April 29, 2021 • 31 mins
For our final episode of season 3, we take a look at how reckoning with our history, collectively, and personally, can help us move forward. Closing the racial wealth gap might not be possible anytime soon. But if the U.S. wants to seriously tackle these injustices, it might need to start with the truth. A few years ago, Bloomberg colleague, Claire Suddath explored her own family’s connection to slavery and a plantation in Mississippi. Jackie sits down with Claire to explore what it was like to reckon with that past.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
If the US were to seriously tackle the racial wealth
gap and all the injustices past and present that have
led to today's economic inequalities, it might not actually start
with preparations, but with something much simpler, a full reckoning
of our history the truth. Truth commissions can be the
(00:33):
starting point for much broader national reform and a national
effort to deal with the enduring legacies of past violence
and current violence. Kerry Wiggham is a professor at Binghamton
University's Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. He also
runs a similar center at the Auschwitz Institute. He points
(00:56):
out that truth commissions are a relatively new phenomenon, a
lot newer than ideas about reparations or restitution. They're the
first step and what scholars call transitional justice away for
countries to deal with their own large scale human rights abuses.
It's built on four different pillars. Truth is the first
(01:17):
of those pillars, and it's often positioned as first because
it becomes a sort of prerequisite for dealing with some
of those other pillars, like justice and reparations and guaranteeing
non recurrence. The first one happened in Argentina in four
to investigate the quote disappearances of thousands of people, including
(01:39):
children and infants, during the country's military dictatorship. It started
where most truth commissions start. An independent body investigates what happened.
It identifies the victims and all the forms of violence
that occurred against them, and then it asked those harm
to tell their stories. This is important because changes the
(02:00):
historic record and often reveals atrocities perpetrators have tried to
keep hidden. In the end, Argentina's Truth Commission led to
a series of reforms. Truth commissions have since been used
across Africa and Latin America, and in Eastern Europe and
Southeast Asia. Some US lawmakers think America is long overdue.
(02:23):
In February, Representative Barbara Lee and Senator Corey Booker reintroduced
a bill that would set up a truth commission in
the US. The resolution, if passed, would urge the establishment
of United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation.
Here's Congresswomanly talking about the bill last summer during a
(02:43):
virtual event. We call ours truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation,
not reconciliation, because there's really nothing to reconcile. There's no
no value in four hundred and one years of ago
of a two d fifty plus years of slavery, and
so we call it trail formation. I asked Carry about
what a truth commission in the US could accomplish. There
(03:05):
is still the reality that many white Americans have a
difficult time understanding how slavery was directly connected to, for instance,
mass incarceration and police brutality today. Or it could help
explain how slavery is connected to today's racial wealth gap.
(03:28):
But it's not an easy process and it won't magically
fix all inequality, especially if it doesn't go deep enough.
And that's not the only challenge. In the US. Even
the idea of something like a truth commission faces a
lot of resistance from people who don't want to dwell
on the past. They say that it's so far in
(03:48):
the past that having a truth commission will only highlight
and and sustain the divisions that are already present, that
really what we need to do is turn the page
and look towards the future. The reality Carry says is
that the people who are saying those things, who are
(04:08):
eager to move on, they tend to be the people
who have benefited throughout history and for them the status
quo is working. The data shows that the median white
(04:28):
family has ten times more wealth than the average black family.
One of the drivers of that wealth gap is redlining.
When it comes to understanding financial inequality in this country,
economists often point to the absence of African American generational
wealth see the Black mag Ota Plai the White mag Who.
(04:49):
Many of the Bedrock policies, in fact, that ushered generations
of Americans into the middle class were designed to exclude
African Americans. It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter
than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance,
to get rid of positive It's really intended as much
to terrorize people in a physical sense as it is
(05:10):
to kind of deprive them of the opportunity to gain
equality through economic standing. It's a trend propelled not just
by economic forces, but by white racism and local white
political and economic power. Welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm
(05:33):
Jackie Simmons and I am Rebecca Greenfield. This is our
last episode this season. Our goal going into this was
to understand a bit more about the racial wealth gap.
It's been fifty years since the end of segregation in
Jim Crow. Why has an economic inequality between black and
white Americans budge at all? It brought us back to
(05:54):
slavery and everything that grew out of that system. And
the truth is that as a country, the United States
has never really reckoned with slavery or any of the
racist violence and oppression that followed. We have created a
narrative of denial. We've created a narrative that says we're
not going to talk about the mistakes we make. I
(06:14):
think it's because we've become such a punitive society. We
think if we own up to our mistakes, something bad
is going to happen to us. We're gonna get punished.
And I'm not doing these projects because I want to
punish America. I want us to be liberated from the
change that this history has created. That's Bryan Stevenson. He's
a lawyer and the executive director of the Equal Justice
Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. In three years ago, this month,
(06:38):
he opened the first memorial to the thousands of black
Americans killed in racial terror lynchings from the end of
the Civil War up to nineteen fifty. The museum and
the memorial in Montgomery and the National Museum of African
American History and Culture, which opened in ten in Washington,
d c our steps toward correcting the historical record in
the US, but also universities, media companies, and investment banks
(07:04):
are increasingly owning up to the ways they participated in
or benefited from the slave trade. Earlier this spring, the
Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city of Charlottesville can
go ahead and remove statues of Confederate soldiers, an effort
that's happening around the country. But there are plenty of
people who choose to ignore this part of America's history
(07:24):
and how it connects to the present. On the other hand,
there's also people like my Bloomberg colleague, Claire Stuff. It's
the easiest thing to do is not to say something.
