- [Announcer] Support for this program is provided by the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga.

- I'm Bob Culkeen, president and CEO of WTCI-PBS.

We want to welcome you to this special presentation, meant to spark conversation, healing, and unity in our community.

- And I'm Donivan Brown with The Ed Johnson Project, and we are pleased to bring you the conversation I was privileged to moderate between Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. and Jon Meacham back in September.

We discussed the legacy of lynching and the soul of America in the week leading up to the dedication of the Ed Johnson Memorial.

Here's that conversation.

And I've got a special request for the first question.

And that question is this, why are you both here, both physically today, and also what has drawn you to the kind of work that you do in our land?

- [Eddie] After you.

- Well, I'm here mainly to translate for Eddie, (audience laughs) because these guys at Princeton, which we think of as the Sewanee of New Jersey, (audience laughs) (audience applauds) he needs some help, and so I came along for that.

I'm honored to be here with both of you.

I'm here because this city and its institutions formed me, for better and for worse, the best parts of what I think I do because of institutions here, St. Nicholas School, McCallie School, the "Chattanooga Times."

And I wouldn't be doing anything that I do if I had not been shaped by the teachers and the people and the colleagues who made my life possible.

And I am deeply admiring of the work that you all have done to bring this case, this legacy, this conversation to national attention.

As with so much that has unfolded in Chattanooga since about five minutes after I left, I decline to see causality, but everything's been great since I left.

I insist it's correlation, not causality, but it's a model.

And your presence here, the work of this weekend, the ongoing work is genuinely impressive, genuinely important, and if we can't get this right, we're not going to become a more perfect union.

So thank you for what you've done.

(audience applauds) But mostly it's to translate for Eddie, so.

- It is such a delight to be here with you, Donivan, to be here with all of you and to be here with my good friend, Jon Meacham, when he's not in his basement, holding forth on "Morning Joe," but to see him in the flesh.

Why am I here?

It is rare, at least in these days, where we are gathered to commemorate or to recognize the evils that make us who we are, to acknowledge the shattered glass beneath our feet, that informs our way of life.

It's a different kind of memorialization.

It's not the triumphant narrative that typically is associated with the civil rights movement tourist industry.

It's a kind of confrontation with what we can descend into.

So I'm here because it's a unique moment in some very troubling times.

Plus, I wanted to give you guys a little levity.

You need some Mississippi up in Tennessee.

(audience laughs) - There are many things we need, that's not it.

(audience laughs) - I think that's the first I've ever heard anyone say that we need some Mississippi here, but before I get to my second question, a follow-up question, I've been a brew, "I've been brew."

I grew up Baptist, and as a Baptist, the first thing I was supposed to say was, we are at Olivet Baptist Church, and we- (audience applauds) And we are grateful for their work in this city, the witness in this city, and also being outstanding hosts for this evening.

So you said that this is an unusual kind of memorial, and you talk about the nature of this moment.

So as our topic is thinking about the soul of America, if indeed a nation has a soul, and I think that I can say that we do, what has lynching and its legacy done to the very soul of our nation?

- I think it's an inextricable element of that soul.

To me, a soul is not entirely good or entirely bad.

It's an arena of contention in which our worst instincts do perennial battle against our better angels.

And if you're anything like me, if 51% of the time you do the right thing, that's a heck of a good day, and I don't have many of those.

I fail six or seven times before breakfast, and a lot more after that.

And so soul in Hebrew and Greek means breath or life.

When God breathes life into man in Genesis, that word can be translated as soul.

When Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends," life could be translated as soul.

And so I think it's our ambient being, and the task of humankind, and in a political context, the task of a democracy is to try to do the right thing because it is our default position to do the wrong thing.

Democracy is a very counterintuitive thing.

Think about it.

I don't want to love my neighbor as myself.

I mean, I like my neighbor okay, sometimes, although I have to tell you quick story about my actual neighbor.

(audience laughs) And this is... you shouldn't have let me talk first.

So we live in Nashville now, I'm sorry, but we have a very Trumpy neighbor.

And one day about 18 months ago, I hear these backhoes and bulldozers in the yard, which, given my wife's propensity for projects, it wasn't that surprising, but I was looking out the window, and they were, somebody was, the neighbor was building a fence, a big fence along the property line.

And so I called the neighbor and I said, "What's going on?"

He said, "Well, I'll tell you what's going on.

I went to a fundraiser with President Trump last week and I said, 'I live next door to Jon Meacham.'

