 Hello and welcome everyone, thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute on Laura Shepard's Director of Events and we're very pleased to welcome you to our program tonight with artists George McHellman and poet Tanya Foster and tonight we're going to be celebrating George's new book, Illustrated Black History. Before we begin we'd like to know how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute? There's never been any before, wonderful. Well, it's over again. We were founded in 1854 and we are one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers here in the heart of the city. We feature our general interest library which is on the second and third floors, an international chess club right down the hall and we have our ongoing literary programs almost every day of the week and our cinema-lit film series going on as well every Friday. Also the chess club has tournaments and classes that are going on in both live and online so please check out our website at mi-library.org. Also I'd like to remind you that we also have tours Wednesday and noon so if you have friends, family that would like to take a tour, send them on down Wednesday and noon and also as mentioned Alyssa will be giving a tour after our program. Become a member and then you can enjoy everything we have to offer under one roof and you can take a brochure which is right at the front. If you have any questions about membership, see Alyssa, see Andy, see me afterwards. Also after our talk we will be selling books and George and Tonya will be here to sign your books. We are very pleased to co-sponsor this program with Moad, the Museum of African Diaspora and also just a quick mention about their upcoming event. It's a book launch and celebration for the Black Year book with Adrienne Buriel in conversation with George McCallan and that's on Wednesday February 28th at 6 o'clock p.m. so please check that out. And now I'd like to introduce our esteemed guests. George McCallan is an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. His design studio, McCallan Co, collaborates with a wide range of cultural clients. He is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and his observed and first-person column, Document Bay Area Culture. His book, Illustrated Black History, is his first publication. It is a gorgeous collection of over 300 portraits in a large variety of styles featuring the famous and also the yet-to-be-known who have contributed to activism, science, politics, culture, literature, fashion, food, medicine, business and more, plus informative biographies and inspiring quotes from each of those featured. Now you may know Maya Angelou at of course James Baldwin, but do you know anything about Leah Chase, restaurateur of Dookie Chase in New Orleans? Perhaps not. Or Althea Gibson in Tennis Pro or Charles White, painter, soon to be revealed. And our other honored guest tonight, Tanya Foster is author of The Swarm of Each in My Court, La Romera Dezot and the forthcoming SINGIFICATIONS. She is the co-editor of Third Mind, teaching creative writing through visual arts and the forthcoming Umbra Galaxy, published by Wesleyan University Press. She is recipient of awards and fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the C.D. Wright Award, S.F. Beaumont, Hedlin Center for the Arts, Radford Institute, Creative Capital Foundation, the Mellon and Ford Foundations and others. Dr. Foster holds the George and Gibi Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, and of course she's got some building projects, which I hope she'll share with us. So please welcome George McAllen and Tanya Foster. This thing. And this thing. This thing. I want to say, every event I've had for the support of this book, I was addressed anybody, whether it's two people in the audience or 200, and thank you for just being here. There's lots of other things you could be doing with your time, and so I'm very appreciative and grateful for your attendance. And I'm going to provide commentary on what you just did. Somehow that graciousness is actually the first thing I noticed about when I met as a person new to the day here. And I think this is relevant. We've known each other for a few years, so there's a lot of familiarity you'll feel in our exchange. We're not strangers. We're not strangers, but I so appreciate it just how, and I still appreciate it of course, how gracious and welcoming you were to me, and I am, if you know me, any place on the menu sitting in front of you, oh yes, sitting in front of you, I am socially awkward, and I no longer hide from you. And so for the longest time, whenever I would meet George, I would say, I'm Tonya Foster. He's like, you tell me this every time I see you, but... I would say, I know who you are. But I would say this precisely because there's a kind of, there's an incredible kind of graciousness that I can't say I'm the only recipient of, right? But it's all the people you know, people you encounter. And for myself, I know I can't remember everybody. So that that dynamic was about how I see you, how I saw you. And I start there because that's also the kind of engagement that the book undertakes, right? It's a kind of a real welcoming and acknowledgement of people with all kinds of different fields. And so one of the things I began to think about, recently I've been talking with students and writers about a poem as being a part of a constellation, right? Or a book of poetry, a book of anything as being one note or one moment in a constellation of ideas, a community of people that the artist is in conversation with. And so when I, I mean, one of the really kind of beautiful things in the acknowledgement page is that you set those terms for how the book opens. And can you speak to that, speak to the sense of history as both personal, but also as far beyond the personal that this particular work engages? What Tanya is very sweetly stating is that in the acknowledgement page, I thank myself first. And I thank myself for my curiosity because that is the origin point of anything that we do as human beings. We can thank God, we can thank our families, we can thank our mothers, our spouses, our children. But the truth is we are with ourselves. And