In Black America; Michael Klein; Ms. Pryor

Thank you. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. And then I think the next person who's winged he went under would be Jesse Jackson, who he met again still as a teenager when he came to the church and almost instantly was

appointed by Reverend Jackson to head up the New York City Youth Organizing of Operation Bread Basket. And this is going back into the very last days of the life of Dr. King when Dr. King was still heading that up and Reverend Jackson was heading it up nationally. Reverend Sharpen was appointed by Reverend Jackson to head it up in New York. Michael Klein, author of the new book entitled The Man Behind the Sound Bite, the real story of the Reverend Owl Shopping published by Castile in the National. The book written by Michael Klein traces Reverend Sharpen's life from the beginning in 1954 when it was a Dane as a minister by Bishop Frederick Douglass Washington in 1964. In 1967 when he formed the Youth Committee for Power to fight Adam Clayton's power expulsion from Congress, in 1969 when he was the appointed New York City Director of SCLC's Operation Bread Basket, in 1973 when he became a surrogate son to the godfather James Brown up to and beyond 1987 with the Geron of Brawley Howard Beach and Bensonhurst Cases.

I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week the African American writer Survival Handbook with the Rita Booth Prior and the man behind the sound bite, the real story of the Reverend Owl Shopping with author Michael Klein in Black America. This is an ongoing story and what I think interesting about the story is that it's written about a person who was now 37 years old rather than in the past and in the archives and I think what's important about it is how this story will end and the book ends by I'm pretty much that note. The future of a Reverend Owl Shopping has much to do with I think the future of this country and whether or not we ever come to terms with the pressing and almost life and death issues of things like racism and injustice that are affecting this country that has a lot to do with what volume 2 of this book will be but I think at this point it's an important story that needed to be told and I think gets told fairly and accurately

based on those years of observation and traveling with Reverend Shopping. When Michael Klein started covering the Reverend Owl Shopping for the National Alliance newspaper four years ago it wasn't his intention to find out who was the man behind the sound bite. He was assigned to cover the movement that was happening out on the streets of New York City and Reverend Shopping was clearly one of the movers and shakers. Reverend Owl Shopping first gained national attention in the Howard Beach case. That's when on December 20, 1986 Michael Griffith was killed after he was run down on a belt parkway in Queens while fleeting a white mob. The next big media vent in Reverend Shopping's life was the Toronto Broly case. That's when on November 24, 1987, Toronto Broly a 15 year old was kidnapping sexually abused in Duchess County, New York. The following month, Reverend Shopping and other staged a day of outrage in Brooklyn shutting down all trains in the New York City subway system. These and other events in Reverend Shopping's life up to the writing of the book are covered.

Recently I spoke with Michael Klein regarding his book on the Reverend Owl Shopping. I think there was more and more fascination with him as an individual, both but an equal amount of fascination with what was gone on in the community, what were the needs and wantings and desires of the community that was leading to Owl Shopping, not only coming to the forefront, but remaining in the forefront despite what I'm sure you know is mountains and mountains of literature and news broadcasts about him that were intended, I think, to get him out of the picture. Okay. What kind of man did you find Owl Shopping, your particular perception of the Owl Shopping, we're going to some of the details that you have in the book, but personally the type of man that you found Owl Shopping, Reverend Owl Shopping to be actually? Well, I think I found a little bit of what is behind his personality in someone who for many, many years going back to his childhood was fascinated both with the pulpit and also with the whole idea of entertaining, in a way, he was someone who was enthralled with

Bishop Frederick Douglass Washington at an early age back at the church that he had attended for many, many years from the age of four and both was in love, I think, with the content of what Bishop Washington was saying in the gospel as well as the theatricality of the whole experience. He liked many people who would wind up an entertainment later on, including a number of his friends and childhood, was just very, very attracted to the stage and to having an audience in front of him and getting a reaction from that audience. And his particular message that he wanted to send to an audience was the comment of what Bishop Washington was preaching. Was it difficult to get Reverend Sharpton to open up? I'm quite sure some of the work we're taking from New Cypress Council, you actually been there. But the intimate details, when you first began to take religion and to become a minister really seriously.

