James Baldwin

James Baldwin was a brilliant essayist, one of the chroniclers of the Civil Rights Movement, and a powerful voice against racism.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. The last
thing we recorded before I got to work on today's
episode was our June five behind the scenes, and if

(00:22):
you've listened to that, I was clearly having a hard
time figuring out what to do next. And when I
remembered that I'd had James Baldwin on my list for
a while, my inward response was like, yes, obviously, James Baldwin.
Of course, why didn't you even think of this before?
This description by Juan Williams and a piece called Baldwin

(00:45):
The Witnesses Testament, which was published in The Washington Post
the day after Baldwin's death in illustrates why I had
that response quote. Given the messy nature of racial hatred,
of the half truths, blasphemies and lies that make up
American life, Baldwin's accuracy and reproducing that world stands as

(01:05):
a remarkable achievement. His accuracy was key and his works
the reader could resonate to the sounds of the street
corner as drawn by Baldwin, could feel the anger of
black Americans so long denied a role in American life.
As Baldwin wrote about that anger, black people reading Baldwin
knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed

(01:26):
his truth about the lives of black people and the
sins of a racist nation. Interest in James Baldwin's work
has just really grown in the United States over the
last several years, in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement.
His nineteen sixty three book The Fire Next Time is
frequently on anti racism reading lists. Sometimes it's paired up

(01:47):
with Tana hassy Coats Between the World and Me, which
was inspired by it, or with The Fire This Time
a New Generation Speaks about Race. That's a book that
came out in Basically, James Baldwin was a brilliant essayist
and one of the chroniclers of the civil rights movement
and a really powerful voice against racism. And that is
why we are talking about him today. So we're gonna

(02:09):
start with his background. James Baldwin was born James Arthur
Jones in Harlem, New York, on August two. His mother
was Emma Bertas Jones, and she was a domestic worker
When James was born, Emma was not married and she
never told him who his biological father was. When James
was three, his mother married David Baldwin, who was a

(02:29):
factory worker and an evangelical minister, and they went on
to have eight children together. The family was really poor.
They were living in a part of Harlem that Baldwin
later called Junkie's Hollow, and part of James's early years
also took place during the Great Depression. David Baldwin was strict, unyielding, authoritarian,

(02:49):
and cruel, including telling James that he was ugly and
reminding him of the circumstances of his birth, and of
course that was heavily stigmatized at the time. At as
an adult, Baldwin described as a whole household constantly working
to appease his stepfather. James also said David taught him
to fight because he had to continually fight back with patients,

(03:11):
and a kind of ruthless determination, because I had to
endure it, to go under and come back up to wait.
James Baldwin attributed his stepfather's treatment of him and his
mother and siblings as being the product of living as
a proud man in a racist society where he just
could not make enough money to really support his family.

(03:32):
And Baldwin also credited his younger siblings as being a
big part of what kept him off the streets and
largely out of trouble in his youth. As the oldest,
James was always helping to look after the younger ones,
and that was something he described doing with a book
in one hand, because reading became one of his biggest
means of escape. He liked to tell people that he

(03:53):
read every volume in Harlem's library branches and that he
had to go to the New York Public Library on
Fort Street to find any books that he hadn't read yet.
He also credited religion with helping to keep him out
of trouble. He had a religious conversion experience at the
age of fourteen and became a youth minister at Fireside
Pentecostal Assembly. He was a youth minister for three years,

(04:15):
and during that time he crafted his use of language
and his speaking style. Throughout all this, James had been
attending New York Public schools, first at PS twenty four,
whose principle was Gertrude Ayres. That was the first black
principle in New York City. From there, he moved to
Frederick Douglas Junior High School, where Harlem Renaissance poet County

(04:35):
Cullen was his French teacher and the director of the
school's literary club. While at Frederick Douglas Junior High, James
was editor of the school's newspaper, The Douglas Pilot, and
also tried to make money to help the family buy
shining shoes and selling shopping bags. For high school, James
was selected to attend DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
This was one of New York's more elite schools, with

(04:57):
a predominantly Jewish student body. There, James again worked on
the school newspaper, The Magpie, and he excelled in his
English and history courses. He also meant painter view for Delaney,
who became a friend and something of a mentor, as
he demonstrated for Baldwin that a black man could become
an artist. James didn't do nearly as well and as