And I think a lot of what this country is
going through and has been going through over and over
and over again, often stems from the fact that white
(07:47):
people are ignorant of their own actions and ignorant of
their families past actions. Claire's white. She grew up in Chicago,
but her parents were from the South, and they took
her to visit relatives on a big plantation in Mississippi.
Called Codsworth. If you've seen the movie The Help, well
that's Codsworth. It was originally owned by a man named
(08:11):
James Z. George, who was a U. S. Senator, colonel
and the Confederate Army during the Civil War and also
my great great great grandfather. Also he owned many slaves.
Claire wanted to learn more about James E. George. Not
only did he own slaves, he fought hard to preserve
(08:34):
white supremacy even after the Civil War ended. She learned
that he was a pioneer and crafting some of the
very first Jim Crow era legislation that kept black people
from voting. He also created the Understanding Clause, which required
people to be able to read or understand the Constitution,
that effectively removed tens of thousands of black people from
(08:56):
voter rolls. Claire wrote about her journey in an essay
for an online magazine called The delic Court Review. I
wanted to talk to her about why she felt it
was important to tell her family story and what it
was like to reckon with their past. Hi, Claire, Hey, Jackie,
Obviously I know you and we've been colleagues for for
(09:18):
years now, but you know, until I read your story
about your family's history and about Codsworth. I didn't really
know that much about you or about your family in
their history. Why did you decide to write about Coatsworth
and what you called the two sides of Coatsworth in
your peace? I think you have to understand just how
(09:42):
unusual and rarit is for a family too still in
present day own, and not just own, but live in
a plantation that the same family has lived in since
before the Civil War. So there's that. But then also,
my grandmother died before I was born, and my middle
(10:05):
name is her name. Her name was Vernon, which is
also very unusual if you're a woman, and Colts was
the only connection, aside from my name, that I had
to her. But then as I started actually researching the
past of who was James E. George? Who owned it?
And what did he do? And what does it really
(10:25):
mean to own slaves? That was when I realized that
whatever feelings I have towards my grandmother and any living
relatives is separate from how I feel about what my
great great grandfather did d fifty sixty years ago. I'd
(10:47):
like to know what are your first memories of Codsworth?
So I knew that This was a house that my
family had had for a really long time, and I
remember thinking it was really cool. It was like this
relic from the past. All the furniture was over a
hundred years old, all the floorboards creaked. I could run
(11:10):
around the grass, which wasn't the meticulously kept suburban lawns
that I was used to. And I was really into
horses when I was a kid, so I brought all
my plastic horses and played with them in the front
yard of Codsworth. The other memory that I have was
that there was this small sort of rectangular shack behind
(11:32):
the house and off to the side that I think
is the last remaining structure that had been slaves quarters.
And I wasn't allowed to go inside because it was
structurally unsound and it was full of wasps nests. So
I never went inside, and I could never really even
(11:53):
peek inside because I couldn't get close enough to it.
But I remember knowing that it was there. So you
went back to Cotsworth with your dad in what was
your biggest takeaway from that trip? It's interesting to visit
something that you saw as a child and then revisited
again as an adult, because things that seemed huge and
(12:17):
almost unknowable, are as an adult probably much smaller and
more easier to comprehend than when you're a kid, And
so visiting it when I was young, I didn't really
understand the context of coats Worth, and my dad and
(12:40):
I went down there because I had started to become
interested in writing about it and researching it, so I
asked him if he would go with me. And that's
when I realized that at what I had sort of
(13:02):
romanticized as a child, or even or just focused on,
you know, how big the house was, how expansive the
land was, the fact that she had cows, it was
really cool when I was six, was actually, in reality
quite sad. It was a relic of the past in
(13:23):
more ways than one. But then also looking at the
the former slaves quarters, I realized how poignant it was
that they were still there. I have to ask about
the slave quarters. Did your family tell you about the
(13:44):
slave quarters? Did they How much did they talk to
you about that part of the plantation? I probably asked
what it was when I was six. I don't remember,
but I remember. I do know that when I returned
as an adult, I new to look for it, so
I must have known that it was there. How did
(14:05):
you have a conversation about the use of that space?
I mean, what did you give you an opportunity to
talk with your family or your dad about what had
happened there. The one thing that I have never fully
understood about my family and Codsworth is the house and
(14:28):
land is still meaningful to my family, even people who
don't live there, but they don't like to talk about
what it means to have owned a plantation in Mississippi
before the Civil War. So while my dad and relatives
(14:50):
never shied away from admitting that, yes, obviously my great
great great grandfather owned slaves, they didn't know much beyond
that because their parents never told them, and their parents
never told them, and so they just left it at that, like,
obviously that happened. But then the Civil War came along
and then we didn't have slaves anymore the end, And
(15:11):
I thought, well, I think there's probably much more to that.
And when you fully appreciated James E. George's significance with
regard to Mississippi politics and shaping the outcome of black
(15:32):
lives at that point in our history, what kind of
introspection did that provoke? In you about race in America
and especially as it relates to black lives today. I'm
less upset by my direct connection to this then I
(15:52):
am by the fact that I didn't know about it.