Well, I think it was a combination of things because being someone who was me, who's actually was he on stage all the time? The question would lead to that particular thought, the showmanship. It's a complicated experience because this is someone who was so used to sitting down and telling his story to reporters or to whoever asked the question and has been one of the people who's most easy to get a hold of for an interview so that even makes that question even harder. Are you getting at the real Reverend Sharpton because this is someone who is not shy about reporters? I think after a while and once we got a level of comfortability in getting to those interviews, we got into some, what we're often painful experiences, going back into childhood and through the years, both in his personal life, his home life, his family life, and later on things that happened in the community as the particular community that he lived in

became more and more devastated from the increases of racism, poverty, the war in Vietnam, and people getting politically active and losing friends to police and misconduct and drugs and all kinds of stuff as well from personal tragedies in his own family. I think a lot of that he did begin to put out, which he tried to capture as much as possible in the book and also setting all that in the context of the community that he came forth from. Of course this couldn't be a complete because there's only so much that you can put in one particular volume in one particular book, but the essence of it gives the reader a good portray of who outshopped him is from his early age to what he's doing today, or the any significant parts where you had to take out that may have gave a little bit more insight into every chapter. I think there's much, much more that could probably be told each chapter probably contains

what could be a book in itself. For the main reason that the book and his life takes place in civil rights movement by unlocks from an early age on as a young, young teenager he was involved with Adam Clayton Powell and went on to have relationships and dealings with just about every major figure in the civil rights movement as well as in the entertainment industry, some of the biggest names in that industry from James Brown and down. So each of those chapters could be a book in itself because both civil rights movement in our country and the entertainment field, they're so rich in themselves, there's books written about, oh just about any chapter or any two pages of what's contained in this book. But I think it also does give that insight story and I think the strength of it and I think what makes it important is the fact that it's taken and kind of grows out of the three years of those day-to-day experiences on the street, telling that insight story, lots of people have interviewed Reverend Sharpton, lots of people have covered him the

times I'd said recently that he was the person who appeared, he was number three on the list of people whose name appeared in the paper that year, in this year behind I think George Books, Bush, Michele Gorbachev, then he had Reverend Sharpton, but we don't have that insight story, we do have people who travel with the president day after day and give at least some sense of what he's doing, however it is they wind up saying that. So the insight story of someone who's number three on the New York Times is list of personalities haven't been told yet, I think it's important and it does come from those years of, you know, just marching up and down the streets and the courtrooms and the prisons and everywhere we've been. So once getting all the material that you needed or thought you needed to actually write the book, how long was the process for you actually to sit down and put it in some sort of form? It was about eight months worth of work to sit down and take it into a book from beginning to end and again a lot of it was drawing from notes and recollections and interviews and

even stories I'd written earlier and then going on and doing some of the background research into just, you know, all of those areas, different cases, different periods of history, different communities, interview and different people who've known him, who know him now. How did you come up with, and I think is an interesting way that you titled each chapter. Was that a collaboration with you and Reverend Sharpton? No, those were mine. Some of them would come from particular experiences of his or different ways that he might describe things. I think there's a chapter called The Haunted House, I believe, which is how he had during a period of his young adulthood late teenage years. Right, beginning in high school. Right. He was beginning to feel that using that metaphor in a way of The Haunted House for America that, you know, was sort of like one of those horror movies where he and his young friends

would be in a house and every room they went into they would lose another friend to some kind of wall in the movies would be some kind of science fiction craziness and his actual life experience would be a room that had drugs, a room named Vietnam, a room named police brutality, et cetera, et cetera. So those kind of chapter names come from most different experiences, a chapter called Adam, different chapters about the different phases of his life. And also, you know, the movement that is pretty much inseparable from his life is entertainment and James Brown, as the chapter on the Godfather, or some of those particular situations, like that's one of Broly case and the Howard Beach case. Okay. I was going to get to that point. More so than the Howard Beach case, the Toronto Broly case, really brought national and probably international attention to Reverend Al Sharpton, and Robert, how do you explain that period in Reverend Sharpton's life due to the insurmountable amount of controversy

surrounding that whole incident? Well, again, that's another chapter which not only could books be written about, at least two have been written about one by an entire editorial staff in the art times, and another by some CBS news reporters who were also covering the case, so that, that in a way, is a challenge. And what I've tried to do was to cover that whole incident in that whole period, which lasted for a good year or so, and try to explain exactly what was going on because the Toronto Broly story, you know, I'm sure you know, became much, much bigger than the case of a young girl, and upstate New York, and practically no time, and became a battle. Between on the one hand, a movement that had grown up, literally on the streets of New York, and again, I found Reverend Al Sharpton, among others, at the center of that movement,

to try to attain justice, and what seemed to be a small yet not unusual case. Out of an African-American girl being assaulted by white men in this case, and she, a charge of police officers, not an unusual case, as we know, but also a small case. And as that movement grew, on the other side, and we've tried to locate where that other side is in the book, a movement to put an end to that movement seemed to be growing up, achieving grew beyond, say, the protagonist on that side, beyond the local authorities who were trying to case on, into the county level, and right up into, not only the governor's office, but the office of the governor who was a presidential hopeful at the time, who seemed to have some concern about what was happening on the streets of New York City. At that time and how it was affecting his image in the eyes, not only of America, but