(05:17):
other courses as he did in English and history, and
his high school years were personally very turbulent. In addition
to all the stresses of his home life, he had
started to question his sexuality. He had also started questioning
the church as he began to learn about the ways
that Christianity had been used as a weapon during slavery,
and as he heard people within his church and his

(05:39):
stepfather make anti Semitic comments. He ultimately left the church
in ninety one. James Baldwin graduated from high school in
nineteen two, six months after the rest of his class.
The internal turmoil connected to his faith in his sexuality
contributed to a mental health crisis that derailed his studies.
He had hoped to go to the City College of

(06:01):
New York, but he couldn't afford a tuition. Instead, he
got a defense industry job in bell Mead, New Jersey,
to try to help support his family financially. By this point,
James's stepfather was struggling with his own mental health, with
symptoms that included depression and paranoia. Baldwin's job in bell
Mead involved building a new Army quartermaster depot, and it

(06:23):
was Baldwin's first real experience with overt racism on the job.
The U. S Army was still segregated, and Baldwin continued
to act the way he had acted back in Harlem
when he was around white Southern service members, and they,
of course expected him to be totally deferential to them
and to stay out of their way. Of course, racism
had existed in Harlem as well, but this was a

(06:45):
whole different set of social expectations and consequences. Baldwin described
this experience as learning what it meant to be a Negro.
He refused to back down in the face of racism
and harassment on the job, and he was fired. A
friend helped him get his job back, and when the
harassment resumed, he again pushed back against it and was

(07:06):
once again fired. On his last night in Belle Meade,
Baldwin and some friends were refused service as a diner
because of their race, and Baldwin really reached a breaking point.
He threw a water picture and that shattered the mirror
behind the bar. He described this moment as revelatory, realizing
that he had been angry enough to kill someone and

(07:27):
that his own life was in danger, and his words
quote from the hatred I carried in my own heart.
David Baldwin Sr. Died on July three, which was also
the day James's youngest sibling, Paul Maria, was born. Two
days later on August one, and uprising swept through Harlem.
It was sparked when a black soldier tried to intervene

(07:49):
as a white police officer was trying to arrest a
black woman. The officer shot the soldier, and rumors spread
that he had been killed. This was one of a
series of similar riots that took place in cities around
the United States in ninety three, and in Harlem, six
black people were killed as thousands of police were dispatched
in response to the violence. Baldwin really felt like living

(08:11):
in Harlem had become untenable, and he moved to Greenwich
Village to try to make a living as a writer,
while also waiting tables and doing other work just to
try to make ends meet and to send what money
he could back to his family. He had relationships with
men and with women, and at one point became engaged
to a woman, but ultimately broke off that engagement. He
also became friends with a man named Eugene Worse, who

(08:33):
encouraged Baldwin to join the Young People's Socialist League. Although
it's not entirely clear how long Baldwin was involved or
exactly what his involvement even was in the years just
after World War Two, he spent at least some time
with various political groups that were connected to things like socialism, communism,
and labor rights, but he didn't become exclusively focused on

(08:54):
any of them, or in some cases ever officially become
a member. One of the biography US that I read
of him characterized this period is kind of bouncing around
from one group to another, getting a sense of what
different ideas were, but not really committing to any of them.
At that point in Baldwin met Richard Wright, who helped
him get Harper's Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, and that fellowship

(09:17):
provided some of the funding to help him launch a
literary career. He started getting published and established magazines, but
then in ninety six, Eugene Worth died by suicide. That
was something that traumatized and haunted Baldwin for the rest
of his life. Two years later, Baldwin had become certain
that he could not live in the United States anymore.
It circled back to what he had realized that last

(09:40):
night in Belle Meade. He had a clear minded certainty
that if he didn't leave the US and its systematic
racism and oppression, he would be killed, or he would
kill someone. He finally decided to go to France at
the age of twenty four. We'll get to that. After
a quick sponsor break, James Baldwin left for Paris on

(10:06):
November eleventh, using the last of the money from a
fellowship to pay for a one way ticket by sea.
Beyond that, he had almost no money, virtually no connections,
and nowhere to stay. He also did not speak French.
In his words quote, I had no idea what might
happen to me in France, but I was very clear
what would happen if I remained in New York. Baldwin

(10:29):
faced some criticism for leaving the US, with people arguing
that he was abandoning a country that he should have
stayed in and tried to help fix. But this first
stretch of time in Paris was critically important to his
work and identity as a writer. Unlike many of the
other writers and artists who left the US for Paris,
he didn't think of himself as an expatriate, but more