You know, when I was an elementary school in high school,
every year in history class we would learn about the
Civil War. Every year. I memorize the Gettysburg address in
fifth grade, and I still haven't memorized. I think I've
been to the battlefields. I've been to Gettysburg, I've been
to Vicksburg. But I I don't think there's very much
(16:15):
discussion among white people about white people's role in that.
And I don't really understand why, Because if you claim
to want to make things better, and if you claim
to disagree with all the stuff that has happened in
the past, you know why, why can't you talk about it?
(16:35):
You have a passage about this in your essay. Could
you read it? America has lurched and fits and starts
towards equality, But with every inch gained comes one side's
declaration that things are fine. Now, that's enough, but it's
not enough. The effects of what men like Jay Z
George did ripple through this country. Even now we encounter
(16:57):
this truth again and again, but somehow we still managed
to avoid facing it head on. I can't stop loving
my family, and by extension, I'll always be fond of
Coad's worth. But it's possible to care for something and
know that what it stands for is deeply wrong. It's
been a few years since you wrote that, does it
(17:19):
still resonate? You know? I don't love my grandmother because
she died before I was born, but my dad loved
her loves her still probably, and she in turn loved
her parents, who loved their parents. So by extension, you
could say that there has been love lasting through the generations.
And so someone that I'm connected to today is connected
(17:41):
to someone is connected to someone who did love someone
who owned slaves, And I think that is something that
I've actually never really articulated before, and also something that
I think is necessary for us to understand. There seems
(18:03):
to be this feeling that in admitting your past wrongs
here somehow admitting that everything about you in the past,
or everything about your family in the past is bad
and terrible. You did this amazing thing, Claire, where you
(18:26):
sought out descendants of people who were enslaved at Codsworth,
one of them agreed to meet you. What was that like?
In hindsight, Great Carlos is a lovely human being. He's
really nice, funny, warm, But in the act of meeting him,
and beforehand, I was definitely nervous. I had never met
(18:49):
anyone under the pretext of the fact that my great
great great grandfather had enslaved his great grandfather. How do
you start a conversation when that is the one fact
binding you. Luckily, like I said, Carlos is nice and funny,
and so he brought his wife Tie along and sort
(19:12):
of diffused the initial awkwardness with warmth and humor, and
we took it from there. One of you had suggested
taking DNA tests after learning that you might be related
through James E. George. What happened was I, when I
was researching about jez George, I heard this rumor, and
(19:38):
I first heard it from the historian, the professor who
had written the one biography about him, and he told
me that none of the white people he had ever
interviewed had mentioned this, but he had heard it from
a number of black people, and he had heard that
Jay Z George had fathered children with women that he
had enslaved and when I first heard that, I thought, okay,
(20:01):
what do I do with that information? I can't ignore it,
and I'm a journalist, so I'll just follow up on
that rumor as I would if this were not my family,
if it were someone else's family, How would I follow
up on it? And the historians suggested that I reach
(20:22):
out to this group that is called, I think the
African American Genealogy Group of Carroll County, and they're on Facebook.
So I messaged several people who were people with the
last name George, so ostensibly former slaves of James C.
George from quotes Worth, and I asked them if they
(20:45):
had heard that rumor, and a number of them said
that they had. And when I talked to Carlos, he
said that while his immediate family had never talked about
that necessarily, he had heard that rumor over time, and
he said, you know, it would be great to be
able to take a d DNA test and you know,
(21:06):
put this room to rest one way or the other.
And so I thought, all right, you know, all I
can do is say yes. So we ordered DNA tests
through twenty three and me and we took them and
it turns out that we are not related. What did
it feel like when you first learned that you weren't related?
(21:28):
What was your first reaction. A lot of people have
asked me that, and a lot of people have asked,
weren't you relieved that this terrible thing hadn't happened? And
in the sense that I am glad that I know
that my great great grandfather didn't grape Joe George's mother, Yes,
(21:50):
obviously I'm glad that that did not happen, but I'm
well aware that I didn't answer the question fully. And
also while we were waiting for the results was when
I was doing more research and I learned about this
understanding clause and his role in enshrining white supremacy in Mississippi.
(22:12):
And so yeah, I guess that one answer is the
easier answer, but I mean, it's hard to feel good
about that knowing everything else. I will say that I
took the DNA test without telling the rest of my family.
I did that because if I told them before I
(22:34):
took it, I wouldn't know what the answer was and
I wouldn't know what to tell them. So I was
going to wait until I had the results, so that
I would only have to tell them once. So I
told them, and because the result was that we weren't related,
I think they were like, okay, that answers that. Yesterday
(22:57):
and we were talking, you said that your family react
to it in a way most people would react. Tell
me more about that. Well, I assume they read it,
but they've never said anything to me about it, which
I take to mean they didn't hate it, but they
(23:19):
may not have totally loved it. And I've also never
asked them. It's a two way street, but it's out there,
and I told it because I felt a responsibility too.
And what do you say to white people who say, well,
I never I don't have a direct connection to slavery.
(23:41):
You know, my parents came here only in you know,
year X and had nothing to do with it. And
I've traced my past, so therefore I don't feel accountable.