And President Trump said, 'If I lived next door to Jon Meacham, I'd build a fence.'"

So... it's a true story.

(audience laughs) So I said, "Did Mexico pay for it?"

(audience laughs) (audience applauds) It's a true story.

So back to loving your neighbor, sorry.

(audience laughs) It's counterintuitive, but neighborliness in a biblical sense and in a democratic sense, is about self-preservation.

It's about extending a hand in the morning because you might need one in the afternoon.

And it's about recognizing the fundamental dignity, sanctity of that person.

And without that currency, I'd argue without that commerce of understanding that everyone is created in the image and likeness of God and is entitled to the same rights, bears arguably the same responsibilities, if we lose that, we lose democracy.

And if we lose democracy, we move into authoritarianism, tyranny, totalitarianism, which is another way of using the term "state of nature," right?

The entire history of the world has been moving from the battle of all against all, to use Hobbes' phrase, the war of all against all, and creating order, which is about covenant.

It's about wearing a mask not because you might get sick, but because the person next to you might get sick.

It's a right and a responsibility.

And I think at its best, the American soul has in fact created and sustained that covenant.

But it is a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, centuries battle to make sure that happens.

And we're gonna fail a lot.

You are here to commemorate one, a singular and signal failure.

- So if I may, it's important that we remain conscientious and focused about democracy.

It's not something given, it's something that we have to really wrangle with each day, perhaps.

And I want to say something.

When we spoke a few weeks ago about our conversation, and he gave me permission to interrupt both of you, and so I just want to let you know, it's not me being rude, but from time to time, men with this level of eloquence and genius, they need an elbow in the rib- - Yeah, we get that a lot, yeah.

- They need an elbow or two.

But it sounds like we need to be focused, that democracy is something that we actually can't be neutral with, and that the tide of humanity is such that we wouldn't be regressive.

So to you, Dr. Glaude, what do you believe that lynching has done to this soul of our nation?

- So I agree with everything, much of what Jon just said.

I would want to make it a bit more concrete.

You have to translate these Sewanee people.

(audience laughs) The soul of America rests in a particular conception or idea of the people of America.

When we think about the Constitution, "We the people," when we think about Abraham Lincoln's understanding of democracy, "government for the people, by the people," right?

And what we know is that conception of the people, at the heart of, or that idea of the people at the heart of our national self, conception has been limited, but some people matter more than others.

Some people are valuable, at the very moment in which we give voice to the principles of this fragile experiment, they are shadowed by a set of assumptions about who's valued and who's not valued, who should be regarded and who should be generally disregarded, right?

At the moment, we can reconcile democracy with holding people as slaves, indentured servitude, or women as less than, or children as property of men.

And so there's this effort to make good on our idea of who "the people" actually are, who constitute the soul of this place, right?

Well, black people in this country, and particularly in this region of the country, although the South bears the burden of our national sins, right, the ugliness of our rejection, or let me say the ugliness of our refusal to accord black people equal standing, right, has often made us monstrous, has distorted and disfigured and deformed the soul of the country.

We've had to create certain kinds of rituals in order to manage the ugliness and the evil.

We've had to banish it from view.

We've had to put it in under the cover of night.

There are the white laws and the black laws in Moss Point, Mississippi.

There are the divisions that allow for that monstrous behavior to determine the distribution of benefit and burden, advantage and disadvantage, you see.

And so it's not an abstract question because the monstrosity has evidenced itself in our very social and political and economic and moral arrangements, you see.

So that distortion, that disfiguring, that deformation has become an integral part of who we are.

It's not over here, it's constitutive of our identity as Americans.

But that's another way of saying we're all fallen.

That's another way of saying that we're all stained by sin, and it's just a matter of giving content to what the sin is.

You see what I mean, you see the move I just made?

- I did, I saw the pivot and the adaptation.

So if we are all stained by sin, and if indeed this sin in part at times made us monstrous, and I've seen a lot of horror movies, and there's never a redemption for the monster.

That never happens.

But you're making the case- - Unless it's Frankenstein, though.

- Unless it's Frankenstein.

But you're making the case that we're neither one or the other, that we're both and- - I believe that.

- And therefore, there's this perpetual negotiation of this.

As that's true, would you say that this American soul is one that honors, that embraces fully the tragedy of our monstrosity?

- That's why we're here, right?

It's an ongoing perennial struggle.

And a lot of folks don't want that... a lot of people violently and virulently disagree with what I would say.