before we are even connected to God, we have ownership over how we move out into the world and how we engage with everyday people. And this book took six years of my time, but it also feels like it was a whole lifetime of work because I, one of the unique things about this book, which is important to state, only because people don't think about how books are made because we are the beneficiaries of it because books are our gift to each other and the world. It's how we share information, it's how we travel into different realms, different universes, different worlds. And I am the co-writer, artist and designer of the book. And that's a rare thing. And even the publisher that I worked with, I said, has anyone else, has any other offer done all of the things in the one book that I do and even the publisher of HarperCollins said, no, you are a pioneer to us. And what Tonya is speaking to is that I had to be graceful with myself first all throughout the process of making this. And I had to be graceful with every person that I collaborated with. I had to be graceful with every pioneer I got to know. I had to be graceful with myself as a black person doing something that a lot of black people don't get to do. I had to think about all of the ways that I was moving through the world very clearly with agency. There was no point that I second guessed my place in doing this. And I had to kind of come back to myself many times. And I had to rely on a lot of people around me for counseling and guidance because book publishing makes you feel crazy all the time. And so I had to just really find my center over and over again. Yes, you start with yourself. But what's also kind of miraculous in terms of what you do or and what's also kind of miraculous in terms of what you do is that you redefine yourself again and again and again in series of relationships. And so you thank people who've added to the self that you are. And that that is creating this kind of expansive vision of authorship that is not the author of Isolated. Yes. What we both know is that being an artist is a is a lonely existence. You are working with yourself. And at the end of the day you can show stuff to your parents and your friends and your thises and your thats. But the truth is it really is just your relationship with yourself. You're the origin point. You're the person producing the work. At the end of the day you're the person that has to, that has to know when it's finished, when it's not finished. And writing is also a very lonely existence. There's no one else who can prompt words out of you. If you're a writer it's a commitment of sitting down, sitting with yourself and navigating how you are extracting the universe inside of yourself out. And you're giving birth every single time you sit down to write words. And so in combining all of these traits into one book, it was a lonely experience. And also it was not. There were a lot of people around me who were rock stars. And every single person who I think played a really pivotal role in me understanding my responsibility and I viewed making this book as a responsibility. No one asked me to make this. But I knew it was essential to create this book that did not exist before. And to what or to whom is the sense of responsibility? So I'm going to be really honest with you because there are two ways of answering the question. Both of them are true. To the external world I felt a sense of responsibility to my community. Because one of the wild things about this book is that no version of it existed before I made it. And that's why I did it. I made something that there was an absence of. There was a vacuum of it. A book that is a compendium of our American icons and the origin point of so much of our culture that we take for granted that most people don't know about. That book didn't exist. Yeah, you could go to the Encyclopedia to find these names. And if you're smart you know how to search online to find them. But to have it all in one book outside of an academic book or a children's book. There was absolutely nothing. And I just became enraged. I just got really angry. And then I decided to do something about it. But the truth is that the person I felt most a sense of responsibility to was myself. I did not want to fail myself. And the promise and potential that I had. My origin is I come from publishing. So I have an unfair advantage over most people in that I know how to design books in my sleep. I know this process very easily. This was not a uphill battle for me. I spent 15 years as a magazine art director. I worked in New York with the biggest names in the industry at a time where I was one of five black people in the entire industry. And so I have established some experience that makes this easy for me. Where it would be daunting and intimidating for someone else. There were a lot of hurdles in the book in making this book. But the making of it part was the easiest part. It was all the invisible things of making sure I didn't mess up. Telling people stories that are in the public domain. Telling stories about people who are still alive and very private. That I was speaking intimately about people's lives. And I did not want to mess that up. I did not want to add any more burden to anyone's life. I only wanted to celebrate people's lives. It was always very subjective. And so I was making something that I didn't know what the response was going to be. I thought a lot of people would hate that I was doing this. And not for reasons that other people might think. Our culture is in a really strange cul-de-sac right now. Where you're critiqued for not trying and then you're critiqued for trying. And so I knew that I was basically setting a target on myself. That if I got it wrong, my community would tell me. And I decided to wear that and just use it as fuel. But I didn't want to disappoint my own standards. I didn't want to do anything subpar. I only wanted to do the best version of this for my community and myself. So the answer to who is not just yourself. But it's also the community that surrounds the self. And I think that... And I asked this question because the acknowledgement... Well, it's interesting that he said, well, I started by