What do you what do you say to that? I
think that's the easy answer. But I think if you
only look at your family and that ends, if you're
missing a lot. Right, I've lived my whole life in America.
(24:04):
I would say that I have an above average understanding
of American history, but only when I decided to sit
down as a side project and really research reconstruction in
my family's history. Did I really learn about this? Has
anyone else in your family reckoned with this history at all?
(24:27):
So you know, my dad is retired now and he
lives in Florida, and one of the projects that he
came up with to keep himself occupied during the pandemic
was he is working on this book about his family.
It's not going to be publicly published. It's like this
book that he's putting together with pictures and anecdotes about
(24:47):
this far, stretching as far back in history as he
can and going sort of as wide as he can.
He's including my mom's side of the family and my
step mom, my husband's side of the family. And he'll
publish it on snapfish or something like that and print
five copies or something and give it to people for presents.
Hopefully I'm not ruining future Christmas gifts for people, So
(25:09):
just acts surprised when you open it. So he's been
doing this, and he told me the other day we
were talking um that he had just finished the page
on James C. George and he said he had put
in the information that I had found about this understanding
clause and what he had done, but he wasn't really
(25:31):
sure how he felt about it. And it's in there
for now, but maybe if he needs to revise the
book later, he would leave it out. And I said,
I think he should keep it in. And I don't
know what hell decide. I guess I'll find out when
I opened my future Christmas present in a year or
something like that. But he has thought about it at least,
(25:55):
and I think it's a good sign that it's in
the first draft. So you gave birth to your first
child last year, Yeah, in a pandemic, little little Kate. Right,
So how did all of this research into your family
and to Codsworth make you think about the kind of
conversations you're going to have with little Kate down the
(26:19):
road that maybe your own family didn't have with you
about these topics. I may not ever take her to Codsworth,
or maybe I will, but it probably would be one time,
one trip two we're all Mississippi to see where she's from.
(26:39):
Maybe she'll be twelve or thirteen. Kate will grow up
as a generation even further removed from this past than me,
And in some ways that's how it should be. I
think the only way we can move forward is to
actually move forward. But I will tell her about her family,
(27:02):
and when I tell her about who would now be
her great grandmother's side of the family or her great
great great great grandfather, I will tell her all of
this and she'll grow up learning about it, and she
won't have to spend, you know, six months, nine months
(27:23):
of her life researching it to find out. Claire was
able to learn a lot about her family's history going
back centuries. That's something most people can't or won't do.
When I think back to my family's story of land
lost in Ease, Texas, where it all began, there's a
(27:46):
lot my research didn't yield. So, for instance, I never
figured out about my great great grandparents migration from Tennessee
to Texas. I also didn't know how they lived as
slaves and then as free people. I did, however, manage
to track down the original deed to my family's land
with the help from Jason, a listener in Ohio. So, Jackie,
(28:11):
I'm wondering, having gone through this process in a more
personal way, what gives you hope Spending months diving into
the causes and consequences of the racial wealth gap. It
could feel dark. It's just such a big problem with
no simple solutions. No, there's not. But let's be honest.
We might not get to closing the racial wealth gap
(28:33):
anytime soon. And if I'm totally honest, I'm not even
hopeful we'll get there in my lifetime. There is one
underlying thread that ran through my research, and that's resilience.
I don't think we talk about that enough. It's resilience
that keeps black people proud and thriving in our own ways.
(28:56):
Take my cousin Yolanda and Dallas. She walked away from
our family's land in Kilmur. She's now trying to develop
another hundred acres of land in a town nearby, land
that her family initially acquired after slavery. My cousin had
to tell me, he said, your grandfather would turn over
in his grave to know that you all have done
(29:18):
nothing on this property. You need to be ashamed of yourself.
And so this got me to thinking that I owe
it to my grandmother and grandfather two cultivate this land
and to make it where what he would have wanted
it to be. Tna her grandparents. Jolana wants to build
(29:38):
a pavilion on the land. That's really some balked to me,
because most black families never managed to pass on wealth
from generation to generation as white families have. But the
way I see it, Yolana's vision shows that black families
do pass on hope and they pass on the ambitions
of their ancestors. And that's one of the biggest take
(30:00):
aways from season three of The Paycheck. We went as
far back as forty acres in a mule, right through
to the late eight nineties, when a black woman called
Kelly House proposed reparations and was eventually jailed for it.
We talked about local initiatives to address past wrongs in
places like Evanston, Illinois. Now the US is weighing a
(30:20):
bill in Congress to study reparations, and it's the resilience
of people behind those efforts. People like Kellie or my
cousin Yolanda, or my colleague Claire. They're willing to speak
up and talk honestly about our past, present in future.
It's people like them who give me hope that will
(30:41):
get there eventually. This is the last episode of our season.
Thank you so much for listening to The Paycheck. If
you liked this show. Please rate, review, and subscribe. This
episode was hosted Aimy, Rebecca Greenfield, and Me Jackie Simmons.
(31:04):
This episode was reported by Claire Sadeth and Rebecca Greenfield.