They'd say, "No, the soul is good.

It's 1776, it's quill pens, it's Omaha Beach.

It's 'Saving Private Ryan,' you're wrong."

Well, I'm not wrong on it.

I'm wrong in a lot, this I'm not wrong on because the murder of Ed Johnson is part of the soul of America.

It's the darkest part.

It's the grimmest part, and it's the part we have to work hardest at redeeming, but to act as though, to go to Eddie's point, to act as though it's the exception and not the rule is to kid ourselves.

And I would argue that one of the best parts of the founding era of the early republic, the 1776 to 1789 period, was the possibility that reason could take a stand against passion and prejudice, notionally.

I can't use constituency as an adverb like that- - What you mean by notionally?

- It was an aspiration.

"All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," not everybody, as Eddie was just saying.

But I do believe that the story of the country has been a gradual tragic, bloody, overly slow, but discernible progression.

And I use that word advisedly, and I know you're gonna be upset.

That's why, you know, Ivy league, you know.

Expansion of that understanding, I just believe that, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.

This is a better country today than it was 100 years ago.

That doesn't mean we stop.

It doesn't mean we congratulate ourselves.

I think we will look back not to celebrate, but to challenge.

- I hope you don't get mad with me with this question to the both of you.

So it's possible that America was a better country in 1870 than it was in 1890, which suggests that there might not be, we may not have an auto correct system woven in, but we might think that we do.

- History doesn't move in a straight line.

Of course we... oh my God.

We, it was, I mean, arguably one of the many tragedies of Ford's Theatre, which is why I think you all are nervous in the balcony, (audience laughs) is that you had a president in that era who had self-evidently shown a capacity for growth, in context, all the caveats.

But Abraham Lincoln, if you go read the first inaugural, it's hard going, it's like a lawyer's brief.

And it was, "I'm not gonna touch slavery.

You're picking a fight with the wrong guy," is basically what he was saying.

And then he gets to, in his view, by the way, of America was as an all-white America, let's be very clear about that.

He wanted gradual compensated emancipation, linked legislatively to colonization, through the removal of black people from the United States of America through at least 1863, and I can make a good case it lasted until the summer of '64.

That's Abraham Lincoln, that's the best guy we had, all right?

So my argument is not, let's dig him up and revivify him, and if only we could have that again.

But I do think, as a observer of it, in my case, as a not very good Christian, I'm an Episcopalian, so that's redundant.

(audience laughs) That was for Father Huckabee, sorry.

If you had that on your bingo card, you win.

Is that you saw someone who was fallen, frail, and fallible, doing the right thing, once, as Winston Churchill said, "once he had exhausted every other possibility."

And I'm not saying that to therefore say, "Aren't we great, so let's stop."

I'm saying that the best guy we can come up with, if that was his vision, we have a lot more Saturday afternoons to spend, don't we?

- Yeah.

- And to you, sir.

- So I, I don't... John and I put the accents in different places in this conversation, right, because I don't tend to use language of progression or progress.

I think America is more an argument than an idea, right?

And that argument has been bloody.

- But there is a proposition about which we argue about- - Argue about- - And what might that proposition be?

- That all men are created equal.

- Right, and, see, we make the... we argue about the proposition as if... let me say it differently.

Oftentimes the proposition is seen as America.

- Yeah, yeah.

- As opposed to the thing we're trying to instantiate, right, and to see the proposition as America is to, in some ways, obscure all of the ways that we fall short, repeatedly, right?

Because I come out of a blues tradition that while Abraham Lincoln is trying to get it right, we are the strange fruit dangling from poplar trees.

While the nation is trying to figure out, and when you say the nation, we're talking about white folk, trying to figure out what they mean by all, of being all are created equal, our babies are being raised under conditions of utter brutality, right?

We're losing people, we're having to bury our dead.

And we're trying to figure out how to navigate Chattanooga with some semblance of dignity while the nation is trying to figure it out.

So part of what I tend to see is, 'cause your point, Donivan, about 1870 was better than 1890, right, so there's a moment, there are moments when the nation seems to be on the cusp of finally embracing the ideas.

And then there's a reassertion of the belief that some people are more valued than others.

And then we have to end up burying our dead again over...

I'm sorry, y'all are looking at my bald spot.

I gotta look over here.

(audience laughs) They got a glaring view, all right, (laughs) so.

- That's why y'all are wearing sunglasses.

(audience laughs) - So you see what I mean?