thanking myself. But that's not where you went. Right? And so that it's this beautiful acknowledgement. Is that I'm grateful to my father for making me who I am. I am devoted to my grandmother, virus holder, who taught me everything that is good in me and made me the storyteller I am. And it goes on in this way so that even though you say, I thank myself, you list all of these people who are involved in making you, you. And so in that way, and I'm not contradicting you or anything, but I think, yes, writing is a lonely task. And yet art doesn't happen without community. Right? And it's a community of the dead and a community of the yet to be. And it's a community of people who surround us in ways that make us feel alive. And that what's remarkable for me in looking at this work is the ways that you don't lose sight of those relationships. And so the performance of the writer as the hero, the sort of radically individualized hero, that that's not what this work is about. And it's also nonsense. It's also not true. What's not true? The writer as the hero? Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is one of the things that Tommy and I talk about is part of my French, the bullshit of the American narrative. And one of the things that it does is it challenges your sense of community all the time. And it plays with your head. It fucks a lot of people up. It really, really does. And I watch it all the time. You know, when you have fidelity to your family, you're stressing this a weirdo. And when you have fidelity, when you have a commitment, when you express commitment, there's that it somehow portrayed it as a weakness. And that when you are the idea that you're taken to the open road and you're just driving to end up nowhere, that is seen as heroic. When they hold this whole... Shoot up some stuff along the way. Yeah, you gotta shoot up some stuff and there's always violence. Because, you know, that's always the story. But the idea that you are deeply inside of community and that you rely on people and you need people, because that's what we as human beings do. That's actually what we're put on Earth to do, is to be in service to each other. And then you have to kind of go off and create your own and be self-made, this total nonsense word phrase. And then what? And then nothing. That's the end of the story. And that's like the scene at the end of the movie. But that has nothing to do with everyday life, because we as all, as we've seen in the pandemic, when people are isolated, it's no bueno. It is no bueno. It's a sad tale when we are isolated as human beings. It's the worst. It's the thing that teenagers know. It's the thing that young adults know. It's the thing our senior citizens know. And people die in isolation. And they live and thrive in a community. And so I come from a community-based family. So it's the only way I know how to beat. So that's what brought that into everything that I do. And that's a radical definition of a self. And it's a close friend once said of her partner, Lisa and Greg have been together longer than many married couples I know. And Lisa said, being with Greg, the joy is twice as good, the grief is half as bad. And so I think about that way that we might become each other's resourceful units and joy and cancer events. And that there's something about this. I also thought the subtitle, honoring the iconic and the unseen. And I guess I'd like to invite you to talk a little bit about that and why it's important to talk about both the iconic and the unseen. And also what is it to make that physical? So the subtitle of the book, as Tonya said, is honoring the iconic and the unseen. But the book is really more about the unseen than the iconic. And I start the book out by saying and showing what it's not about. You know, I wanted everyone to know that this was not fantasy football. So it wasn't going to be like your top favorite black pioneers. And I didn't really care what anyone thought or what the best things I did was just tuning out the world. It took me a while, took a couple years to inhabit that, to feel comfortable with that. I felt like that was blasphemous in a lot of ways that I was basically not going to have Martin Luther King. I was not going to have Harriet Tubman in the book. I was not going to have a lot of the pioneers that during this month everyone sees. This is like the top 10, top 10 hits. I wanted to dig a lot deeper than that. I wanted to educate myself and re-educate myself because I thought, you know, I've been in publishing for a long time. I'm a reporter, I'm a writer. I'm always educating myself. And I have a naturally curious streak. I don't need anyone prompting me to do research on the things that I'm interested in. I take my own initiative. I've done that my whole life. And I knew that if I just did the unseem, that would be a turnoff to some people. So what I did at the beginning, an introduction, was a subversive thing. I created several portraits of people who were not in the book. Just to say, I understand you're going to come to the book expecting these people. So let me show you. Let me just like, scratch that off the list and tell you that there are a lot more people that you should know. It's not just about Martin Luther King. It's not just about Malcolm X. It's not just about Marcus Garvey. It's not just about Harriet Tubman. It's not just about... There's a vast ocean. And it's the iceberg. The most interesting part is under the water. And that's what I wanted to show. And so, even though the book is... We had to have the workshop subtitled. And we had... It was going to be celebrating the unseem and iconic. And it went through many revisions. And then we ended up honoring. We had the best... It just sounded great. It landed on everyone's tongue and it just felt delicious. But the book, as I was telling people, it is more about the unseen than the iconic. And that is my design. And that is what this book is actually all about. And that can use the other. If you think of work as a kind of constellation, it's another particular constellation in the night sky. Yes. And that even the folks who are iconic... This is the other piece of the book. Even the folks who are iconic. While