(10:49):
as a commuter. He still felt a deep connection to
the United States, and he made frequent trips back, and
he spent long stretches of time in other parts of
the world, including Istanbul. Shortly after arriving in Paris, Baldwin
met Swiss artist Lucien Happersburger, who was white, bisexual, and
at one point married to a woman. When they met,

(11:10):
Baldwin was twenty four and Happersburger was seventeen. They eventually
started a relationship that went on for almost forty years.
Baldwin described Happersburger as the love of his life, and
he became godfather to Happersburger's children. Along with other relationships
in his life, Happersburger was one of the inspirations for
Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. While in France, Baldwin wrote Everybody's

(11:34):
Protest novel, which argued that political novels like Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Richard Wright's Native Son were
reinforcing stereotypes about black people and in particular, dehumanizing black men.
Although Wright had helped Baldwin secure his first writing fellowship,
the two men did not see eye to eye on

(11:54):
a number of issues, and they frequently criticized one another.
On December nineteenth, Aldwin was arrested for being in receipt
of stolen property after he borrowed a bed sheet that
a friend had stolen from a hotel. This whole experience
led him to think about identity and policing in the
United States versus in France. The police in France saw

(12:15):
him as an American, while police in New York would
have seen him as an inherently criminal problem. But he
also became aware that most of the people who were
in jail with him in Paris were from Northern Africa,
and that French colonialism had its own part to play
in racism in France. This first stretch of time in
France let Baldwin look back on the US from a distance,

(12:37):
seeing things from angles that just were not possible for
him while he was living in it. He started coming
to terms with both his own history and with his
sexuality while living in France. In Switzerland, he finished his
semi autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain she
had actually started writing in high school, as well as
a plague called the Amen Corner, and a series of

(12:58):
essays in nine In fifty two, Baldwin made a trip
back to the US with financial help from Marlon Brando.
He was awarded a Googgenheim Fellowship in June of nineteen
fifty four, and other fellowships followed. In nineteen fifty nine,
he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to work on
the novel Another Country, when this novel included a fictionalized
depiction of his friendship with Eugene Worth, including worth suicide.

(13:22):
Professor in literary critic Fred Stanley later wrote of Another
Country quote, Baldwin has been audacious enough, prior to most
other artists to grapple candidly with the usually taboo subjects
of American society and culture, interracial sexual intercourse, homosexuality as
a normative mode of experience, and bisexuality as a real phenomenon.

(13:45):
After similar back and forth travel, Baldwin returned to the
US for a longer stretch, starting in July of nineteen
fifty seven. A lot of his written work during this
time documents or reflects on the Civil Rights movement, a
movement that he wasn't really sure how he fit into.
He had become well known and well established as a
writer by this point, and while he did not want

(14:06):
to describe himself as the movement spokesperson, there were definitely
people who thought of him that way. As the civil
rights movement grew and evolved, Baldwin found himself aligned in
some ways with Martin Luther King Jr's approach through non
violent action, that in other ways with Malcolm X, the
Nation of Islam, and the Black Power movement, for example,

(14:26):
As time went on, Baldwin increasingly favored the Black Power
movement's focus on immediate radical change instead of non violent
incremental progress, but he really did not agree with the
Black Power movements focus on black separatism. One hallmark of
Baldwin's writing during the Civil rights movement was that it
was accessible to and sometimes written specifically for a white audience.

(14:50):
Much of this written work carried an implicit or explicit
warning that racism was not just harming black people, that
it was also destroying white people as well. Some of
it has also been described as prophetic, foreseeing that the
movement would become more militant if non violent activism did
not meet its goals, and foreseeing that white activism would

(15:11):
turn away from that militancy. Baldwin's work in the movement
was not just about writing, though he also made speeches,
He donated money, wrote letters sci petitions organized during the
lunch counter sit ins that we talked about on the show.
Earlier this year, James Baldwin traveled to Tallahassee to interview
student demonstrators. In nineteen sixty one, he became a sponsor

(15:33):
for the National Committee for a Saying Nuclear Policy, and
he also helped sponsor a rally to disband the House
An American Activities Committee. In nineteen sixty three, he took
a speaking tour through the South in conjunction with the
Congress of Racial Equality. During this tour, he met and
started working with civil rights activists and in double a
cp field secretary Medgar Evers. Baldwin's book The Fire Next