So I'm less that we're better... we may, of course my life is better than my grandfather's, my great-grandfather's, right?

But we still live in a world where some people are valued more than others, just differently, right?

So this is not slavery, this is not Jim Crow.

And we want you... to deny that difference is, to me, to be silly, but- - But you're not suggesting that I'm denying that- - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.

But I'm just saying, hell can be caught in a number of different ways under different conditions, if that makes sense.

- So in this, I hear this- - I wouldn't say you deny that.

- And this clearly there's a tension about national identity, what does it mean to be American, how do we perceive ourselves?

And I grew up down here in Chattanooga, and from what I could tell, that we were the protagonists, that we were the most noble nation ever conceived, that essentially God, when he was sending his son, Jesus, that Jesus had us in mind because he knew that there would be an America.

And we were essentially like a new easement, a new Israel.

So I too bought into maybe something that wasn't true, or maybe you would call it the lie in this, but there is truth sitting in this lie.

So as this tension exists, this question enters my mind, or this statement I often hear about, this is not us.

So it's very possible that the day after Ed Johnson was lynched, there are folks who clasped their pearls and said, "This is not who we are."

And it may have been such that as the breath was leaving the body of George Floyd, there may have been those Americans who clasped maybe not pearls, but their nice Apple watches, and they said, "This is not who we are."

So who are we?

- That's the argument.

That's- - We're fallen, frail, and fallible.

And of course it's who we are.

Of course it's who we are.

It drives me crazy when people say that.

- When they say what?

- "This is not who"- - "This is not who we are."

- Why does it drive you crazy?

- Because it's just wrong.

I could be, I could go on, but it's just, it's factually, historically, intellectually, and morally incorrect.

- [Eddie] Exactly.

- Stop the steal on that one.

(audience laughs) (audience applauds) - So, indeed, stop the steal on that one.

I don't know if y'all heard an affirmation, but do you agree with this sentiment, that we actually are the nation that actually lynched Ed Johnson and in this country, or in our county, Alfred Blount and the other men, and we actually are the country that kneels upon the neck of George Floyd?

- I mean, yeah, absolutely, absolutely- - So what do we say to the folks who say, who fight you on this?

What do we say to people who say, "No, this is not who we are," and they get, and they want to punch you in the face.

Can we go someplace together with them if they disagree on this?

- It's not...

Tragically, it's who we are, it's not who we should be.

That's sort of a formulation I've tried to get people to use.

This isn't who we should be.

That verb change changes the whole thing, right, because it's back to aspiration, and we're in a building devoted to the weekly commemoration of failure.

Why do people come to church?

They come to church to have the world put back in order again because they know it's gonna fall apart over the next six days.

That's what religion largely is about.

Religion means to tie together again.

And so I think the proper... and I think the proposition is essential, but to assert the proposition as if that's the end of the argument is ahistorical.

And I believe that yes, the country was kneeling on George Floyd's neck.

It's also the country that hit Omaha Beach.

- It was the country that that 17-year-old black girl who kept videotaping it.

- Yeah.

- You see- - And guess what, that's the panoply of human experience, which, if I may, goes back to my definition of the soul, is that there are great moments, there are finest hours, and there are dark moments.

And the task of history, the task of citizenship, the task of politics, I think, is to put our fist on the scale to make the good outweigh the bad.

- And oftentimes when we hear that this is not us, it is rooted in a deep seated evasion, right, an evasion that was predicated upon the idea that these acts of violence are exceptions to the rule, that these are... how can I, these are obviously bad people over here doing bad things, that it was the Klan doing the bad things, it's these virulent racists doing the bad things.

And it's usually this kind of melodramatic kind of approach to reality.

That is to say, you have your easily discernible heroes and your easily discernible villains.

I grew up in the coast of Mississippi in the summers, and it was so hot you could see the waves.

So we couldn't go outside and play, so I had to watch ABC soap operas 'cause my mother wouldn't let us change the channel.

(audience laughs) - This explains so much.

(audience laughs) - So much, right?

She wouldn't let us change the channel.

So when I finished reading, she had already, she started with "Young and the Restless," but then she went to- - Oh, I used to, my grandma would watch "Young and the Restless," so I would watch "Young and the Restless."

- Yeah, so then she went from that, then it was "All My Children," "One Life to Live," "General Hospital," "Edge of Night," you remember these?

(audience murmurs) And what was so clear about the soap operas is that the villains were clear, Erica Kane.