I was telling different stories about them, I did not want to tell the same chestnuts that you can go on Wikipedia to find. I wanted to get to... At its core, I wanted to understand who these people were and are. I wanted to really understand who they as human beings are. Not the totems, not the symbols. We tend to deify or demonize our icons. And I wanted to move both of those away. I didn't want to lionize anyone. I wanted them to be human. I wanted them to be flawed, interesting, contrarian, irritating. I wanted them to be human. Because one of the things that we do in the United States is we lionize or demonize the black community. And neither of... We don't deserve either. Both of those are a way of killing people. It is a way. That's an icon. And they're also no longer human. They're up there. And a lot of Americans feel like that's what we need. That's what we need to have. And I always rejected that. The humanity is what we get to be as irritating as everyone else. And that it's just not... It's not about looking so amazing or being so amazing that you become something else. It is about what makes us all human beings. And then that varies. I mean, also one of the things that's kind of, for me, interesting as a writer about the first line of the acknowledgments and then how the texts move is that it's a very particular point of view. Yes. And I also knew it would be controversial to say that. And by the time I finished this book, I felt like I had earned my perspective. And the book is written in the first person, so it's written from my perspective the entire time. And so it's, you know, making sure it wasn't just in the third person that it wasn't just encyclopedic, that it wasn't just Wikipedia, that I was telling stories and I was telling intimate stories that I was bringing anyone reading the book closer to the person that they were reading about, the subject, the pioneer, and closer to me, too, that I was saying, yeah, I'll handle your disdain if you don't like what I'm writing. I'm fine. You don't have to like me. But you should pay attention to what this is, who this person is, what they contributed, because there's a lot of information in here. There are a lot of everyday things that people don't know, like people who were created, invented, personified, brought to life. There's a whole slew of that. And I really wanted to make sure that people felt that it wasn't over there. I wanted people to understand it. It's right here. I also love about history in the first person. Is there an acknowledgement that the subject position is as evented as the perspective of the objective? Right? So beautifully stated. Because we read history and we think it's objective because they are facts. But let me tell you, it's just as biased as anything you would write in the first person. This is one of the fallacies that we don't teach children. The idea that somehow if you're reading something in the third person, it's truer than writing something. It's all subjective. All of history is subjective even when it's ground in facts. Because there's a lot that history leaves out and it is the eye of the beholder. There's a lot throughout. And I had to relearn this in researching this book. You know, one of the things I'm fascinated by culturally, and this is not to inflate the crowd, but it's more about country music. And I was reading a story today about this new Beyoncé album that's country, and there's a whole like, ah, is she country? Yeah, and listen. And I read it was an essay in Time Magazine. And it's written so simply and beautifully that country music that we assign a lot of these things to a particular group. And country music is basically three things. It is Mexican culture. It is black culture. And it's indigenous culture. And that's it. There's no other thing that it is. If we're talking about a thing, we're talking about where it's from, end of story. And so you can like or not like that, but it doesn't matter whether you like it or not because it's the truth. And so everyone, it doesn't stop anyone from loving country music or going to the square dance or country is a really popular music genre. And it is a sentiment. It is becoming a dominant music force again after being quiet for a couple of decades. It's big business. And Beyoncé reclaiming the fact that she is from Texas. She grew up with that culture. Of course, it's hers to me. It doesn't matter what you think or what she's doing. It's hers. It's her culture. And this idea that somehow black people are asking to participate in something that we help create is insanity personified. And it is one of the many things that we as black people have to constantly deal with the second guessing of us claiming aspects of our culture and reclaiming aspects of our culture. There's always some response to that negatively. And it's like, shut up. What are you all talking? What are you complaining about? Everyone gets the benefit from this. Everyone gets to participate in it. And even with conversation about cultural appropriation is reductive. What it does not acknowledge is that for the longest time for hundreds of years the culture will move to the side. And now the originators are reclaiming the stories. That's all that's happening. And no one needs to be pressed about that. A lot of people are pressed about it. And so that's the fight. It's a fight for ownership. And invisible not even tangible is the invisible parts that just kind of go away. Which parts? When someone else claims your stuff you have to fight with them to get it back. And yes. And so what if we relate? Okay, that's all of those conversations. I'm not going to go down that. What I am going to ask is how did you determine the styles of the drawings? If you look at the drawing and the style for each selection, each person you focus on. Well actually even that is a continuation of what we were just talking about because I was doing a few things that I knew were unconventional. This whole book is just unconventional. I made a lot of decisions that my editor and my publisher were not thrilled with. I fought with my publisher the entire time. And it's beautiful. I was relentless. They did not know what to do with me. Well, but it says