A Word on Words; 4015; Daniel Sharfstein

it's been delicious celebrating all things literature and ideas for more than three decades that this is a word on where is john johnson impala welcome once again to a world where it's my guest today is daniel schorr singing an associate professor of law at vanderbilt university and he's here today to talk about his book the invisible line this book follows three families from the revolutionary iran up to the civil rights movement as they straddle the call on change their racial and an invitation from black to white with these profiles and hope to show the notion that the racial and exists and helped us to realize that we are all related welcome thank you for having me on this great and here to talk about the invisible line and could i just ask you before we begin

the cover of this book read me before it all i have taught you like it i i love the cut for aaron douglas that become president aaron douglas on it and he is one of my favorite artists and has been since long before i moved to nashville well i must say it's a terrific get the invisible line where the title comes from well i think in a way my interest in the subject began when i read the when i read invisible man in high school and it was assigned reading in eleventh grade and i was very lucky because i i got the flu is home for a week and just had a lot of time to read it and end it just really changed my perspective on the world learned to and i must say i crack this book and before i realized about anyone or three families there was ralph ellison was a quote from the

invisible man and the minute that ago abrego always fun got to go through the lives of these generations of three families out to become well i chose them in part because they were typical and parkinson's the spencers a lot less stress it ends i want families that were typical of the diversity of experiences of crossing the color line so i chose families to cross the color line at different moments in american history in different parts of the south and from different social positions then i also wanted the families that were extraordinary and these families they all left such a rich historical record that i was able to move beyond just the bare jr logical data on and really talk about who they were or why they did what they did and how it affected them and their families and the communities is not just three stories three great stories only

you also provide us a wonderful photo album and you know you look you look at faces and you wonder a black or white how they get away with it our how they get caught in that trap of racism and the new providers three family tree each not talking about the structure of the book before we get into the details of it i wanted to tell her history of race from the perspective of people who were living at and why i chose these three families to get their perspective on the color line was always are different from one another but depending on the period of time and always changing over time so i ate interwoven the chapter sorry i first had a chapter about the kids and family and then the wall family van the spencer

family and i kept braiding their stories together and in a way i might use their experiences to give us a three dimensional view of what race was in the us how people understood it and how it was changed let me just read you the line for what he wrote dances regard themselves as white with little sense of they be having our suspense is had a foot in each side of the line and wallace cultivated a strong black identity so you do get three different stories but the same story and the new nine we're here in nashville southern boys times a rights movement we was so good use any place in south africa apartheid people here will read this book and and understand what it must have meant to these three

families they come from where they were to the point the story brings long and you know sooner or later usually three families has to fail to face up to reality and that you've won almost like many parts of the story but as the writer who did the research you're understanding all along but there is going to be trouble here i'm troubled player a few minutes hear a lawsuit there are injected child in a rubber screw their dramatic scenes one after another but the question i'm in material is so rich but the research involved in this i mean i go through the notes and you know i mean it's another story almost

every note i well i knew i did research in think it i thought eighteen states and the district called me up and i put a lot of miles on my honda civic i look at getting the story together i and each family lyden presented its own set of challenges atkinson family there was almost an embarrassment of riches the good sense never saw a sheet of paper that they didn't want to cover from back with their own handwriting there just thousands and thousands of letters and yet they're there were letters that were stuffed into giant hogshead sugar barrels on the walls are they there are few letters that survive but also really dramatic congressional testimony and teachers are lots of newspaper coverage as the focal of a the existence of washington dc right hands i am in the spencers were are illiterate farmers and art in an

isolated mountain hollows is your archrival less as a really frightening eastern kentucky and it from me by my ability to capture their story really began with the fact that when there was a family feud and someone instead of fighting with bullets fought with rumors rival family went around the county i've been saying that the spencers have black blood it and instead of fighting with bullets the dispensers brought a lawsuit and that record miraculously survived as loony indie skin cancer versus civilian hands on the testimony was just so rich and voluminous dude you just have this marvelous picture of a terribly upset among because of brothers shot i must answer yes i am an anomaly get

even a bum he just and no pun intended did you just fix the black and they aren't and what's amazing about this is either when that happened when a stone circle blew me this was around nineteen eleven and there's a time and there were lots and lots of silent movies being put out with appalachian appalachian themes are at our end the if this were silent movie they they would have been in pitch battles with each other and instead loony really revealed a more of a modern sensibility in deciding that it was more damaging to turn the spencers black then tissue that you know the amazing thing to me thinking back on the times but is