This episode was produced by Magnus Hendrickson and Lindsay Cradowell,
and it was edited by Rocksheeta Saluja, Jackie Simmons, Janet Paskin,
Francesca Levi, and Me. Special thanks to Katie Boys, Laura
Carlson Chaufer for has Laura's Alenko, and all the Bloomberg
(31:24):
reporters and editors who made this season possible. Original music
is by Leo Sidron. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Thank you for listening.
If the US were to seriously tackle the racial wealth
gap and all the injustices past and present that have
led to today's economic inequalities, it might not actually start
with preparations, but with something much simpler, a full reckoning
of our history the truth. Truth commissions can be the
(00:33):
starting point for much broader national reform and a national
effort to deal with the enduring legacies of past violence
and current violence. Kerry Wiggham is a professor at Binghamton
University's Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. He also
runs a similar center at the Auschwitz Institute. He points
(00:56):
out that truth commissions are a relatively new phenomenon, a
lot newer than ideas about reparations or restitution. They're the
first step and what scholars call transitional justice away for
countries to deal with their own large scale human rights abuses.
It's built on four different pillars. Truth is the first
(01:17):
of those pillars, and it's often positioned as first because
it becomes a sort of prerequisite for dealing with some
of those other pillars, like justice and reparations and guaranteeing
non recurrence. The first one happened in Argentina in four
to investigate the quote disappearances of thousands of people, including
(01:39):
children and infants, during the country's military dictatorship. It started
where most truth commissions start. An independent body investigates what happened.
It identifies the victims and all the forms of violence
that occurred against them, and then it asked those harm
to tell their stories. This is important because changes the
(02:00):
historic record and often reveals atrocities perpetrators have tried to
keep hidden. In the end, Argentina's Truth Commission led to
a series of reforms. Truth commissions have since been used
across Africa and Latin America, and in Eastern Europe and
Southeast Asia. Some US lawmakers think America is long overdue.
(02:23):
In February, Representative Barbara Lee and Senator Corey Booker reintroduced
a bill that would set up a truth commission in
the US. The resolution, if passed, would urge the establishment
of United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation.
Here's Congresswomanly talking about the bill last summer during a
(02:43):
virtual event. We call ours truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation,
not reconciliation, because there's really nothing to reconcile. There's no
no value in four hundred and one years of ago
of a two d fifty plus years of slavery, and
so we call it trail formation. I asked Carry about
what a truth commission in the US could accomplish. There
(03:05):
is still the reality that many white Americans have a
difficult time understanding how slavery was directly connected to, for instance,
mass incarceration and police brutality today. Or it could help
explain how slavery is connected to today's racial wealth gap.
(03:28):
But it's not an easy process and it won't magically
fix all inequality, especially if it doesn't go deep enough.
And that's not the only challenge. In the US. Even
the idea of something like a truth commission faces a
lot of resistance from people who don't want to dwell
on the past. They say that it's so far in
(03:48):
the past that having a truth commission will only highlight
and and sustain the divisions that are already present, that
really what we need to do is turn the page
and look towards the future. The reality Carry says is
that the people who are saying those things, who are
(04:08):
eager to move on, they tend to be the people
who have benefited throughout history and for them the status
quo is working. The data shows that the median white
(04:28):
family has ten times more wealth than the average black family.
One of the drivers of that wealth gap is redlining.
When it comes to understanding financial inequality in this country,
economists often point to the absence of African American generational
wealth see the Black mag Ota Plai the White mag Who.
(04:49):
Many of the Bedrock policies, in fact, that ushered generations
of Americans into the middle class were designed to exclude
African Americans. It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter
than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance,
to get rid of positive It's really intended as much
to terrorize people in a physical sense as it is
(05:10):
to kind of deprive them of the opportunity to gain
equality through economic standing. It's a trend propelled not just
by economic forces, but by white racism and local white
political and economic power. Welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm
(05:33):
Jackie Simmons and I am Rebecca Greenfield. This is our
last episode this season. Our goal going into this was
to understand a bit more about the racial wealth gap.
It's been fifty years since the end of segregation in
Jim Crow. Why has an economic inequality between black and
white Americans budge at all? It brought us back to
(05:54):
slavery and everything that grew out of that system. And
the truth is that as a country, the United States
has never really reckoned with slavery or any of the
racist violence and oppression that followed. We have created a
narrative of denial. We've created a narrative that says we're
not going to talk about the mistakes we make. I
(06:14):
think it's because we've become such a punitive society. We
think if we own up to our mistakes, something bad
is going to happen to us. We're gonna get punished.
And I'm not doing these projects because I want to
punish America. I want us to be liberated from the
change that this history has created. That's Bryan Stevenson. He's
a lawyer and the executive director of the Equal Justice
Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. In three years ago, this month,
(06:38):
he opened the first memorial to the thousands of black
Americans killed in racial terror lynchings from the end of
the Civil War up to nineteen fifty. The museum and
the memorial in Montgomery and the National Museum of African
American History and Culture, which opened in ten in Washington,
d c our steps toward correcting the historical record in
the US, but also universities, media companies, and investment banks
(07:04):
are increasingly owning up to the ways they participated in
or benefited from the slave trade. Earlier this spring, the
Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city of Charlottesville can
go ahead and remove statues of Confederate soldiers, an effort
that's happening around the country. But there are plenty of
people who choose to ignore this part of America's history
(07:24):
and how it connects to the present. On the other hand,
there's also people like my Bloomberg colleague, Claire Stuff. It's
the easiest thing to do is not to say something.