(15:56):
Time came out during this tour as well. It contains
two essays, My Dungeon Shook Letter to my Nephew on
the one anniversary of the Emancipation and Down at the
Cross Letter from a Region of My Mind. The latter
essay dwells on Baldwin's experiences with religion, including both Christianity
and the Nation of Islam, relating them to race and racism,

(16:18):
and reflecting on his own beliefs. The Fire Next Time
spent more than forty weeks in the top five of
the New York Times bestseller List on May seventeenth, nineteen
sixty three, during Martin Luther King Jr's Birmingham campaign, Baldwin
was on the cover of Time magazine under a banner
that read Birmingham and Beyond the Negro Pushed for Equality.

(16:39):
A few days before that Time magazine cover, Baldwin had
sent a telegram to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy criticizing
the United States lack of response to the civil rights movement,
especially in the face of increasing violence and brutality against
the people who were participating in that movement. Baldwin framed
this inaction in the failure of the nation to make

(17:01):
black liberation a priority, as a moral treason. The result
was that Kennedy met with Baldwin for breakfast on May,
asking him to gather writers and activists to meet with him.
The next day. They met in Kennedy's apartment in New York,
where Kennedy was joined by Department of Justice lawyer Burke Marshall.
Baldwin had brought his brother David, as well as Harry Belafonte,

(17:24):
Lorraine Handsbury, Lena Horn, and Ripped Torn, along with representatives
from the Chicago Urban League, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the
n double A CP, and core Clarence Benjamin Jones, who
is one of Martin Luther King Junior's advisers, was also there.
The Kennedy's goal for this meeting was not so much
to get a sense of what Black Americans needed, or

(17:45):
what the civil rights movement's goals were or how the
government might incorporate those goals. He was more focused on
figuring out who among them might serve as sort of
a mouthpiece for the government, promoting the government's policies to
the black community to improve ray relations, and also on
outlining what the government had done already so far to
the assembled group while basically asking for their patients uh.

(18:10):
This meeting consequently did not go well. Baldwin and the
other assembled activists were trying to describe the systemic racism
that went well beyond what was encoded in law, while
Kennedy was talking about how his own family had been
oppressed for being Irish. Kennedy came off as deeply naive
and unwilling to listen. Eventually, Lorraine Hansbury walked out and

(18:32):
several others followed. Afterward, the FBI started monitoring Baldwin, placing
him on its Security Index of potentially dangerous people and
amassing a file on him that was more than seventeen
hundred pages long. This meeting, though while not immediately successful,
is often credited with starting to shift Robert Kennedy's perspectives,

(18:53):
leading him to encourage his brother, President John F. Kennedy
to address the nation on the subject of civil rights okay,
and he gave his civil rights address on June eleventh,
nineteen sixty three. In the early morning hours of June twelve,
Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in front of
his children. The culprit was Byrondella Beckwith, who was found
guilty of the crime more than thirty years later. Baldwin

(19:16):
continued his writing and worked during the nineteen sixties, but
the assassination of Medgar Evers was the first of a
series of events that sort of shifted his work and
his outlook. Others included the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing
in nineteen sixty three, as well as the assassinations of
two other men that he had known and worked with,
Malcolm X in nineteen sixty five and Martin Luther King Jr.

(19:38):
In nineteen sixty eight, and we're going to get to
more on that after we first have a sponsor break.
As we noted earlier, James Baldwin never seemed really sure
where he fit within the civil rights movement. Although he

(19:59):
participated in the nineteen sixty three March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom, he wasn't a big part of its
public presence or its planning. There's been some speculation that
this was because of his sexual orientation, but as we've
noted on earlier episodes of the show, one of the
major planners of the march was Bayard Rustin, who was
also gay. It's more likely that Baldwin's views were becoming

(20:21):
less and less aligned with Martin Luther King Jr's non
violent arm of the movement. As time went on, Baldwin
became increasingly radical. When the Black Panther Party was established
in nineteen sixty six, Baldwin supported many of its efforts,
including school breakfast and lunch programs, community health care programs,
schools and arms self defense programs meant to protect black

(20:44):
communities from violence, including violence at the hands of police.
Baldwin's written work had always been focused on both racism
and homophobia, and he had been both critically acclaimed and
a best seller through this work, But in the late
sixties and early seventies or yours increasingly criticized him for
becoming more pessimistic, accusatory, and vehement, and too directly focused