in the eyes of those who make the decisions of who would be, say, a Democratic presidential nominee and who would receive that kind of support from the powers that became a large and complicated and often vicious story, tried to tell what that story is, and without it becoming an investigation into the Tuwana Brawley case per se, because that's a whole mother book I would love to write that book someday, but I think that's a book who, a story that still needs to be told and hasn't been told yet, although much of that information is in there too. Michael, do you find Reverend Shopton to be genuinely, I'm concerned about the oppression of people in his community, and in the world, for him to make this continual commitment of civil rights in a new and empowerment in this country? Well, in this day and age, you can only base your, an answer to that kind of question on your impressions and try to figure out if you pretty much believe that, can I pretty

much believe that as much as, you know, I believe in the sincerity of just about anybody I've met, and I would say that based on not only the experiences of spending that time and watching and observing and questioning, but also some of the background material that would predate my own getting, you know, to be alongside him in this story, and that would be times going back to say over a decade ago, when he was fairly secure in a location in the entertainment industry, a very comfortable position, he hadn't been, as you might know, in which is in the book, become sort of a surrogate, got sent to James Brown, and was getting entrained to a very rich, in many ways, field, both in the people who is meeting, and the resources that he had access to, and as you know, and no one else denied his works on him, he's having, would not deny that he's an intelligent person, who knows how to get

things done, and had quite a future in that field, and was going rather well, traveling across the country, around the world, and had a pretty good future in that, and put that aside at a certain point, just about a decade ago to return to the National Youth Movement, which had founded as a teenager, and to get back into that work, and begin doing work on the drug problems in the community, and police brutality cases, which seemed to be mounting up back in New York City at that time. One usually formed their particular personalities, how they see themselves from other images when they were young, who were some of the persons who influenced a Reverend Shopton at a young age in his life? Well, he was someone who was influenced at a very, very young age, and has sort of the talent of taking in those influences, and then going through the process of creating

his own personality, started that very, I think, with the first person being Bishop Frederick Douglas Washington, who was a very respected preacher in New York, who passed away in 1980, and he led the church that Reverend Shopton's family, went to, it was a very large church, but thousand people would be there every weekend, and that's the person who he was infatuated with from a very early age, so I think that was the first and very last impression on him. And up until probably the next key influence, which would be Adam Clayton Powell, and interestingly enough, the attraction to Powell was his first entree into the political arena, and he turned out, and this is the time, of course, of the early days of the White Empire, and there's many, many other political groups and individuals, the days of Malcolm X. Adam Clayton Powell is a person he chose because he was, as we know, a Reverend, too. So he noticed a Reverend here, who was speaking out, and in a way, that he hadn't seen since

say Bishop Washington was, and that was his attraction at the politics of finding someone who was both a political figure with that charisma, and was also a preacher, who was putting aside a lot of the conventions of the pulpit, and really sticking his neck out of it. Adam Clayton Powell did, like, perhaps no one else has. In your opinion, in the three most celebrated incidents in Reverend Sharpton's life in this country, the Howard Beech case, the Twine of Raleigh case, and the Benson-Horse case, in your opinion was Reverend Sharpton treated fairly in the media? Well, I think, in my opinion, probably not in the opinion of many people who just based that on just the question of fairness, I don't think he was treated differently than many people in his position in the past that have been treated. I think there's a long and sad and very unjust history of people doing that sort of thing,

and obviously he does it in his own particular way, much different than a Malcolm X or a King or anyone else did, but also it's a similar thing. And we saw years and years of vilification and attacks on people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, so in a way, it's no different than usual. I think all of that is unfair and sad and something that I hope to address in this book is to give an inside account of actually what's going on with an important person on the community and leader and controversial person in the community and hopefully to do that while they're an actual living leader still active. Michael Klein, author of the new book entitled The Man Behind the Sound Bite, the real story of the Reverend Al Sharpton, published by Castile in an National. After two failed attempts to get two autobiographical books in print, Loretta Booth-Prior now has a reference book on how to get published.

The reference book entitled The African American Writers Survival Handbook, How and Where to Get Published, published by Longwood Academic. The book is an outgrowth of the lessons learned from having her work rejected and from chatting with publishers and published authors. The book also covers rejection letters, copyrights, script writing markets, names and addresses of literary agents, publishers, magazines, newspapers, and other media that publish work on African American themes. Recently, I spoke with Loretta Booth-Prior regarding her new book. Well, I would say the first thing for a person to do is to have the work completed. Don't say, well, I've got three chapters of a great book, have the work completed. And then there's the writer's guild of America, there's the literary guild of America, there's the writer's guild of America, East and West. And there's ILAA, I think that stands for Independent Literary Association of Agents and SAR, which is the Society of Authors, Representative's Guild or something like that.