And I think a lot of what this country is
going through and has been going through over and over
and over again, often stems from the fact that white
(07:47):
people are ignorant of their own actions and ignorant of
their families past actions. Claire's white. She grew up in Chicago,
but her parents were from the South, and they took
her to visit relatives on a big plantation in Mississippi.
Called Codsworth. If you've seen the movie The Help, well
that's Codsworth. It was originally owned by a man named
(08:11):
James Z. George, who was a U. S. Senator, colonel
and the Confederate Army during the Civil War and also
my great great great grandfather. Also he owned many slaves.
Claire wanted to learn more about James E. George. Not
only did he own slaves, he fought hard to preserve
(08:34):
white supremacy even after the Civil War ended. She learned
that he was a pioneer and crafting some of the
very first Jim Crow era legislation that kept black people
from voting. He also created the Understanding Clause, which required
people to be able to read or understand the Constitution,
that effectively removed tens of thousands of black people from
(08:56):
voter rolls. Claire wrote about her journey in an essay
for an online magazine called The delic Court Review. I
wanted to talk to her about why she felt it
was important to tell her family story and what it
was like to reckon with their past. Hi, Claire, Hey, Jackie,
Obviously I know you and we've been colleagues for for
(09:18):
years now, but you know, until I read your story
about your family's history and about Codsworth. I didn't really
know that much about you or about your family in
their history. Why did you decide to write about Coatsworth
and what you called the two sides of Coatsworth in
your peace? I think you have to understand just how
(09:42):
unusual and rarit is for a family too still in
present day own, and not just own, but live in
a plantation that the same family has lived in since
before the Civil War. So there's that. But then also,
my grandmother died before I was born, and my middle
(10:05):
name is her name. Her name was Vernon, which is
also very unusual if you're a woman, and Colts was
the only connection, aside from my name, that I had
to her. But then as I started actually researching the
past of who was James E. George? Who owned it?
And what did he do? And what does it really
(10:25):
mean to own slaves? That was when I realized that
whatever feelings I have towards my grandmother and any living
relatives is separate from how I feel about what my
great great grandfather did d fifty sixty years ago. I'd
(10:47):
like to know what are your first memories of Codsworth?
So I knew that This was a house that my
family had had for a really long time, and I
remember thinking it was really cool. It was like this
relic from the past. All the furniture was over a
hundred years old, all the floorboards creaked. I could run
(11:10):
around the grass, which wasn't the meticulously kept suburban lawns
that I was used to. And I was really into
horses when I was a kid, so I brought all
my plastic horses and played with them in the front
yard of Codsworth. The other memory that I have was
that there was this small sort of rectangular shack behind
(11:32):
the house and off to the side that I think
is the last remaining structure that had been slaves quarters.
And I wasn't allowed to go inside because it was
structurally unsound and it was full of wasps nests. So
I never went inside, and I could never really even
(11:53):
peek inside because I couldn't get close enough to it.
But I remember knowing that it was there. So you
went back to Cotsworth with your dad in what was
your biggest takeaway from that trip? It's interesting to visit
something that you saw as a child and then revisited
again as an adult, because things that seemed huge and
(12:17):
almost unknowable, are as an adult probably much smaller and
more easier to comprehend than when you're a kid, And
so visiting it when I was young, I didn't really
understand the context of coats Worth, and my dad and
(12:40):
I went down there because I had started to become
interested in writing about it and researching it, so I
asked him if he would go with me. And that's
when I realized that at what I had sort of
(13:02):
romanticized as a child, or even or just focused on,
you know, how big the house was, how expansive the
land was, the fact that she had cows, it was
really cool when I was six, was actually, in reality
quite sad. It was a relic of the past in
(13:23):
more ways than one. But then also looking at the
the former slaves quarters, I realized how poignant it was
that they were still there. I have to ask about
the slave quarters. Did your family tell you about the
(13:44):
slave quarters? Did they How much did they talk to
you about that part of the plantation? I probably asked
what it was when I was six. I don't remember,
but I remember. I do know that when I returned
as an adult, I new to look for it, so
I must have known that it was there. How did
(14:05):
you have a conversation about the use of that space?
I mean, what did you give you an opportunity to
talk with your family or your dad about what had
happened there. The one thing that I have never fully
understood about my family and Codsworth is the house and
(14:28):
land is still meaningful to my family, even people who
don't live there, but they don't like to talk about
what it means to have owned a plantation in Mississippi
before the Civil War. So while my dad and relatives
(14:50):
never shied away from admitting that, yes, obviously my great
great great grandfather owned slaves, they didn't know much beyond
that because their parents never told them, and their parents
never told them, and so they just left it at that, like,
obviously that happened. But then the Civil War came along
and then we didn't have slaves anymore the end, And
(15:11):
I thought, well, I think there's probably much more to that.
And when you fully appreciated James E. George's significance with
regard to Mississippi politics and shaping the outcome of black
(15:32):
lives at that point in our history, what kind of
introspection did that provoke? In you about race in America
and especially as it relates to black lives today. I'm
less upset by my direct connection to this then I
(15:52):
am by the fact that I didn't know about it.