this poses sudan let them in you know it's a it's almost like a louse roberta which are aligned summit during my years as a journalist you know hugo worry about only way you can prove you're not an african american and i must've been on his mind but he never hesitated i there are there are two lawsuits in this book one brought by the spencers and one brought by the wall family and each one is very curious exercise for them in my view because if we think about the color line with respect each family it's a line being drawn between people who look white and other people who look white and they easily could've picked up stakes moves somewhere else and in white without question but each time the families decide to stand their ground and really aren't subject themselves to

very public scrutiny and what was amazing about the spencers was that there was plenty of evidence that they descended from a man who was a man of color it he was a man who moved into eastern kentucky and to johnson county they could've at any doubt about that themselves right and five the dayton it and at the same time it led to a local jury verdict that reflected the fact that five of the broad public opinion was that they were five that they had after that any witness one of he says well i looked at his hair and the no shred of evidence of a navy an african american woman a lot of crazy lorson one sixteenth it one sixteenth of your blood is

black mirror on the wrong cell line amazing the he was willing to sue for local jury was ultimately go wind up and then he had the guts to appeal and he appealed it and when the supreme court reversed the jury verdict i mean in a way that he was reversing on a technicality so i have to ask are you does it really matter whether they reversed when so much of the secrets for or error and exposed to the light of day it could they continue to live in their community and what was amazing was they could they stayed right where they were and nothing changed that their family continued to inter marry with everyone around them and when the nineteen twenty census was taken i dare county that at that time there were living in southwestern virginia but their county

was one hundred percent white and lit with felipe for non native born white americans that they knew about that you're a law professor and early and i loved it but the book is about so much more than lawsuits bought just talk about the war lawsuit for a moment short on it patriarch of the wall family and really one of the main figures of the book was a man named bo as the wall and osamu simone believe are actually or in douglas simon <unk> and all through his life like everybody got his name wrong i and in a way it was a it was a name that his father who have also been his owner had given him it end alyssa the wall was a man who became an art an abolitionist and then are part of the rising black political class in washington dc after the civil

war and he raised his children in integrated schools during reconstruction i raise them to expect our full seat at the table and right when his children came of age reconstruction ended jim crow took its place and it was like a door had slammed shut and after i was through all died his children spread out to different cities in the different parts of the district of columbia and one song move to a neighborhood right by catholic university and he tried to send his doctor to the local white elementary school and essentially he was trying to pass for white just by keeping his mouth shut but the walls had been a prominent family and early on a weekend in his daughter's on it the start of the first grade and the rumor started spreading that she was black and she's kicked out of school

and he could have done exactly what his siblings had done he could've moved to new york he could've moved to montreal he could have moved to georgetown and instead he stayed where it was and he brought a lawsuit and as a result aren't newspapers from coast to coast wrote stories about him and his family out they were very specific about his ancestry even named block in block number out where he lived so he had been hoping to become white just by being anonymous and by bringing the lawsuit he did exactly the opposite and i think in a way that it showed that he was ambivalent about trading his father's legacy of really being a hero in the african american community for an anonymous life as a white person for those of you just joining us i'm talking with daniel schorr singing but his book invisible line you know i once of the once had a

conversation with alex haley and he was writing his last book alito like counter he had had with some quite cousins he'd gone down to the gravesite of the slave master who is his great great grandfather's father made his great grandfather's father and suddenly there was an anniversary and his white cousin to a bear on the other side he said you know on a book on this and he died before he could then every time i turned the page of this book i thought about the election and i thought and then you have done and it's been done you know you think of two brothers both officers in the confederacy talk about that

family and what a totally different experience that it is sure that their kids and family was the first family to cross the call oneness alice themselves as white in this book i need they lived in the south carolina back country and for the revolution they assimilated into a community of welsh and scots irish farmers are and then they move from around eating hundred to mississippi then eventually up into kentucky and over into louisiana mentioned the family tree what our family tree that was gas and on the day i when they moved to mississippi they didn't have much memory above what their lives in south carolina was like they they knew exactly where in south carolina they were from the pv river the great pete even for and as pete earley be totally that's exactly right hand i teach it they were