(audience laughs) Right, clear, the hero's clear, Asa, you remember Asa Hutchison on "One Life to Live"?

So everybody was clear.

What's interesting about human beings is that our lives aren't melodramatic in that way.

We're all implicated, it's not just the Klan.

Citizens' Councils were folks who came to your house for dinner.

They ran the chamber of commerce.

- [Jon] I call them hardback haters.

- Yeah, they were respectable folk, or you can see it in New York, just not too long ago when the chancellor wanted to address segregated schools in Manhattan and decided to try to really, right, engage in desegregating Manhattan, and those limousine liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton were in their town hall meetings, talking about how they're going to destroy the schools by trying to really integrate the schools, right?

We look at the loud racists and we say, "They're the problem."

We look at the Trump, those folk who marched, who marched today, they're the problem because we can absolve our sins, our own complicity in it all, right?

So usually when we hear the phrase, "this is not us," it's the activation of the melodramatic narrative to absolve you, us of how we're implicated in the ugliness, you see?

That's all we need to do, is to see the back of the head of Donald Trump and everything is okay with us.

- [Donivan] So there's not just- - See, that's not true.

That's why he's sending folk over to Meacham's house.

- So there's not, so there's not this clear demarcation, this great clear vast line between what we see as heaven and hell, that there's this blurring, there's this shading effect, and that there's this overlap.

It's just like a wave up and down that we see within the nature of both the nation and also as we, as humans.

So I'm curious that if we want a melodrama or if we being aspirational when we say this, how do we as humans, we as Americans, in particular, actually live when we don't want to live, we don't want to live there?

I often want the fantasy of the dream, but how do we each day put our hand in the soils and live in the in-between or in the not yet?

- You're gonna become a preacher?

- I think he already is.

- I love this.

(audience laughs) That's it, I mean, is it life mostly lived in the meantime?

- That'll preach.

- Isn't that it?

So I think it's, and I think it's at once empowering and terrifying to realize that we created Donald Trump, right?

(Eddie snaps) We're responsible.

- And Mr. Meacham, when you say we, who were the we?

Am I the part of... am I one of this?

(audience laughs) Are you?

- I don't know.

- Okay, okay- - I don't know, maybe.

(overlapping chattering) - Yeah, maybe.

- Maybe, I like the Mr. Meacham, though.

No, the idea that he is an aberration is wrong.

He's an exaggerated version of a lot of stuff.

But the notion, as Eddie said, that somehow or another, if he goes to Mar-a-Lago and falls and can't get up or whatever, that somehow that solves everything is wrong.

And all of you either have kinfolk or neighbors who absolutely believe the opposite of what you believe, don't you?

And you have unpleasant conversations, which aren't even really conversation, right?

And so I think that this goes to the, so what do you do?

Well, this is the great test.

We are undergoing the greatest test of citizenship, I think since the 1850s, and the only way to do it is to do it with the agency we have.

And you're probably not going to convince them of anything.

Nobody wants to be convinced of anything.

So I think it's about maximizing the reachable.

And I think it's a vanishingly small number, but it's... Alex Haley once said, "If you ever want to get anybody to actually listen to you give a speech, start by saying, 'let me tell you a story,'" so what's the story?

I believe the story is Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, that the American story is one, with all respect to my friend and colleague, has been one of progression.

That doesn't mean the wagon train has stopped.

It doesn't mean that it's been perfect, but you have, I believe that in this dialectic that we have in the country right now, and, by the way, I don't know if this is going to work.

And if we had been here, where are we now, September?

12 months ago, I would have been much more optimistic.

I would have said, this is a fever, this is Huey Long.

34% of the country loved Joe McCarthy, even after he was censured.

I could have told you in very Aaron Sorkin like ways that in the 1924 Democratic National Convention went to 103 ballots because there were 347 Klan delegates at Madison Square Garden who would not vote for Al Smith, the governor of New York, because he was an Irish Catholic.

I can do that all night, you can leave now.

But this is different, and it's different because of January 6th.

It's different because a big chunk of the country didn't want to have a conversation about the Constitution, they wanted to tear up the Constitution.

And if there are moderate Republicans, which is not an oxymoron, (audience laughs) it seems like one, but if you're there and if you're thinking, you're debating all this, and you think these are these two MSNBC communists up here and all that, that's fine.

(audience laughs) But if you are, think about this.