something that they didn't just say going the wrong way. Well, I almost went my own way and they came back and said Yeah. Because that's how resolute I was and relentless I was not going to compromise it for anyone. And I made a lot of visual choices early in making the book. The convention of a book like this is you establish a style and you render everyone through the same prism. That's how books are done. That's how museums present shows. I'm saying something really important to this group. Museums, galleries, universities, they all suffer from the same problem. And it's this need to compress everything and flatten it. Information. Everyone has to get and be the same. That is fundamentally untrue to who we are as human beings. And so I decided not not as a response, but because I was collectively thinking about the pioneers. I wanted to make sure that they were individualized. That they were not rendered through the same style. I also wanted to make the person unique because I was saying that each of their stories is unique and they all deserve a different freedom. I didn't know that I was going to approach it that way initially. And then I did the first couple of well the original project is what prompted that. I did the original project I did a daily painting eight years ago this month. And I shared it on my Instagram. It was just like research. It was just what I thought was just a self-motivated project. And as I kept doing it the first one I did was Gordon Parks and then Edna Lewis who's a culinary icon and then I did Gordon Parks who is a polymath photographer filmmaker one of the kind of origin points of a lot of the filmmaking we see today. Gordon Parks was the originator and I rendered each of them using the same tools differently. And so when I was starting on this book I did a couple of portraits and they each were distinctly different and I realized that I was going to approach this entire book that way and I remember saying that to my editor and she said you are crazy. Why would you that's so much more work and I said yeah it is. It is. It is. And I said I know I'm making my life more difficult but that's what these pioneers deserve. What's fantastic about that that so often blackness is and rendered and articulated through this homogenous homogyny homogyny and I the whole mandate was color vibrancy everything is in 3D we're not flattening anything. And so that the variations are the same. I wanted to reemphasize that everyone, every time you turn the page and read a new story we're reading a completely new story but to Tonya's point that everyone was part of a constellation that it was a tapestry and that there are many people in this book pioneers whose actions led to the actions of other people in the book and you start to kind of see how history crochets and interweaves and produces this larger quilt of actions affecting actions affecting actions. What is the possibility for movement that rather than history as a kind of singular static vision but that in accessibility there's narrowing and show that's awesome. So would you like to read it? 1-0 Really? You don't like me reading? Yes I am. Time to put everyone on the spot it's really just a part of the process here. How many people know Leo Chase is really fantastic. Thank you. That's the point. That is the point. Thank you for being honest. Thank you. That is what this is for. Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah I know this. That's why. Can you use the microphone? I will. So Leo Chase So food is big in America and food is I think the most complicated Bigger in New Orleans Bigger in New Orleans Yes. Well food is an industry food is an industry the restaurant business food is big business in the United States and there's a lot of stories about the origin point of why food is the way that it is and we're still kind of getting past there's some food that's seen as high art and there's some food that the culture has seen as low and this is one of the many things that we are all struggling with on a daily basis like why is X fine dining fine dining and then finger food or street food there are all of these and we all pass it around and we all just talk about stuff and we share these phrases with each other and no one really litigates what it all means like why is French food fine dining why why no one can really explain why yet it's an old country with a lot of traditions but it's also many facts too country's connection to black food culturally it all goes back to Africa and because the black community was violently cut off from its history the threats of that are not always evident even though we can taste it in the food there's not a lot of language around it and so there were a few people in the 1900's that started putting language and recipes and context to the food and Leah Chase is one of those people I'm trying to think of who you know right now we think about a food doyen and Martha Stewart is the one who comes to mind but there were a lot of folks like Edna Lewis and B. Smith and Leah Chase who hired Martha Stewart and Jill admitted but there's not there's a lack of awareness of who these people were that set up our current writings of food so each quote in the book each quote each story of each subject has a quote that just to give you context of who these people are their own words before about them and Leah Chase just recently passed away she was born in 1923 and passed away in 2019 food, bills, big bridges if you're going to eat with someone you can learn from them and when you learn from someone you can make big changes we changed the course of America in this restaurant over bowls of gumbo we can talk to each other when we eat together it's one of the fundamental things that is universal that matter what culture or country there are like some things that every community does and it is a really simple thing how we relate to each other so we just think it more complicated than it needs to be but it's really pure so even in her 90s Leah Chase was reported to work at Dookie Chase's restaurant in New Orleans every morning as she had done for seven decades one of 14 children born to Hortensia and Charles Lang Chase grew up in Madisonville but moved to New Orleans