the end moving to mississippi and kentucky they they really became they didn't reach the heights of the planter aristocracy and the i think that on one level they had absolutely no idea that this was their ancestry and at the same time there was a tradition of i mean they're talking about hal they had dark complex and so i have a cousin in the gibson family wrote in a diary that what he wants he asked his father about what we have dark skin i've heard that it's because we descend from their younger son of an english nobleman who had children with the gypsy last year and his father in a way that that doesn't trigger is typical of of the planter we said it doesn't matter what your pedigree is out what matters is how you live your life and what you make of it today it and the good sense they

weren't so much a part of the southern a week that they could actually have been fairly unusual and relatively liberal views about slavery so i have one life member the family i mean who was out large schiller planter in louisiana were repeatedly about how distasteful he found the institution of slavery would much rather employee free labor and when it he sent his children to yale they were lionized by their northern classmates in in part because they wore the role of the southern aristocrat with such a plan but at the same time they've been fought in the end the approach the world in ways that were very northern ireland baby really soaked up the intellectual ferment it and they could be critical are about the south and end about slavery

on the change for them when they moved back to the south after that after they graduate from college and when the civil war began shortly thereafter they became officers of the comparison money and then after the civil war they paid played a central role in defeating reconstruction and building a new self that was segregated and premised on the idea of white racial purity there is that seeing how the family reunion but until great nation convention and talk about i was to me that was a seminal moment that was chancellor an opt in to there not really envious well i think the two brothers randall lee ann parkinson

aren't i one that i've inherited a family a state in kentucky near lexington and one i was trying to make it in a law business so it's both a thought for the confederacy and and each of them their work was a democratic delegate to the eighteen sixty eight presidential nominating convention and we eat and sixty eight the democrats have been the party of secession and five this was the first convention that the south was was back on and the white south was part of the political process again the oaths they've taken their loyalty oaths and at the same time on you and they in many ways they did have a choice about what the defeated confederacy what surrender grant anne litt what they chose was to

reinvigorate the the democracy the democratic party but not as the party of slavery but as the white man's party in a way it's a moment when we really see how our before the civil war the key distinction in the south was between slaves and free and after the war this was a moment when it turned into white and black when i use the word irony here they are on the wrong side not once but twice once in combat and then and political combat during the process of writing how long to take well it was my research project full time for of bell i was six years where you find these three domains to the families i've found

by a man looking at legal records so from lawsuits i found the wall family and i found spencer family it begins since i learned about through a scholarship of winthrop jordan who in nineteen sixty two wrote an article for the william and mary quarterly saying that this wealthy south carolina landowner i mean it's insane mississippi and kentucky and eventually trees themselves back to it was actually a man of color and you lose really fascinating article that became part of his book went over black and so the gibsons in a way were one of the most prominent families on the crew had this history you know how often we let ourselves be misled and i can recall i guess a teenager

was probably when i first saw walter white who was then jack character an ugly city and other hot it is have a white man heading out the national association of ethnic of people and one day and after i guess after younger foreign and too zill example of the great american advocate here mike nissen myself and was he had traveled the south with with walter white they'd risk their lives from time to time and then ended i was reminded of it again as i read this book and i'm reminded of it again as i think of allocating alex haley's only intention in writing a book we don't know i mean dna is helping tell us some as

you say talk about that hole on contemporary dynamic when i'm going through and which aren't and what we're finding out that we are brothers and sisters we never knew when we ate well one of the amazing things about the things i was really curious about when i started the project was as i trace descendants to the present would i be breaking the news to them and what i found was with very few exceptions everyone had found this out in five or ten years previous it either it mostly because of the incredible wealth of genial logical material that's been digitized is now searchable by dna is also a big part of this and really every day more americans are are finding out that this is part of their story and so everyone had a similar kind of story where someone would go into the library see that they were offering a a search of eating fifty census and

it's a oh right i'll enter my great great man that same type that in here and written the numerator she would come up that have to call over the librarians excuse me but what's it mean that the letters m u l our original by his name creating fifteen nineteen twenty my lot i was a sense the stakes designation for mixed race and so each family had learned about this had talked about it among themselves and really process this information and it was fascinating to talk to them i'd just a little bit after that they learned this hour the story of what a great story we relate time i have our five pa has been great at is daniel thank you say what's going and thank all of you for coming and dunn singing over a word on words very nice