(21:07):
on civil rights, as included the three act play Blues
for Mr. Charlie, which was based on the murder of
Emmett's Hill. And it wasn't just white literary reviewers who
were criticizing his work. His advocacy for Palestinian liberation was
criticized as anti semitic, although he also criticized anti semitism
within black activism. Members of the Black Arts movement criticized

(21:30):
his work because it was intended, at least in part,
for white audiences rather than being written for other black people.
The non violent arm of the civil rights movement criticized
his more radical and confrontational views, while the Black Power
movement criticized his sexual orientation and his integrationist stances. His
sexual orientation was also criticized from outside the movement. The

(21:53):
Kennedy's nicknamed him Martin Luther Queen. He basically was criticized
from every conceivable direction. In nineteen seventy, Baldwin returned to France,
where he bought a farmhouse in the medieval village of
Saint Paul Devance. Although he's still did a lot of traveling,
this became his permanent home for the rest of his life.
Locals named it Sa Baldwin. Baldwin's writing in political Views

(22:15):
had always been anti capitalist, anti colonial, anti imperialist, anti racist,
anti homophobic, Pan African, pro Palestinian liberation, and against mass incarceration.
He also made connections between black liberation in the US
and United States foreign policy, noting that a nation that
truly supported black liberation would be supporting black freedom fighters

(22:39):
elsewhere in the world and supporting people who were fighting
for independence from colonial powers. All this work had also
been primarily focused on men. In the nineteen seventies and eighties,
that started to change, in part through televised conversations with
poets Nicki Giovanni and past podcast subject Audrey Lord. Both
Women Really Is to Baldwin on issues of gender, gender roles,

(23:02):
and sexuality, ultimately leading him to criticize the whiteness of
the mainstream feminist movement as well as it's homophobia and
anti lesbianism, but like Bayard Ruston, James Baldwin never took
a leadership role within the gay rights movement as it
became more public and widespread in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
He also expressed some ambivalence about exactly how to describe

(23:25):
himself in his own identity. In one five interview, he said,
quote those terms homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, our twentieth century terms
which for me really have very little meaning. I've never myself,
in watching myself and watching other people, been able to
discern exactly where the barriers were. I read one piece

(23:49):
as I was working on this that that noted that
this has some similarities to conversations happening today about all
of these ideas being socially constructed and what they mean. Um.
Baldwin continued to travel and teach and write and work
until late in his life, but by the late nineteen
eighties he was having serious issues with his health. He
had developed hepatitis and experienced liver damage back in the

(24:11):
nineteen seventies, followed by two heart attacks. Then in nineteen
eight seven he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I actually
also found references that it was stomach cancer or pancreatic cancer,
and I don't know which of those is correct. Regardless,
though the cancer progressed really quickly. He gave his last
interview to journalist Quincy Troop just days before his death.

(24:32):
James Baldwin died on December one, nine seven, at the
age of sixty three. Lucien Happersberger was there with him,
as well as a household attendant. His funeral was held
at the Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan,
with five thousand people in attendance. A Mary Baraca delivered
the eulogy, with tributes from others including Maya Angelou and

(24:53):
Tony Morrison, and the words of Amary Baraca's eulogy quote,
this man traveled the earth, like its history and it's biographer.
He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, saying
made us think, made us better, made us consciously human
or perhaps more acidly pre human. And also in the

(25:15):
words of Tony Morrison addressing the late Baldwin is Jemmy quote,
in your hands language was handsome again. In your hands
we saw how it was meant to be. Neither bloodless
nor bloody and yet alive. It should surprise no one
who knows anything about Tony Morrison Um. That tribute to
Baldwin from the funeral is beautiful and I highly encourage

(25:38):
reading it. During his lifetime, James Baldwin wrote twenty two books,
including six novels. He was a member of the National
Advisory Board of the Congress on Racial Equality, as well
as being a member of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters, the Author's League, the International Pen
the Dramatist Guild, the Actor's Studio, and the National Committee

(25:58):
for a Sane Nuclear Paul to See. He also hoped
that his home in France would be turned into a
writer's colony after his death, but it was eventually sold
to developers and torn down. Baldwin had been a best
seller during his career, especially during the prolific nineteen sixties,
but by the end of his life he was not
as widely read. That started to change, as we said