Until the Republican Party's house is put in order, until the Republican Party, and Eddie's gonna, his head's going to explode in a second, until it becomes the party of a Ronald Reagan or a George Herbert Walker Bush, or a George W. Bush, George W. Bush could not be nominated today by the Republican Party, and Donald Trump makes it look like Cicero, and believe me, he loves that, "I look pretty good."

(audience laughs) If you don't find a way to become a functioning part of a constitutional order, if you don't engage in fact, as opposed to what you want to believe, then I'm not sure the Republic makes it.

And as Eddie, Eddie and I have debated these things for years now, and I was very optimistic heading into the Trump era.

I thought this was like, okay, George Wallace pulled it off.

He got 13.5% of the popular vote, carried five states in 1968.

This can happen.

60% of self-identified Republicans think that Joe Biden stole the election, 60%.

That's not a rational functioning element of a constitutional system.

And so when I have Republican friends who say, "Oh, I don't think the election was stolen, but I really don't want to spend that much money on infrastructure," you don't get to say that.

You've lost that sweet spot, until you re-engage with reality, however uncomfortable, however terrible reality might be.

And one of the things I don't know, and I want to hear you two on this is, and you alluded to it a second ago, is how do we have this conversation with folks who don't want to hear you say that they are complicit in what happened to Ed Johnson or George Floyd, that they do think there are more extreme versions of evil?

How do we bring those people into a neighborly conversation?

- I think in light of your neighbor, it would be interesting to hear what you might say in a month from now, these fences you got- - Your real neighbor.

- So there's a question on the table, but there was a moment where you sighed, there was a moment where we sighed at the same time.

I don't know if y'all saw us, but as a moment when you referenced Reagan- - It's Reagan, it's Reagan.

Y'all are all upset about Reagan, I know.

- So I want to make a quick statement and ask a question about this, and there's this other question at the table.

And so when I was a kid, Ronald Reagan was the president and he seemed kind of interesting.

What I didn't know, that Ronald Reagan was basically, he was extension of what, when Martin Luther King said, when he said that... this is throwing me off a little bit, when he says that, "I fear that my dream has died."

He says that it's '68, right?

Ronald Reagan is like, he was the king of California when Martin Luther king said that, and I think that, when I think of Ronald Reagan, it's like he's the one who is strangling Martin Luther King's dream, but with this wonderful smile and the greatest presidential hair, just the nicest- - [Jon] He had good hair.

- So on this sigh that you had when he referenced Ronald Reagan, and this other question on the table, what are your thoughts about this princely figure?

- I should say this as a preface, I gave Jon Meacham the manuscript of "Begin Again," my book about James Baldwin's America, and its urgent lessons for... and my friend read the section on Reagan, and he said, "Eddie, just say what you mean," 'cause I was hemming and hawing, right?

Regan, many people don't understand that for many black activists of the Black Power era, in particular, Reagan was as notorious as George Wallace.

So when the nation elected him and declared him a redeemer, it closed the door on the prospect of fundamental change unleashed by the mid 20th century black freedom struggle.

It was the nail in the coffin.

Remember when Conyers, you know late Representative Conyers, put up for legislation the day after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated to make it a national holiday, and when finally this was going to happen, many people in Reagan's administration were calling Dr. King "Dr.

Coon."

Remember all of that language?

We know that it was George Wallace's folks who called the Reagan campaign and said, "You're gonna have to appeal to these Wallace Democrats, and the way you're going to have to do that is you're gonna have to understand how (snaps) to make certain kinds of racial appeals."

So there's a reason why we get that state's rights campaign speech in Mississippi, right, it was a direct appeal.

There's a reason why there's an attack on basic civil rights.

Reagan, for me, right, is the preface to Trump.

The nation reached for the B list actor to make America great again.

That comes out of that campaign, right, to make America great again.

They reached for him to close the door on what the great society represented, to close the door on what the civil rights movement represented, and Donald Trump is a caricature of Reaganism.

Trumpism is a caricature of the worst elements of Reaganism.

So we have this argument because I think we want to make Trump exceptional so that we can absolve the Republican Party for what it has done over these years.

But let me say this really quickly.

We can have that argue 'cause we will.

You see Meacham in his Episcopalian way?

(audience laughs) He did it.

- Just a thought, yeah.

- I want to say this really quickly, though.

How do we do this, how do we live in the in-between?

We gotta grow up.

One of the distinctive features of American life is that we seem to be in a kind of perpetual state of adolescence.

We like to imagine ourselves as Never Neverland, where we're all lost boys and lost girls.

And what's distinctive about Never Neverland?