You know, when I was an elementary school in high school,
every year in history class we would learn about the
Civil War. Every year. I memorize the Gettysburg address in
fifth grade, and I still haven't memorized. I think I've
been to the battlefields. I've been to Gettysburg, I've been
to Vicksburg. But I I don't think there's very much
(16:15):
discussion among white people about white people's role in that.
And I don't really understand why, Because if you claim
to want to make things better, and if you claim
to disagree with all the stuff that has happened in
the past, you know why, why can't you talk about it?
(16:35):
You have a passage about this in your essay. Could
you read it? America has lurched and fits and starts
towards equality, But with every inch gained comes one side's
declaration that things are fine. Now, that's enough, but it's
not enough. The effects of what men like Jay Z
George did ripple through this country. Even now we encounter
(16:57):
this truth again and again, but somehow we still managed
to avoid facing it head on. I can't stop loving
my family, and by extension, I'll always be fond of
Coad's worth. But it's possible to care for something and
know that what it stands for is deeply wrong. It's
been a few years since you wrote that, does it
(17:19):
still resonate? You know? I don't love my grandmother because
she died before I was born, but my dad loved
her loves her still probably, and she in turn loved
her parents, who loved their parents. So by extension, you
could say that there has been love lasting through the generations.
And so someone that I'm connected to today is connected
(17:41):
to someone is connected to someone who did love someone
who owned slaves, And I think that is something that
I've actually never really articulated before, and also something that
I think is necessary for us to understand. There seems
(18:03):
to be this feeling that in admitting your past wrongs
here somehow admitting that everything about you in the past,
or everything about your family in the past is bad
and terrible. You did this amazing thing, Claire, where you
(18:26):
sought out descendants of people who were enslaved at Codsworth,
one of them agreed to meet you. What was that like?
In hindsight, Great Carlos is a lovely human being. He's
really nice, funny, warm, But in the act of meeting him,
and beforehand, I was definitely nervous. I had never met
(18:49):
anyone under the pretext of the fact that my great
great great grandfather had enslaved his great grandfather. How do
you start a conversation when that is the one fact
binding you. Luckily, like I said, Carlos is nice and funny,
and so he brought his wife Tie along and sort
(19:12):
of diffused the initial awkwardness with warmth and humor, and
we took it from there. One of you had suggested
taking DNA tests after learning that you might be related
through James E. George. What happened was I, when I
was researching about jez George, I heard this rumor, and
(19:38):
I first heard it from the historian, the professor who
had written the one biography about him, and he told
me that none of the white people he had ever
interviewed had mentioned this, but he had heard it from
a number of black people, and he had heard that
Jay Z George had fathered children with women that he
had enslaved and when I first heard that, I thought, okay,
(20:01):
what do I do with that information? I can't ignore it,
and I'm a journalist, so I'll just follow up on
that rumor as I would if this were not my family,
if it were someone else's family, How would I follow
up on it? And the historians suggested that I reach
(20:22):
out to this group that is called, I think the
African American Genealogy Group of Carroll County, and they're on Facebook.
So I messaged several people who were people with the
last name George, so ostensibly former slaves of James C.
George from quotes Worth, and I asked them if they
(20:45):
had heard that rumor, and a number of them said
that they had. And when I talked to Carlos, he
said that while his immediate family had never talked about
that necessarily, he had heard that rumor over time, and
he said, you know, it would be great to be
able to take a d DNA test and you know,
(21:06):
put this room to rest one way or the other.
And so I thought, all right, you know, all I
can do is say yes. So we ordered DNA tests
through twenty three and me and we took them and
it turns out that we are not related. What did
it feel like when you first learned that you weren't related?
(21:28):
What was your first reaction. A lot of people have
asked me that, and a lot of people have asked,
weren't you relieved that this terrible thing hadn't happened? And
in the sense that I am glad that I know
that my great great grandfather didn't grape Joe George's mother, Yes,
(21:50):
obviously I'm glad that that did not happen, but I'm
well aware that I didn't answer the question fully. And
also while we were waiting for the results was when
I was doing more research and I learned about this
understanding clause and his role in enshrining white supremacy in Mississippi.
(22:12):
And so yeah, I guess that one answer is the
easier answer, but I mean, it's hard to feel good
about that knowing everything else. I will say that I
took the DNA test without telling the rest of my family.
I did that because if I told them before I
(22:34):
took it, I wouldn't know what the answer was and
I wouldn't know what to tell them. So I was
going to wait until I had the results, so that
I would only have to tell them once. So I
told them, and because the result was that we weren't related,
I think they were like, okay, that answers that. Yesterday
(22:57):
and we were talking, you said that your family react
to it in a way most people would react. Tell
me more about that. Well, I assume they read it,
but they've never said anything to me about it, which
I take to mean they didn't hate it, but they
(23:19):
may not have totally loved it. And I've also never
asked them. It's a two way street, but it's out there,
and I told it because I felt a responsibility too.
And what do you say to white people who say, well,
I never I don't have a direct connection to slavery.
(23:41):
You know, my parents came here only in you know,
year X and had nothing to do with it. And
I've traced my past, so therefore I don't feel accountable.
What do you what do you say to that? I
think that's the easy answer. But I think if you
only look at your family and that ends, if you're
missing a lot. Right, I've lived my whole life in America.
