask what we need to do today, we need to open up new things. We need to look at what was possible in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, how Black people imagined what was possible. And then the sort of Black codes and the Klan and lynching took that away. If we think about how many people were lynched over decades and the impact on the community, the explicit desire to have an impact, it worked. And so we definitely need to go back to Francis Harper and others to look at how they imagined things. In
Starting point is 00:30:17 other words, the road not taken. So Baldwin, on the other hand, is asking people to come to a cyber conscience, whereas Harper is appealing to that, but is really saying like this, look, if we are all equal, what does that require? And she focuses on how Blacks should think about equality, which is unique. She does not spend time on what we think of as white life or a complaint about the planter class or something like this, a slave man. She doesn't spend any time with that. Instead, she is spending time, she's showing the humanity of black people. And that's all her books and her poetry are about that. And she's also demonstrating through her own person. Here you have an erudite, voluble, articulate is one way to say it, right?
Starting point is 00:31:10 Somebody who's polished, who gets up in front of an audience is maybe 26, 27, 28, a small person, and she's talking to an all white audience. And she's reading her poetry. And so she's a living representation of that type of equality, right? Hey, I'm doing this. If you need me to be less than you, you're going to have to come with something more than just like reading and writing or ideas. And that's 1840s. Wow.
Starting point is 00:31:37 1850s, 1860s. And of course, she's not alone, but it allows us to see that she's not alone, that we actually need to rethink how we consider American history. Yes, we certainly do. We need to learn more about it and stuff. This whole fight that they're having now about teaching racial theory and in schools and stuff, and which is already taught to my understanding in like law schools and other places, critical race theory. I've learned so much on the show between the great authors we have on, like yourself, Eddie Law Jr., Ellis Cole. I could go on and on about the last year and a half.
Starting point is 00:32:09 And so much of our history has been whitewashed and covered up and so much of it has been lost. There's so much of it that we really need to discover, really get down to the true history of America and what it was about. Anything more you want to plug or tease out on the book to see if we can get some people motivated to pick that baby? I want to talk a little bit how you said whitewashing of history. Imagine if it wasn't black and white. Imagine if, in fact, along with this free person, Francis Harper, there were lots of people we would say today are allies. There are a lot of white people who organized her lecture tours, who saw value in
Starting point is 00:32:46 her even as a very young woman, a sort of burgeoning poet, like she's beginning to remember, there's no formal career, she doesn't have a title, she's just very good at speaking and making a case. But these are white people organizing this. Wow. Instead of imagining it's like how we think of today, like people white people instead imagine what was missed by this erasure of people working together and then how she could write books that spoke to how black people should contribute without being subordinated as equals, imagine the opportunity lost. And also what could be gained by us if we do delve more into it.
Starting point is 00:33:30 I think people, reading the book, I cover all of her literature, her prose, and then I delve into some of the poetry. I think people will be surprised. There you go. There you go. And enlightened too. And I'm glad they're doing the series.
Starting point is 00:33:44 I think that polity books is a polity books or polity books polity books i think they might have some more people booked on the show from the series so that'll be awesome yeah i think it's fun it's how we after george floyd and people's concern rightly so this is the way to do it yeah if you're watching a confederate flag be in my capital on januaryth, or everyone's capital, that was extraordinary. That was like, not even the South got that far with their flag. That was a moment where we really,
Starting point is 00:34:12 and George Floyd, like you say, and some of the horrors over the last, going on for a long time, that we need to change. And this is, and the way to do it, it's already there. We already have people who've written about it. So let's just look and see how we really did live. There you go.
Starting point is 00:34:27 There you go. It's been wonderful to have you on. Utes, give us your plugs where people can find you on the interwebs. So you can find me at Utes McKnight, Alabama. That's easy. Yeah, just Google me. I'm there. Just find him, man.
Starting point is 00:34:42 He's got a book out. Is this your first book or do you have more no this is like book four congratulations man i'm still working on my first one hopefully we'll get out this year i'm like eddie this is there you go i'll try and catch up to you in the next few years doing the book thing you know coronavirus thing i think i'm sure you'll stay ahead of me but thank you very much for this work and thanks for coming and spending the time and sharing it with us today we certainly appreciate it sir thank you the opportunity thank you very much for this work, and thanks for coming and spending the time and sharing it with us today. We certainly appreciate it, sir. Thanks for the opportunity.
Starting point is 00:35:08 Thank you, because we definitely want to lift this information. Check it out. You can find it where fine books are sold at fine bookstores. How about that? Francis E.W. Harper, A Call to Conscious, the Black Lives series from Palliative Books. And thanks, Samanis, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, has chris voss hit that bell notification so you get all the notifications of all the brilliant authors we have on the show just a massive array of people that come on i learned so much from my front row seat that i have at my show and plus i get to ask all the cool questions
Starting point is 00:35:37 a lot of people don't get that and so my audience gets that as well go to goodreads.com for it says chris voss and follow us there go to all the different groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places. Follow them on. You can see everything going on with the Chris Voss show. Thanks to everyone for tuning in and we'll see you guys next time.

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