(26:19):
at the top of the show, with the rise of
the Black Lives Matter movement and the many connections between
the movement and Baldwin's ideas and writings decades earlier. In
the last few years, There's also been a film adaptation
of his novel If Beal Street Could Talk, which came out,
as well as the award winning documentary called I Am
Not Your Negro. As we said at the top of

(26:41):
the show, Baldwin's work is frequently part of anti racism
courses and reading lists, so we thought we would end
with just a couple of quotes quickly from that work.
One is from the end of the Fire Next Time quote,
everything now we must assume is in our hands. We
have no right to assume otherwise. If we, and now
I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks,

(27:03):
who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness
of the others, do not falter in our duty. Now
we may be able handful that we are to end
the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the
history of the world. If we do not now dare
everything the fulfillment of that prophecy recreated from the Bible
in a song by a slave is upon us. God

(27:26):
gave Noah the rainbow sign no more water, the fire
next Time. The other quote is from an interview that
he gave in nine where he said I'm optimistic about
the future, but not about the future of this civilization.
I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one,
and that is James Baldwin. UM. I talked to two

(27:47):
various friends as I was trying to figure out what
I needed to work on next UM and then every
case when I said I think James Baldwin, the answer
was like, obviously yes, UM so yeah, I hope I
have done his life and work justice today. Would you
also like to cover some listener mail? I have uh

(28:09):
some listener mail from Jackie. It goes back to our
Bureau of Home Economics podcast and Jackie says, good afternoon,
Holly and Tracy, thank you so much for the wonderful podcast.
I found the podcast early on last year and was
hooked immediately. I'm always excited when an episode coincides with
something or someplace I've experienced. I'm a school counselor for
a private school in Florida. This morning, as I listened

(28:30):
to the podcast about the Bureau of Home Economics, I
realized I can finally share something with you. At my school,
we still offer family consumer Sciences one and two. I've
been in a few a few school districts in Florida,
and this is the first school I've been at with
this particular program. Family Consumer Science one is for incoming
freshmen and throughout the year learn about child development, sewing, cooking, nutrition,

(28:53):
and meal planning. Sewing normally coincides with fall, and the
students learned to sew pat jama bottoms. It is amusing
before and after school to see the girls wear they're
brightly colored pajama bottoms under their school uniforms to keep warm.
I guess next year they will include face mask patterns.
Family Consumer Science too, is for juniors and seniors and
takes an approach to prepare them for going away to college.

(29:15):
One semester is focused on health, nutrition, and of course food.
The other semester focuses on management of personal finances. These
classes are two of the most popular electives that we
offer and typically have a waitlist. Boys and girls love
this course and the faculty enjoys getting to sample the
goodies made. Also thank you for your work on the
Rosewood incident in the Six Impossible episodes. As a school counselor,

(29:38):
every spring, I walk students through the application of the
Florida Bright Future Scholarship, a scholarship award for students who
decide to tend to higher education institution in the state.
One of the questions on the application is are you
a descendant of a family member that was affected by
the Rosewood incident in Florida during the nineteen twenties. So
many times students ask what it is, and counselors, including myself,

(30:00):
glass over it. Up until your episode, I knew it
was something terrible, but didn't know that details. Now when
asked about it, I tell students and they get a
look of disbelief at something like that happened in their state.
With some it Foster's great conversations about how little Florida
history they knew. Jackie goes on to talk about being
really delighted to learn that Frankie Manning was born in Jacksonville. Uh,

(30:21):
and then says, thank you for your research. I listened
to the podcast on my way to and from work
or wherever else I'm traveling. You have made the ride
more pleasurable and less lonely. Thank you so much, Jackie. Uh. Wow,
I kind of wish I had had a class specifically
about like the finances part. Uh. What I actually had

(30:43):
when I went off to college was this book. There
were two of them. One was called Where's Mom went?
Now that I need her? And the other was called
Where's Dad uh now that I need him, which you
know is unnecessarily gendered in a way. But the like
the mom one talked about basic food stuff and basic
first aid and how to tell if you need to
get to the doctor now um, and the dad one
was like basic called maintenance and fixing stuff and that

(31:04):
kind of thing. Uh So a class probably would have
been helpful anyway, Thank you, Jackie. Uh if you would
like to write to us about the surrending other podcast
or history podcast at I heart radio dot com that
we're all over social media at missed in History. That's
where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, of Pinterest and Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,

(31:25):
then I heart radio app and anywhere else you get
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