And they have listings and you can write these organizations and they'll send you a list of their agents and they will report to you. I think the best thing to do is to save your stuff a lot of money with postage and all of that is to use a query letter. They don't like to be phoned at all, I learned that, they don't like to be phoned. With all the how-to books that are currently out on the market, how did you come up with the idea of how to book to actually get your works published? First of all, I have to thank my husband, Alex, he and I sat around one night just talking it over and just throwing titles at it one another and we came up with this title. It sounds weird, but actually it's a catchy title, the survival handbook. After we got the title and all that down, it wasn't difficult to call people. That's what I did.

That was my method and I had an old writer's market and I called this publisher Who's At Home which is where most of them are at home scanning through hundreds of manuscripts and he laughed when I read in the title and he said, okay, send it to me and it was really ironic. I was so happy I had a publisher's standard contract within six weeks, my first, after three books. This was the third book. In getting your work published, our African Americans more susceptible to being rejected because one, they haven't gone through the right processes or they may be lacking in some skills and particularly pertaining to writing or just not knowing the ends and out of the publishing business. The problems particularly African Americans have about getting their works published. I don't know how this is going to come across but from being in Austin, most of the manuscripts that I've read have been poorly written grammatically, not that they didn't have a good thing

or a good plot or something like that but they weren't written very, very well but they were energetic and willing to persevere and that's the key word. You have to persevere in this business for as long as it takes. I remember getting on the floor just crying begging to God to please, please let me get a book published and ironically it happened that year when I'm not saying this is a method for everyone but when I got on my knees and prayed and begged and all earnest, it seemed to make a difference. This book is filled with a lot of information, there are 28 or some chapters. When one reads this book, what will they come away with? What are some of the things that they will find that will be beneficial to them as a writer and progressing their career and also getting their work published? Some of the things that I thought about were that most people don't know that they can

claim writing expenses as they write with they're getting published or not but you can only do that for five years otherwise the government considers that you're writing a hobby. I've also gone through the trouble of accumulating ten names of top agents, black and white who are susceptible to black works in New York City which is really worth happening. It may not happen for everyone there but that's your best bet for making a lot of money if that's what's motivating you. Also right there in the book I have over 50 to 60 pages of all the literary agents and almost every state in the union that you would want to contact some may be right around your corner down the street from your something and that's in the book and I want to clean up that was one of the things that I was trying to shorten and the publisher didn't want to shorten it at all if anything he wanted more agents names in there for some reason.

It shows you how to write a query letter, a query letter either opens the door or shuts it very tightly, immediately someone to glance at a one page query letter and say oh, haven't send it or write this personal rejection letter. You've got to tighten up that writing skill to write a coherent intelligible query letter to sell yourself because he'll never see you all he will see is the letter because someone can suggest something to you and turn something totally around because my book had been rejected by about 10 publishers that 150 page manuscript that first one had been rejected by all of them and then when I revised it and added those suggestions and things it was accepted. So you shouldn't think that criticism is meant personally. You should see what good there is in it because a lot of times there is good and a lot

of publishers are sympathetic. They read something and I said darn, we can't use this, but tell the poor guy he should do this or he should do that. Just to be nice and they really do it that way but they just can't accept it at that time or it's not right for their list or their catalog or something. When one writes a book do you think about the audience in which you're trying to attract some books are wrote in quote unquote black English or it's wrote in a style in which African Americans spoke in the 50s, 60s or before or after World War I or II in that particular dialect. Does one think about that when he when he or she writes the book? A lot of that is successful as a matter of fact, essence of the black women's magazine has been having a fiction contest for the past couple of years and most of the fiction winners, the top three winners did use that old dialect and they won. So it's still popular, you can use it, I'm sure.

LaRita Booth-Friar author of the book entitled The African American Writers Survival Handbook, How and Where to Get Published, Published by Longwood Academic. If you have a question or comment regarding his program write us, remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for In Black America's technical producer David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson Jr., please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, that's In Black America Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is

the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson Jr., join me this week on In Black America. And that path naturally seemed to lead at more and more turns to Reverend Sharpton, starting in particular with the Howard Beach case back in 1986, to a number of other cases. The real story of the Reverend Al Sharpton and the African American writer's handbook, this week on In Black America.