You don't have to be responsible for anything.

You don't have to be held to account for nothing.

So in order to exist in that in-between space where you recognize that you have within you the possibility of evil as well as the possibility of unimaginable good, that you can see yourself at once as both disaster and miracle, in order to sit in that spot, you got to grow up, you got to mature.

And it seems to me, one of the things that's so unique and distinctive about America's way of life is that we cleave to our adolescence.

And the moment you try to snatch us out, all hell breaks loose, because then you have to look yourself squarely in the face, right, and confront what you have done and what you continue to do, right?

That's all you got to do, is look at the history of Chattanooga, so all you gotta do is look at your zoning laws.

So all you got to do is to understand how this city was organized.

Even as we begin to talk about how liberal you were, how humane your Jim Crow was, but if you tell the story about the choices you made to build this place, right, and be honest about it, not to beat yourselves over the back, like self-flagellation or something like that, but to set the stage for you to be otherwise, really quickly, it's a basic Emersonian notion, translation later, coming out of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

You can't reach for a higher self unless you accept the self that you currently are.

(audience applauds) So we have to grow up.

- I believe that if there's a chance of reaching folks who would be incredibly furious about everything we've said, just about, it should be framed in terms of the American past and the American ideal, because I think that's a safe, a safer place for them.

And that's not nostalgia, it's not cinema, but conservatives say they like the past, liberals say they like data.

And so I make these arguments from history because it's the only thing I can think of that checks both boxes.

- But you already said that this idea of, the idea of a good sermon or wanting someone to listen to a speech is by saying, "Let me tell you a story."

And so what history is, at least it was for me growing up, it was this grand story that fit together.

And my teachers did such a wonderful job weaving together 1776 and 1865, and things were left out, of course, but it was a story that I found so deeply compelling.

So I know that y'all don't agree about- - Do you still, if I may?

- Do I still what?

- Find that story compelling?

- If I allow myself to grieve, if I allow myself to feel confusion and frustration, I found the story very compelling.

And the reason I referenced grief is that when I learned about things that happened to people like me, and I didn't always know how to grieve, and then I go back and forth, I found if I didn't grieve, I may have just sort of lost my mind, or even lost my soul.

And even when I've listened to both of your books, one about John Lewis and talked about the kind of pain he endured, I'm not wanting to stop a book.

I would just keep going through, but I kind of have to disconnect the emotion.

And I was re-listening to "Begin Again," and particularly "Democracy in Black," it hurts my heart, it really hurts.

And so I think that we, as Americans, aren't good at grieving, and I think that we can't grow up until we learn how to grieve better.

And so I think that January 6th might not have happened if people learn how to actually feel the pain and shock about there being an America that they'd hope for, that when their fathers looked at them in the '70s, they said that your life would be like mine, that you will work at one factory your entire life, you'll work your way up, you'll have your house, a summer house, two cars, money for all your kids for college, and that's no longer here for many of them.

And so while we can run from that, while we can fight about that and take up arms, we can also grieve about that and then make some new decisions.

And so I fear because we can't grieve, then there's a whole host of options.

There's the ways in which we could be creative that are not at all on the table, but what's on the table is anger, rage, and weapons.

(audience applauds) And I'm curious, y'all don't always agree, and you've got this neighbor, and yet the question that remains on the table is, how do we bring those along that who don't agree?

How do each of you bring each other along when y'all disagree?

- So there's a presumption of decency that allow us to disagree because I don't ever feel as if Jon Meacham is questioning my humanity.

And I'm never going to tarry with anyone who questions my humanity.

(audience applauds) The price of that ticket has been paid.

So if you're uncomfortable with me standing in front of you telling the story that made me possible, I'm not going to allow you to diminish me.

So I'm able to sit at a table with Joe Scarborough, and Joe and I probably disagree about what, yeah, exactly.

(group laughs) And I've watched Joe move, watched Jon from September to January move, right?

So the first thing is, how do we, how do we have that conversation?

It has to be an underlying set of commitments about my standing in this conversation, that your comfort is not contingent upon me muting what I bring into the room.

Your comfort is not contingent upon me quieting the storms that are behind me, because if that's the case, then we will never grow up.

We're gonna have to quiet, we're gonna have to hide and obscure the ugliness.

You asked about grief.

There's a haunting ritual in this country of black grief in public.

Think about all of those mamas burying their babies early, dying at the hands of police, in a death dodging civilization.

We're a death dodging civilization.