after high school there she married man leader Dookie Chase Junior and went to work at his family's bar and lunch counter before convincing her in laws she transformed the sandwich shop into a full scale restaurant in 1946 and this premade gathering spot quickly became one of the city's crown jewels of Creole cuisine inspired by the fine dining treatments she saw through the windows of whites only establishments at the peak of the Jim Crow era Chase wanted to offer black diners a commensurate level of service and flair multiple courses unbeautiful dinnerware and served up gumbo crab, soup, greens grilled, fish and cream sauce Dookie Chase's was sued a hit this restaurant was integral to the community not just because of the food and ambiance but because of Chase's political involvement setting segregation laws that made it illegal to serve white and black people equally Chase constantly hosted a mix of diners and ensured that those supporting the civil rights activism of the day had place to eat feeding a range of people from NAACP staff and voter registration volunteers to luminaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. Chase worked to keep the restaurant a safe space for those frontline leaders they often held secret meetings on the top floor of the restaurant building a lover of art who recognized that museums and galleries were discriminating against black artists Chase not only patronized folks like the famous black painter Jacob Lawrence but also displayed their work in the full grandeur that their pieces deserved making the restaurant not simply a place to dine but also a place to indulge in the visual storytelling of black life she cooked for three U.S. presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush Barack Obama among many celebrities over the decades the Dukie Chase cookbook published in 1990 was considered a classic of black free old cooking one of the things that this book does not make clear that I actually didn't realize until I was halfway through making the book and after at that point almost 30 years in the publishing industry it had never occurred to me that books don't let you know the scale of the original art a lot of people assume that every piece in here is the same size and in addition to each of the pieces being stylistically different they're all different sizes there's some that are giant and there's some that are small this is a giant piece and what I wanted to show was her just sitting in her kitchen in her home at the you know what I just read is who she actually was and so I didn't want to show her just stably I wanted to show her laughing and just enjoying the environment that she created in political times where it was really dangerous for her to be so politically unspoken and her life could have forfeited and that she was very sick I also wanted to show that and the body language too like she is just inside of her body she's not performing for anyone she has an interior world that no one has access to I wanted to show that the thing for me of course I'm from the world so that sense people eating together right the way that we as a kid like the myth that I love most this kind of world potentially it's a myth about Persephone eating a few pomegranate so she couldn't leave Hades and I was like yep that's what'll happen when you're with people and you're bound to them and that in the world there really was a sense that if your home wasn't good people would say oh honey I'm going to do something about those things no no no no or they won't eat at your house so that there's also something she understood about all these people came because she made the kind of food that spoke to them I should open it to questions yes do you have questions for George about this wonderful book we have a microphone so if you have a question I'm going to come around and give you a mic I can start off do you have a question down here yes coming your way what was the research process like to research every single question that I did to the book that's a great question that's honestly what took the most time where it wasn't just researching and it had been a while since I had to do this much reporting or something and so the process has really changed it used to be libraries and institutions and now it's the internet leading you to libraries and institutions and the research the process hasn't really changed but there was a lot of formality you know there's a lot of hidden stuff in here where you can't just use a quote there are estates that you have to pay basically it's like licensing a song if you go out in the morning of America and you start singing all the single ladies you have to pay like you're going to get a bill you can't just be singing someone else's song just out in the world and so like I spent a lot of money in the making of this book paying estates because I wanted to use a particular quote and it took a couple years to research and we researched for a couple years before we started writing and so by the time we started writing it was we were deciding on aspects of their life that we wanted to focus on we were more specific if we're writing about someone who's well known I love telling the story like Erika Franklin is not in the book because she's a singer she is in the book because she's one of the savviest business people I have ever read about I'll tell you a little story about Erika Franklin like Erika Franklin is known as really irascible and super salty and and she is that way and she is that way because she was used to dealing with people's bullshit all the time and she was and she grew up in places that were always trying to not pay her what she was worth or pay her less and they paid white performers and black performers have been used to this our whole lives and what she did to combat that is she started demanding that she was taken cash and she was paid before she said because singers were always denied full payment especially if you were moving to the south and because she was so talented that she demanded payment up front before she opened her mouth and she did that her entire life long after she needed to she kept doing that and she was like I don't trust anyone because you all lie and you