(24:04):
I would say that I have an above average understanding
of American history, but only when I decided to sit
down as a side project and really research reconstruction in
my family's history. Did I really learn about this? Has
anyone else in your family reckoned with this history at all?
(24:27):
So you know, my dad is retired now and he
lives in Florida, and one of the projects that he
came up with to keep himself occupied during the pandemic
was he is working on this book about his family.
It's not going to be publicly published. It's like this
book that he's putting together with pictures and anecdotes about
(24:47):
this far, stretching as far back in history as he
can and going sort of as wide as he can.
He's including my mom's side of the family and my
step mom, my husband's side of the family. And he'll
publish it on snapfish or something like that and print
five copies or something and give it to people for presents.
Hopefully I'm not ruining future Christmas gifts for people, So
(25:09):
just acts surprised when you open it. So he's been
doing this, and he told me the other day we
were talking um that he had just finished the page
on James C. George and he said he had put
in the information that I had found about this understanding
clause and what he had done, but he wasn't really
(25:31):
sure how he felt about it. And it's in there
for now, but maybe if he needs to revise the
book later, he would leave it out. And I said,
I think he should keep it in. And I don't
know what hell decide. I guess I'll find out when
I opened my future Christmas present in a year or
something like that. But he has thought about it at least,
(25:55):
and I think it's a good sign that it's in
the first draft. So you gave birth to your first
child last year, Yeah, in a pandemic, little little Kate. Right,
So how did all of this research into your family
and to Codsworth make you think about the kind of
conversations you're going to have with little Kate down the
(26:19):
road that maybe your own family didn't have with you
about these topics. I may not ever take her to Codsworth,
or maybe I will, but it probably would be one time,
one trip two we're all Mississippi to see where she's from.
(26:39):
Maybe she'll be twelve or thirteen. Kate will grow up
as a generation even further removed from this past than me,
And in some ways that's how it should be. I
think the only way we can move forward is to
actually move forward. But I will tell her about her family,
(27:02):
and when I tell her about who would now be
her great grandmother's side of the family or her great
great great great grandfather, I will tell her all of
this and she'll grow up learning about it, and she
won't have to spend, you know, six months, nine months
(27:23):
of her life researching it to find out. Claire was
able to learn a lot about her family's history going
back centuries. That's something most people can't or won't do.
When I think back to my family's story of land
lost in Ease, Texas, where it all began, there's a
(27:46):
lot my research didn't yield. So, for instance, I never
figured out about my great great grandparents migration from Tennessee
to Texas. I also didn't know how they lived as
slaves and then as free people. I did, however, manage
to track down the original deed to my family's land
with the help from Jason, a listener in Ohio. So, Jackie,
(28:11):
I'm wondering, having gone through this process in a more
personal way, what gives you hope Spending months diving into
the causes and consequences of the racial wealth gap. It
could feel dark. It's just such a big problem with
no simple solutions. No, there's not. But let's be honest.
We might not get to closing the racial wealth gap
(28:33):
anytime soon. And if I'm totally honest, I'm not even
hopeful we'll get there in my lifetime. There is one
underlying thread that ran through my research, and that's resilience.
I don't think we talk about that enough. It's resilience
that keeps black people proud and thriving in our own ways.
(28:56):
Take my cousin Yolanda and Dallas. She walked away from
our family's land in Kilmur. She's now trying to develop
another hundred acres of land in a town nearby, land
that her family initially acquired after slavery. My cousin had
to tell me, he said, your grandfather would turn over
in his grave to know that you all have done
(29:18):
nothing on this property. You need to be ashamed of yourself.
And so this got me to thinking that I owe
it to my grandmother and grandfather two cultivate this land
and to make it where what he would have wanted
it to be. Tna her grandparents. Jolana wants to build
(29:38):
a pavilion on the land. That's really some balked to me,
because most black families never managed to pass on wealth
from generation to generation as white families have. But the
way I see it, Yolana's vision shows that black families
do pass on hope and they pass on the ambitions
of their ancestors. And that's one of the biggest take
(30:00):
aways from season three of The Paycheck. We went as
far back as forty acres in a mule, right through
to the late eight nineties, when a black woman called
Kelly House proposed reparations and was eventually jailed for it.
We talked about local initiatives to address past wrongs in
places like Evanston, Illinois. Now the US is weighing a
(30:20):
bill in Congress to study reparations, and it's the resilience
of people behind those efforts. People like Kellie or my
cousin Yolanda, or my colleague Claire. They're willing to speak
up and talk honestly about our past, present in future.
It's people like them who give me hope that will
(30:41):
get there eventually. This is the last episode of our season.
Thank you so much for listening to The Paycheck. If
you liked this show. Please rate, review, and subscribe. This
episode was hosted Aimy, Rebecca Greenfield, and Me Jackie Simmons.
(31:04):
This episode was reported by Claire Sadeth and Rebecca Greenfield.
This episode was produced by Magnus Hendrickson and Lindsay Cradowell,
and it was edited by Rocksheeta Saluja, Jackie Simmons, Janet Paskin,
Francesca Levi, and Me. Special thanks to Katie Boys, Laura
Carlson Chaufer for has Laura's Alenko, and all the Bloomberg
(31:24):
reporters and editors who made this season possible. Original music
is by Leo Sidron. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Thank you for listening.
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