All the bodies in the Civil War, right, death dodging.

Whitman's trying to write about why is the Roaring Twenties so interesting, 600,000 plus dead from the influenza pandemic of 1918, 1919, right?

The Roaring Twenties coming on the mound of our dead, 670,000 dead right now, what are y'all doing in Tennessee?

Death dodging, and I put that as the broader backdrop because America runs fast and loose on our dead.

We can't talk about our dead, right?

And I'm being very, very emotional, not for the performance of it, because I'm trying to bring the point home.

What are you asking of me to make you comfortable so that we can move forward?

What do I...

I can't talk about... Al Raboteau, who's my professor... many people associate me with Cornel West, and they should, but my first book was entitled "Exodus!

: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America," and it comes out of Al Raboteau's work.

Al Raboteau was born on the coast of Mississippi in a small town in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

He is the Dean of African-American religious history, wrote the premier text, "Slave Religion," almost created a field as a result of that book.

Al grew up without his father because his father dared to confront a local store store owner who disrespected his wife.

That store owner shot Al's father in the head and killed him.

Al is dying right now.

As we speak, he's in a coma suffering from dementia, and a version of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, it's vicious.

How do I bring his dad, his dad to the story?

How do I bring Cornel West's pain to the story?

When Cornell in Sacramento, California, as a young boy, jumped into a pool, everybody jumped out of it and then they emptied the water while he was still in it.

Part of what I'm trying to, just with these two stories that are close to me, if the precondition for our conversation is that I have to quiet the storm that is our history for us to move forward, we will never move forward.

(audience applauds) And I'll say this lastly.

And I'll say this lastly, Jon, we're both children of the South.

I'm a Mississippi boy to the core, grew up on the coast of Mississippi with the best seafood on the planet, moss dangling from magnolia trees, the smell of the pogie plant heralding school, fall air mixed with that smell.

Oh my God, you can tell, it was horrible.

If we figure it out, 'cause the South is the riddle of the country, Jon, if we can figure it out, of how to deal with that bridge, how to deal with why our soil is really red, if we figure it out, then the country can be saved.

But we can't dance with each other.

You have to tell each other the truth.

- I want to tell you all a story, which I'm not supposed to tell you.

With some modifications, I had the honor of watching Professor Glaude make a similar case to the President of the United States a few months ago, sitting in the East Room, the pinnacle of temporal power.

And Eddie's consistent point was, "tell the truth," tell the truth.

And it was one of the more moving moments I've been lucky enough to experience, and you just experienced the same thing.

You're right about the South.

One of my obsessions of the moment is... there are people in this room who would know these numbers just as well as I do.

In 1990, Al Gore ran for reelection, second term in the Senate.

He had taken Howard Baker's seat in 1984.

Anybody here remember who ran against Al Gore in 1990?

Let me tell you, Al Gore doesn't remember.

(audience laughs) He doesn't, he carried 95 of our 95 counties.

- [Eddie] Wow.

- 95 counties, 30 years ago.

In 1992, he and Bill Clinton carried the state.

In 1996, he and Bill Clinton carried the state.

In the election of 2000, this state cost Al Gore the presidency of the United States, so what happened?

You have to sort of, if you do what we do, you kind of look for, what are the factors that were different?

Guess what existed in 2000 that had not existed in 1996?

Fox News.

(audience laughs) - Tell the truth, Jon.

- It was national, our politics got nationalized into this machinery of perpetual conflict that requires constant fuel of any quality.

It doesn't really matter.

And one of the things we have to do, and Eddie and I are a part of a machinery of conflict, about which I'm often ambivalent, but the trivialization of the sacred existential questions we're talking about is something that we are able to help fix, because if we don't tune in, if we don't get agitated... just because we have the means to express an opinion quickly does not mean we have an opinion worth expressing quickly.

(audience applauds) Right?

(audience applauds) We just don't.

And this is pretty rich, coming from a guy who just offers opinions, I admit that.

(audience laughs) You should think what I don't say.

Marilyn Lloyd in 1970- - Oh, no.

(group laughs) - This is the only room in America where you can make that joke.

But there's, I think Tennessee is, this is a particular burden for us.

We're not Georgia.

We're not North Carolina, we're not Virginia.

We've gotten redder, we've gotten more prosperous, broadly put, and more radical.

You're trying to fix it, and God bless you.

Learn, if I may, whatever it was that wove this weekend together, keep weaving.

- Yes, yes.

(audience applauds) Yes.

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