will try and I'm not going to deal with that and so she just that is why she's in the book it's not for the reason Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is in the book not because he's a sports figure but because he's a scholar and he's a really gifted writer and has written tons of books that most people here don't know about he is a fiction writer and a murder mystery writer and he has written several books on cultural ethics and that's why he's in the book so I had my own criteria for what I was that it wasn't just because you know Colin Kaepernick is in the book not because of what he did on the field it was it is what he did off the field and so what I wanted to show is that yeah someone might be famous for all the reasons that we know as black people and everything but people are more interested in giving them credit for and our figures sometimes get trapped in amber because they're lost in our public perception of who they are as private citizens and what I wanted to honor is that all of these people are people they're not extensions of us they are their own people beautiful how did you make a list and were there people you were just like oh sorry so I will tell you I have a list of close to 600 days I spent a year just doing that and then I had to decide who was going to be in and that was really difficult and when it got simpler when I realized that there's not just going to be one book and I just decided that nobody told me that I decided that there were going to be multiple books and so that took the pressure off and I thought I was going to have help Tonya's laughing because she knows especially and I've designed a lot of books this is not the first book I've designed this is my first book as an author and an artist but I I'm a design studio and I designed a lot of books so I'm very much on the inside of this process and I I thought I was going to have help when it came to that and my editor was just like oh it's all you I said oh okay great great and it was all me there's no intervention or help from anyone else I decided to take that seriously myself to making that decision I said if someone doesn't like my choices I want them to know that it's me they have to not like how have they responded with your publishers, your editors all of it how are they now well everyone is ecstatic everyone is ecstatic and I have a friend a mutual friend of ours that called me a couple of weeks ago and he said you know I'm really I love watching the positive comments that you have received on Amazon like folks are just rapturous about this book and he said well that's news to me because I don't look at Amazon for anything and I ended up like I can't tell you the last time I've been on Amazon it's not my religion but he was like people just keep writing about this and that was you know I'm so on the inside of this process that I'm not really but one of the most one thing that I did not think about when I was making this book that has happened many times since it came out is that a lot of the pioneers have contacted me really? that's something I did not consider at all and the very first the week the book came out the son I will say there's some people like I can't say who they are just because they were very private conversations but the son of a pioneer sent me wrote a long letter about how I had represented his father and it brought me to tears like all of the conversations I've brought me to tears because I keep hearing how accurate my personal it's the personal side that he and I have responded to is the emotional context of what how I've represented so one of the pioneers in the game here one thing I can't tell you the inventor of V2 I spoke to Toronto Burt last week and it was just she got the book found out and sent me a message on Instagram which is still the weirdest way to hear from anyone I don't know how you could do it it's just weird you have a really active beautiful Instagram yeah but it's still not my primary way of communicating with people so I'm just like who's this you know and then I realized it was her and we have a mutual friend and she got my number and we spoke and I have ugly pride so it's because it's just not what I was expecting I have spoken to quite a few people in this book and I have heard with gratitude that I got their portrayal right and that's not something that I ever thought I would get this sort of feedback from and so I think that's a really surprising aspect of this where I had a blind spot I just did not think I would be corresponding with the people, the living pioneers I mean it's a wonderful testament to the way that stories portray us can actually move over move them closer to us it's beautiful I have a question on the back did anybody get in touch with you because they warned in the book no thankfully but I heard this is a funny aspect of human beings when I shared the public announcement that I was working on this book I got a lot I got a different kinds of suggestions there was a lot of oh did you think of XYZ123 but there was also have you heard of my cousin's daughter's father's uncle who was a pioneer I I know and he did this thing three years ago and I think he should read your book I got a lot of that too and I remember getting into an argument with someone who was it annoying that I didn't have Serena Williams like their favorites that I had Alfea but not Serena and my response is Alfea made Serena and so that's why and I have very short answers to that I'm not fighting with anybody and I could be a moron and say well you can make your own book but that's not that's not how I feel and I don't feel that you need to defend anything that's in the book you know there should be 17 versions of this book that it's still all grown I was the one thing I was haunted by it's a short one is I kept thinking that somebody else was going to do this in the time it took me that every year I was like I'm running out of time oh it shouldn't come out this year the book was delayed several times for really ridiculously dramatic reasons and I just kept thinking oh I've missed my window I've missed my window I was the one thing I kept I was really down on myself before I've missed my window someone else is going to produce this they were not never going to produce that they might produce something nothing else has come out the thing I'm saying is that this is so your vision that it isn't what someone else was even if they did an image text historical that's true yes which I was so inside of it I don't think I ever even thought about that part but yes we're going to have to wrap up soon but I want to ask Tanya if you have a favorite icon unknown in the book that just spoke to you and also I did ask if you would write to wrap up tonight there was sort of a dedication to our evening if you would read one of your poems and I'm also very happy that we talked about Leah Chase because she was the feature and her restaurant is a feature of the KQEDU KQED series cooking series and if you haven't watched it please go to KQED and it's amazing and all of her children and grandchildren are now working and carrying on the traditions of the restaurant which is an amazing story so before Tanya reads there was a question in the front I can repeat the question for the visuals how do you land on the fiction that you want to portray so this is where it gets glue glue um I communed and a lot of the pioneers told me how they wanted to be represented it was a very spiritual experience and something I don't speak about very openly because it's like you don't read the room and so not everyone wants to believe that that is real but the whole making of this process that was very real I would often just sometimes know or I would wake up in the morning with a dream that happened many times like a lot of people visited me in my dreams and told me how they wanted to be represented and so that is and that was active in the year in the six years I worked and so that was um you know Dr. Maya Angelou was very active and she the piece I did of her was also very large and it was in my studio for about three years that she was just like the patron saint and every other portrait I made was under her gaze like she was staring this way on my studio wall and all the other pieces were there and she was just always like okay, yeah she had to give it her approval but that's the opposite and that's the music I'd like to read the Oscar Misho of an Oscar well this will tell you who Oscar Misho was 1884 to 1951 my long experience with all classes of humanity had made me somewhat a student of human nature just how Oscar Misho got his start to become the most prolific independent producer of black films remains unclear but during a career from 1919 through 1948 Misho wrote, produced, directed and distributed more than 40 films founded his own production company that Misho Film Corporation and was one of only a few black independent creators to survive the transition from silent films his 1931 film The Exile was the first sound film by a black person his final film The Betrayal from 1948 was the first black produced film to premiere in a white-owned theater Misho was born as a populist Illinois and raised in Great Bend, Kansas he found work as a Pullman Porter which despite the low wages and the requirement to wait on white travelers hand and foot allowed him to travel the country at a time when such movement was inaccessible to most black people in 1906 he used his earnings often better paid than black service workers earned elsewhere to buy land in South Dakota where he became a homesteader writing as he found time he lost the land to bankruptcy but he used the experience to enhance his storytelling skills writing a novel his third about homesteading as a black man Misho published The Homesteader in 1917 selling it door to door to counter the effects of DW Griffith's racist film Birth of a Nation which applauded the terrorism of a white supremacist country Misho was inspired to adapt his book himself it became the first film he directed in 1990 in 1919 Hollywood's cultural influence on Misho's movies is noticeable he created within similar genres he encouraged the promotion of black performers as versions of white studio stars for example Lorenzo Tucker with handsome features tall figure and fair skin was known as the black Valentino Ethel Moses a Harlem star and former performer was regarded as the black gene Harlow and thanks to a sultry delivery and a sensual appeal B Freeman was known as the sepia made west silent movie stars such as Juano Hernandez continued their streak as Misho's films moved into sound technology transitioning into talkies right along with their film maker but Misho also developed his own style of storytelling one that spoke directly to the city-wide black audience actors such as Paul Roberson and Robert Earl Jones got their start in Misho's films tackling themes that address the black experience Misho's 1931 film The Exile based on his 1913 novel The Conquest explores an interracial romantic affair in his 1938 film God Step Children he takes on colorism in black communities in his 1939 film Birthright he follows a young man set on founding a rural school who has to deal with pushback for black and white communities what's left of the film is in the library of Congress archives some footage like so many black independent films from a turn of the century has been lost to history in 86 Misho posthumously won Director's Guild of America Lifetime Achievement and I'll just have the interconnectedness of this book two of the names that Tonya just read of Juan O. Hernandez was the final the silent film star and Paul Rosen are also pioneers in the book so there's an interconnectivity of some of the people affecting these two actors and three screen presences all got their start from Oscar Misho and went on to the greatness that they achieved I'm really compelled by Misho to try to create a kind of a sense that okay I'm going to find another way to do this and how do I contend with this vision of blackness that Griffin perpetuates he says okay I'm going to answer it in the art that I take and I'm going to take on imagine who it is I'm talking to thank you guys very much thank you to the brilliant Tonya Foster Laura and team at the Kennedy Institute thank you guys for coming out on school nights thank you all very much thank you we're poem found students I'm happy to come back some other time